Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  TERRY: With the memory still fresh of Highway 5, I want no more of this driving a horrible road out in the middle of nowhere. But once you’re down here, and the house is so nice and the beach was so beautiful, and the good people....

  So she stays. I know her, and I know what interests her. And I know that you’ll be able to go by yourself up an arroyo with a dog, and just explore. That’s what the mystique of the Baja is about, the desert and the sea.

  TERRY: The thing that is amazing about Jesse Ventura, if you’re with him on a day-to-day basis, is that he loves to watch sports and he talks a lot and it’s always about politics. But when you see the way his mind works and his strong convictions of right or wrong—just the way he looks at life—he is unbelievable. What I get out of him is always different, every time I turn around. It’s not always great, but it’s always different.

  “Terry, you’ve got to read a chapter in this book, it’s amazing.” The book is Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles Through Baja California, the Other Mexico, by C. M. Mayo. We picked it up in Todos Santos. It had a chapter on the U.S.-Mexican War of the late 1840s, Polk versus Santa Anna. The latter having been “President of Mexico on eleven different occasions, first liberal, then conservative, always mercurial, always ruthless.”

  I can’t help chuckling as I tell Terry, “When a French cannonball blew his leg away at the knee, he’d actually had a state funeral for it! Had his leg carried by twelve hundred members of the presidential guard, ‘in solemn procession through the streets to a specially built shrine. The ceremony was attended by Congress, the diplomatic corps, and the entire cabinet.’”

  “That’s disgusting!” Terry exclaims. We are sitting on the porch of our new hacienda, each with our books and otherwise looking placidly out to sea.

  “They called Santa Anna caudillo, the strongman. Sounds kinda like he was an early version of Saddam Hussein. What I didn’t realize is that American troops once had control of La Paz, Todos Santos, even Cabo San Lucas! Along with most of mainland Mexico, too.”

  “Really,” Terry says.

  “Yeah, except get this part. ‘The war was unpopular and expensive, and Polk was eager to conclude a treaty.’ So, he ended up having a set of secret instructions sent to Santa Anna, saying that U.S. forces would withdraw from all the territory we had taken inside Mexico, including the Baja. In exchange, Santa Anna confirmed our title to Texas and also signed away territories that are now California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and parts of Arizona and New Mexico. Not a bad deal for the Americans.”

  I pause a minute to reflect, then add: “I guess we’ve got a long history of invading sovereign nations in unpopular and expensive wars.”

  I was a few months out of office when the invasion of Iraq took place in March 2003. Had I still been governor, I might have been the only one who opposed it. It had to do with the fact that we were lining up our military against that country as an aggressor and an occupier. Vietnam, as dirty as that was, was still a French colony when they asked us to support them logistically. Of course, it accelerated far beyond that in the end, with the French leaving us holding the bag and our being more than willing to do so.

  But, thinking back to the months prior to the Iraq War, nobody in the national news media was questioning the policy. Here we were going it alone, or with the “coalition of the willing.” Actually, except for the British, most of the “willing” didn’t even have armies!

  New documents that came out in April 2007 prove that a unit inside the Pentagon—Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans—intentionally cooked up the “intel” claiming there was a direct tie between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to gather support for a preemptive strike. It’s long since been established that the other big rationale for our invading, Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, was utterly bogus. I don’t think the CIA is as inept as we were led to believe during the run-up to the war, but was used very much as a scapegoat. I’ve had that verified through some channels of mine; that there are people within the CIA who are exceptionally angry at how they were hung out to dry. The more you get into it, the more you realize that it wasn’t that the CIA was giving President Bush the wrong “intel,” but simply that the president and his people were choosing which “intel” they wanted to use, while the rest was conveniently pushed aside and forgotten.

  Colin Powell has since admitted that he was basically duped, and it was Powell who I think pushed it over the top, because he was the one whom the people wanted to believe. In hindsight, I hold Powell somewhat responsible. He spent his entire life as a military man. You may offer resistance to the commander in chief up until the point that the decision is made. Then any good soldier must go along with the president, whether they agree with him or not. That’s the position Powell was in. Personally, he probably had his doubts, but when push came to shove, his years in the military prevailed. So I can understand, to a point.

  But I can’t forgive the rest of the chicken-hawk cowards—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest—who never served, and who sent American boys to Iraq to die. All based on a pack of lies.

  I’ve heard people say, “W” did it ultimately to impress Daddy. George, Sr., stopped short of going into Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War, and George, Jr., had always played second fiddle to his brother Jeb, and this was his big chance to show Dad he could seize the initiative and do something that even his father didn’t contemplate. Is it that? I don’t know. I seem always to go back to the old line from “Deep Throat” during Watergate: “Follow the money.” That’s generally behind at least 90 percent of all decisions made in government nowadays, I believe.

  When America entered World War II, FDR said: “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.” Harry Truman, who was then a senator from Missouri, launched an investigation into war profiteering that ended up saving the taxpayers more than $15 billion—the equivalent of more than $200 billion today. Today, a whole lot of people are cashing in on the “war on terror.” Not just Halliburton and the Carlyle Group. The big weapons makers—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics—are all reporting huge profits. It’s been toted up that the defense industry’s top thirty-four CEOs have collectively earned a billion dollars since 9/11. I compare the situation to the current mortgage market, where buyers are getting properties for a steal.

