Just like in the 1960s, Tom Hayden can’t get over how absurd the whole situation it is.
He can’t get over the fact that, in his words, despite the fact that a majority of American citizens, American soldiers and Iraqi citizens want the United States to get out of Iraq, the Bush administration doesn’t seem to care.
For Hayden, a man famous for, among other things, the role he played in anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention as part of the “Chicago Seven” and his status as the ex-husband of Jane Fonda, there is no reason for continued American intervention in Iraq or in many of the other places troops are stationed around the globe.
“If you want the war to end,” he told an audience on Tuesday, Feb. 28 at the Dolan School of Business, “you’ve got to end it because the people who started it aren’t going to end it…they can’t admit mistakes.”
The whole problem, Hayden said, is that the United States, and particularly the Bush administration, is deathly afraid of the United States being viewed as a failed superpower by the international community.
But, he said, in order to win a war, a nation needs three things: soldiers, public opinion, and allies; none of which the United States has. He said, according to opinion surveys, the majority of soldiers favor troop withdrawal and that the military is having great difficulty recruiting new soldiers.
Moreover, a majority of Americans oppose the war and disapprove of President Bush’s job performance, and the United States now has so few international allies that control of some areas of Iraq has been assigned to the Fiji Islands.
Hayden’s lecture was given to an audience of mostly anti-war partisans, most of whom supported his opposition to the war in Iraq and applauded loudly when he compared the Bush administration’s ignorance to that of a monarchy.
But he also spoke, at the beginning of the lecture, about his emergence from the editor of the daily student newspaper at the University of Michigan to one of the most famous activists of his generation.
His original goal, he said, was to be a foreign correspondent for a newspaper, so that he could “get out of the suburbs.” He went to protest marches, not with a picket sign but with a pen and a notebook, and interviewed people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X.
He sat on the political sidelines, for the most part, when black students in the south marched out of their high schools and stood up against segregation. He watched as the Civil Rights movement picked up momentum and as America’s most politically active generation began to speak up.
Then he came to a realization that changed history. “There was quite a difference between taking action and observing it,” he said.
And with that, the newspaper editor who wanted to get out of the suburbs emerged as the spokesman of a generation.
He founded the Students for a Democratic Society and wrote its mission statement, the famous Port Huron Statement. He advocated President Kennedy to create the Peace Corps, only to realize further down the road, he said, that American presence overseas was “more a part of the problem then a part of the solution.”
He married, and then divorced, Fonda, served 18 years in the California State Legislature, and wrote a book, not about any war in America, but about the struggle for a united Ireland.
Now, his hair gray and his temper a bit cooler, he is trying to get out the same message that he delivered a generation ago: that it isn’t doing any good for American soldiers to come back from a war in body bags.
Since many of the students in attendance, not caring much about what he had to say, got up and left as soon as they had enough information to convince their professors they went, a fitting topic of conversation was the level of student apathy that exists now that did not during the war in Vietnam.
But, Hayden explained, today’s students operate under immensely different circumstances.
“It’s a false comparison on the surface,” he said. “I could be drafted and I couldn’t vote. If every man and woman on this campus had their vote taken away and could be sent to Iraq, this campus would be in rebellion.”
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