Tulsi Gabbard, the feckless Democrat turned Republican, is the author of a failed presidential bid, has not held elected office since 2020, gets glowing coverage on Russian state media, blames America for the world's ills, and repeats the kind of weird conspiracy-laden stuff your aunt posts on Facebook at two in the morning.
Now Trump wants her to be the director of national intelligence. The director is a human fusion center, a post-9/11 position meant to solve an important problem. The U.S. has a lot of three-letter intelligence agencies and they're bad at talking to each other. The director is meant to be a human at the center of the various information streams with the ear of the president.
If her public career is anything to go by, Gabbard would be a director who willfully ignores intelligence in favor of a preferred narrative, one that waves off the atrocities of dictators. When she ran for president as a Democrat in 2019 she played footage of the Assad regime dropping barrel bombs on the Syrian city of Darayya over a call for peace.
"Wasteful wars bring more suffering, and cost trillions that should be invested in our communities," her advertisement said above footage of her wandering destroyed Syrian cities. I agree. Someone should tell it to Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad, the man responsible for the devastation that Gabbard lays at America's feet.
Gabbard has proven in her long career that she's more interested in the word of dictators and authoritarians than she is of American intelligence agencies. I'm not unsympathetic. Gabbard served the U.S. military overseas and has seen firsthand what 25 years of U.S. intelligence failures and foreign intervention have done to the military and America.
But...
The former U.S. representative from Hawaii visited Syria and met Assad in 2017. She did so in secret. If she was ignorant of Assad's various crimes at the time, then it was by choice.
The world is complex and America makes a lot of mistakes, but Gabbard sees it all in black and white. America's "regime change wars," as she loves to call them, are the center of all the world's ills. She has sided with dictatorial regimes that slaughter their own people more than once.
There is a childish Cold War era view of the world that says Americans are the good guys. We are, as John Winthrop and later President Ronald Reagan put it, a shining city upon a hill. That myth has decayed. Searching for another glamorous example of virtue, some have adopted a new and equality childish narrative: that America is the bad guy and everything it does in the world makes it worse. That means that anyone who opposes America, including the less-than-benevolent rulers of Syria and Russia, say, are the good guys.
Interesting point of view for a person taking a job designed to help the United States to stay ahead of every kind of threat.
The world is more complicated than that. When Gabbard met with Bashar al-Assad, the brutality of his regime was well known. One of his military photographers was so disgusted by what he saw that he faked his own death and fled the country. He smuggled out 27,000 photographs documenting the torture and murder of the Syrian people. Some of the photos were displayed in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
It is these and other horrors that Syrians have fought against since 2011. For Gabbard, everyone who struggles against such horror is a terrorist. "There is no difference between 'moderate' rebels and al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) or ISIS—they are all the same," Gabbard said in a self-published piece defending her trip. "This is a war between terrorists under the command of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and the Syrian government."
Writing of her trip, she described how Syrian government handlers dog-walked her through a prepared meeting with various Syrian civilians. "The U.S. must stop supporting terrorists who are destroying Syria and her people," she wrote. "The U.S. and other countries fueling this war must stop immediately. We must allow the Syrian people to try to recover from this terrible war."
It's an empty and meaningless call to action. This is the line of thinking that would have you believe Russian President Vladimir Putin would never have invaded Ukraine if not for NATO, that Assad wouldn't have used chemical weapons on his own people if not for American-led regime change, and that America's allies and enemies have no will of their own.
It's a simplistic view of a complicated world, as condescending as the neoconservative view that the right amount of military intervention can turn a dictatorship into a democracy or the liberal view that the right amount of aid can turn a poppy farmer into a soybean magnate.
It's the wrong kind of attitude, and the wrong kind of worldview, for the director of national intelligence.
Matthew Gault is a writer living South Carolina covering war and nuclear weapons. He's a former staff writer at Vice who has worked with Reuters, TIME, and The New York Times.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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