  Iraq is the most privatized war in American history. There are as many as 200,000 private contractors over there—a number greater than our 160,000 military troops! You might call it “rent-an-Army.” Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old company, was ready to roll when the war began. They’ve since been found to have wasted millions of our dollars in overbilling and shoddy services (Halliburton runs the chow lines, too). It’s amazing, but these companies have zero accountability. Only one of those 100,000 contractors has been accused of any violations, or been indicted for any crimes. They are operating totally outside of any public scrutiny. Yet, by some estimates, up to forty cents out of every dollar being spent on the war is going to these corporate war contractors.

  Take the mercenary force called Blackwater Worldwide. Their top brass are mostly former CIA and Pentagon people. Since the “war on terror” began, Blackwater has received almost a billion dollars in government contracts, most of them no-bid deals. They’ve now got 2,300 personnel operating in nine countries, and 20,000 more waiting in the wings. They’ve got their own major weaponry and their own private “intel” division. Think about this: a top Army sergeant makes a little over $50,000 a year, including salary, housing and other benefits. Blackwater contractors, who in fact are often retired sergeants, are getting anywhere from six to nine times that much—close to a half million dollars a year—in some instances.

  And these are really little more than hired gunslingers, rogue American mercenaries operating under the banner of “patriotism.” In mid-September 2007, Blackwater guards were accompanying a State Depart
ment convoy in Baghdad, when they opened fire and then launched a grenade at another vehicle. It turned out to be a young Iraqi family inside, and altogether that day, Blackwater killed as many as twenty-eight civilians. They claimed they’d been attacked by gunmen and “heroically defended American lives in a war zone.” That couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, called their conduct “criminal.” Blackwater was apparently responsible for several other fatal shootings before that.

  The money being tossed around in the name of bringing democracy to the Iraqis is staggering. By the fall of 2007, it had cost $464 billion. Bush’s new budget included an extra $100 billion for a year more of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was on top of $70 billion that Congress had already allocated, plus almost $142 billion for 2008. This means that the spending on the almost five-year-old Iraq War is about to surpass the cost of thirteen years in Vietnam. Prior to invading, Donald Rumsfeld said that Iraq’s oil would pay for everything. So much for that big idea. Now Bush has vetoed a bill for child health insurance because of so-called “pork barrel” politics. Well, I’d rather err on insuring kids than on the fiasco we’re involved in over there.

  The fact is, this war is not only draining America’s resources, it’s likely to eventually bankrupt us. And who is paying the biggest price? When you realize that the new Bush budget also cuts $66 billion out of Medicare payments to the elderly over the next five years, and another $12 billion out of Medicaid for the poor, it’s kind of a no-brainer. The New York Times recently noted that, for what the war is costing, we could’ve instituted universal health care, provided a nursery school education for every threeand four-year-old, and immunized kids around the world against numerous diseases—and still had half the money left over.

  At the same time, shortly before we turned over supposed control to the Iraqis, the U.S. Federal Reserve sent over, on military aircraft, the biggest cash shipments it’s ever made—more than $4 billion, amounting to 363 tons of dollars on these huge pallets! The funds came from assets frozen from Saddam Hussein’s regime, as well as oil exports. They’d been requested by the new Iraqi minister of finance, but there was so little accountability that nobody knows how much actually ended up in the hands of the insurgents.

  Speaking of big bucks, there’s also a new revenue-sharing plan for Iraq’s oil. After the Saudis, Iraq has the second biggest oil reserves in the world, and now its National Oil Company is going to hold exclusive control over just seventeen of the eighty known oil fields. The rest, and the ones yet to be discovered, are all going to be open to foreign control. This is just in case you thought there was any rationale for our being in Iraq other than our dependency on oil.

  As of my completing this book in the fall of 2007, close to 4,000 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and almost 30,000 more have been wounded. The majority of casualties on the other side, as in all wars, have been civilians. A scholarly paper that appeared in Lancet (October 2006) estimated that about 650,000 Iraqi civilians—including huge numbers of women, children, and the elderly—have died since the Americans came in. True, many of them have been caught up in a civil war, but that sure wouldn’t have happened without our intervention.

  The terrible truth is, even with as many people as Saddam Hussein had to eliminate to stay in power, the Iraqis are a whole lot worse off today than under his regime. Let’s imagine that we had a dictator, and some outside force came into our country and took him out. And things did not get better; they deteriorated. How would we then feel about whoever did this to us? It comes back to the old cliché: the enemy known, as opposed to the one unknown. At least they knew who Saddam was.

  We always say that everyone deserves their day in court and a fair trial. With a new government completely dominated by the Shiites, who were Saddam’s enemies, how could he possibly receive a fair trial? I personally would have been very interested to hear his testimony. After all, we got to watch every aspect of the O. J. Simpson trial, from beginning to end. In the realm of global politics, wouldn’t the Hussein trial affect us more? Yet we could watch nothing of what he had to say, except whatever was bled to us on our news media after the censors got through with it. I’m no Saddam supporter, but he really was silenced, wasn’t he?

