Jesse Ventura on the Draft

Jesse Ventura, former Reform Party governor of Minnesota, has returned to the public eye as the host of the new TV show, "Conspiracy Theory." It looks like it's going to be a pretty good series -- I saw the first episode -- and I would encourage anyone interested in recent conspiracy theories to give it a look. Ventura isn't quite the skeptic you'd think someone hosting a nationwide TV program would be so the show is pretty much mainstream America's first chance to hear conspiracy theories sympathetically presented. I'd prefer a more balanced presentation personally, but at least it's not the type of "These people are NUTS and DANGEROUS!" tripe you normally hear in media channels other than the Internet (where, bizarrely, everyone seems to believe in one conspiracy theory or another). The next episode is about 9/11 and I suspect will ruin any chance Ventura has to win political office in the future...well before the "teabaggers" earned the mockery of the political elite the 9/11 "truthers" were showered with ridicule. Ventura is definitely wary of the official version of the events of September 11th, 2001.

One side effect of Ventura's salvo into broadcasting is that he's been doing a lot of interviews and talking about a lot of different things. I think he knows that he is one of America's most colorful political figures and I think he also realizes that the reason some people are going to tune into "Conspiracy Theory" is purely because of him. What better way to promote a controversial show than to stir up some political controversy? Ventura's controversial issue of choice at the moment seems to be the military draft. As a former Navy SEAL and previous supporter of an all-volunteer military, Ventura is an unlikely advocate for a return to the draft. Nonetheless, the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have convinced the governor that regular Americans are too disconnected from the military effort. The solution, in his view, is to make sure more people have skin in the game by force via the draft. He even wants the burden to fall particularly hard on senators and representatives, who he thinks should have to name a person in their family to be eligible for immediate military service. Leave it to Jesse to make conscription even less ethical...he actually wants to allow members of Congress the ability to ship off their undesirable family members to war! "Cousin Johnny has caused nothing but problems for this family since the day he was born! One way ticket to Afghanistan, please."

I've heard Ventura's basic argument many times before, and I remain unconvinced of its merits. I think a lot of people, especially those who lived through the 60s and 70s, are angry that the American public isn't more upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars effectively ended Republican control of the government in my view, but it is true that Democratic control hasn't exactly brought an end to the fighting as voters have often picked more moderate Democrats over strongly anti-war ones. Certainly the level of protests against the war have never equaled what happened during the Vietnam War. There are two reasons why I feel the comparison to Vietnam is fatally flawed, however. For one thing, more than 58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam -- roughly 5,000 (less than 10% of the Vietnam tally) have perished in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because there are more people living in the United States today than there were during the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have also affected fewer families (in terms of casualties...of course military families always suffer during wars even if their loved ones aren't killed in battle) as a percentage of the total population. Even if there were a draft going on today, I'd have expected there to be a much greater reaction to the Vietnam War than to Bush's wars simply due to the sheer numbers of casualties involved. My second beef with Ventura's argument is that it strongly implies that the draft makes waging war more difficult. Why, then, did conscription not prevent the Vietnam War to begin with? Why did it last so long despite all the protests? Why did hyper-aggressive dictators like Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler use conscription to fill the ranks of their enormous armies? Something doesn't add up here.

The morality of conscription is something Jesse Ventura barely touches on. I think that's because he's a political realist who thinks the government is in practice essentially permitted to do anything it wants...the only way to stop the government from doing something it wants to do is through popular resistance. Thus, Ventura thinks that doing something that on the surface seems to reduce an individual's freedom (allowing the government to force people into the military at will) can actually lead to more freedom down the line because of the resulting pushback and resistance. That's antithetical to the idea that there should be a limited government that is, like the citizenry themselves, itself constrained by laws. Personally, I don't want the government to violate an individual's rights even if that's popular at the time. Rather than reinstate the draft, it should be made illegal!

With all that said, I do think Governor Ventura has a point about the public's seemingly growing disinterest in the wars. There are still American soldiers who are placing their lives on the line every day in Iraq and Afghanistan -- what right do we have to forget about the dangers they are facing just because we've got massive unemployment and other economic problems at home? Forgetting a war is never wise...wars have ways of forcing your attention towards them no matter how many other problems exist. People also seem to have forgotten the startlingly high numbers of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan -- unintentional as those deaths may be, they nonetheless call into question the very idea of a "virtuous" and "justified" war.