  I saw George W. Bush being interviewed when he was asked if he’d watched the Saddam hanging. He said that he saw parts of it on television—presumably when Hussein was standing there, hooded, with the men holding the noose. I think Bush should have been required to be there. Again, according to the credos of our democracy, don’t you have a right to face your accuser? Without George Bush, Saddam Hussein would never have been hanged.

  While channel-surfing recently, I noticed how the History Channel is now portraying Saddam as the new Hitler. That’s what’s going to be set down in our history books—that George Bush and the American government saved the world from this Hitler wannabe? Sure, he did some terrible things, but this is ludicrous. Hussein gassed the Kurds, but where did he get the gas from? He got it from us. But no, let’s not tell the truth and reveal that, at one time, Saddam was one of our biggest allies in the Middle East, and shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld.

  Revisionist history troubles me deeply. I fear textbooks being written with a “government seal of approval.” Is anything being said about Henry Kissinger’s having accepted the Nobel Peace Prize at the very moment he and Nixon had ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia that would kill thousands of innocent people? Or what about ex-CIA director George Tenet, the only Bush administration official who ended up resigning over the Iraq fiasco? What does Bush do then but award Tenet the Medal of Freedom, the highest award a civilian can receive. So, in the annals of history, I guess that means Tenet goes down as a hero. Or maybe he was simply the guy who chose to fall on his sword at the time, and got the medal as his reward.

  Nothing appears to daunt these people. Why are we building permanent bases in Iraq? Remember when we heard there was no pull-out strategy? That’s when the light went on for me—what if there never was one? Why have an exit strategy if you’re not planning on leaving? I believe that’s part of the scam. Bush simply says we’ve got to “stay the course,” and even got a “surge” in troop strength approved by Congress. That’s exactly the opposite of what his Iraq Study Group advised him to do, and that group is headed up by none other than James A. Baker, who led the legal fight to make sure the Supreme Court would award Florida—and the election—to Bush in 2000. It’s contrary to what his military commanders are telling him, too. Bush isn’t just revising history, he’s turning it into mythology. He’s still claiming that, after the U.S. couldn’t find the suspected WMDs, Saddam banned the United Nations inspectors from his country. Hence, we had to go in. But Hussein never did that.

  Dick Cheney went on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program and continued to insist—this was in April 2007—that Iraq and al-Qaeda were in bed together. And that, if we withdraw from Iraq, that would “play right into the hands of al-Qaeda.” Again, U.S. intelligence analysts have come to precisely the opposite conclusion on both those points. In fact, Osama bin Laden has stated publicly that prolonging the Iraq War is in his best interest.

  But then, what can you expect from Cheney? No matter what he does, a big part of his legacy will be the infamous “hunting accident” on the quail-hunting trip down in south Texas. That sad Saturday when the vice president plugged his friend Harry Whittington, a seventy-eight-year-old Austin lawyer with birdshot in the face, neck, and chest—and the guy who got shot apologized! I must say, that’s a first. Unless you are in combat, there are no accidents; there is only negligence. If you’re bird hunting, the gun should be on safety at all times until the bird is coming up. However, this basic rule of thumb may not take into account a onetime secretary of defense who successfully achieved five deferments from military service. Of course, the official investigation revealed “there was no alcohol or misconduct involved in the incident.” As far as anybody knew, Chene
y had always been a “straight shooter” since his two arrests for drunk driving.

  But forgive me, I digress.... Bin Laden attacks us, so we attack Iraq. In my speeches over the past few years, I liked to bring up the Martha Stewart case as an analogy. What did Martha actually get put in prison for? It wasn’t insider trading—that charge was thrown out. She went to jail for lying to the government. Okay, if we lie to the government, we go to jail. But what happens when the government lies to us? I pause and then say, “Oh, that’s right, we go to war.” And I make the point that I’m not talking only about the current war, but about how the Vietnam War escalated after Lyndon Johnson’s administration concocted the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

  I’m also very angry at the Democrats, who were cowards from the beginning of the Iraq ordeal. They seemed so frightened of their political standing, or of what Karl Rove and the Bush machine had created, they wouldn’t just stand up and say no. Even now that the Democrats control Congress again, they will only go so far. They want a timetable for withdrawing our troops, but they don’t seem ready to hold Bush’s feet to the fire to get it. I, at least, give the Republicans credit for having courage, misguided though it may be. I don’t think anyone who voted for this war deserves to be president, Democrat or Republican.

  What frustrates and angers me more than anything is this: It’s my generation. We’ve been led down the primrose path once already, with Vietnam. Shouldn’t we, of all people, know about being deceived? How dumb can we be? Now we’ve gone and done the very thing we protested so vehemently against in our youth. We’ve become what we feared.

  Maybe it’s time we recalled the words of Robert F. Kennedy, when he was running for president in 1968: “I am concerned—as I believe most Americans are concerned—that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned—as I believe most Americans are concerned—that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned—as I believe most Americans are concerned—that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of [civilians] slaughtered; so they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: ‘They made a desert, and called it peace.’”