Trump nominee Tulsi
Gabbard cozies up to America's enemies
Gabbard, Donald Trump’s pick to be director of national
intelligence, has been called “Russia’s girlfriend” and parrots Kremlin talking
points.
By Mona Charen
Glance through any
post-election voter interview and you will inevitably find someone who mentions
“America first” when explaining his or her vote. They understand the term in
varying ways, but the throughline is the belief that Donald Trump is a strong leader
who will steadfastly pursue America’s national interests.
Sorry, but that is
deluded. Even by the strongman standard, Trump is not securing America. His
nominees are not just unqualified; they are anti-qualified. If he were
attempting to sabotage America’s interests, it’s hard to see how he would do
things differently.
Someone who cared about
America’s security would never dream of nominating a weekend TV host with no
relevant experience in running large organizations to serve as secretary of
defense, far less someone who has an alcohol problem, white nationalist sympathies
and a history of sexual misconduct. Many Republican senators are minimizing the
credible accusations against Peter Hegseth, so perhaps a primer is in order
about why character matters.
It matters for all
officials if you care about honest, responsible government (an antique taste
perhaps). For those in sensitive national security posts though, good character
is more than desirable; it’s essential. If a defense secretary is drunk during
a crisis, lives can be lost. And if he has a history of sexual assault, it’s
possible, even likely, that there may be more unreported episodes out there
that could be exploited by an enemy to blackmail him.
The choice of Tulsi
Gabbard for director of national intelligence is even less explicable. Her
appalling judgment comes into sharp focus this week with the fall of Bashar
al-Assad.
Gabbard’s outstanding
trait has been warmth toward dictators. In 2017, she traveled to Syria and met
with Assad not once but twice. Like so many political pilgrims, Gabbard saw
what she wanted to see, not the reality staring her in the face. In 2017, she
had every reason to know that Assad had not only used chemical weapons against
the Syrian people but had welcomed Russian assistance in his civil war, and
that Iranian-allied troops and Russian fighters had conducted operations
against American interests in the region.
Gabbard embraces conspiracy theories
No one knows what Assad
and Gabbard discussed in their two hours together, but soon after she emerged,
Gabbard was expressing skepticism that Assad had really used poison gas, and by
the time of her 2020 presidential run, she was citing full-on conspiracy sites
that claimed the chemical attacks were false flag operations designed to bring
the United States into the war.
Her credulousness — if
that’s what it is — looks particularly obscene this week, as stories are coming
out about the grotesque human rights abuses committed by Assad in Sednaya
prison and at other places around Syria. Within hours of Assad’s departure, people
swarmed the prisons in hopes of finding loved ones alive. At Sednaya, they
forced open the doors of the prison morgue and found bodies in conditions
reminiscent of the Holocaust or the Cambodian genocide.
The New York Times reported some of the grisly details: “One
woman shrieked at what she found. Most of the bodies were emaciated, the skin
hanging off their bones. The shoulders of one man was covered in the scars of
puncture wounds. Another had a thick red scar around his neck — a rope burn,
the examiners believed. Yet another man was missing his eyes.”
Some of the women
prisoners were found with toddlers in their cells, doubtless the result of
prison guards raping them. Rape and torture were routine in the prison Amnesty
International labeled a “human slaughterhouse.” Human rights groups vary in
their estimates of the number of Syrians murdered by their
designer-clothes-clad, Bentley-driving dictator, but the range is between
13,000 and 30,000 dead at Sednaya alone since the uprising against Assad began
in 2011. The total of all Syrians killed since 2011 in the civil war is
estimated to be 620,000, with 12 million refugees.
Gabbard demonstrated
similar credulousness about Russia and Putin, mouthing so many Kremlin talking
points that Russian TV hosts referred to her as “Russia’s girlfriend.” She
repeated the propaganda that the United States and NATO were responsible for Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine, tweeting in 2022 that “This war and suffering could have
easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s
legitimate security concerns.” She has denounced Volodymyr Zelenskyy as corrupt
and repeated the baseless smear (originated in the Kremlin) that the United
States was operating biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and was
responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
There is something wrong
with Gabbard. The pull of conspiracism — particularly anti-American
conspiracism — seems to be her overriding mental frame. In this, she and Trump
(and RFK Jr. and so many others) are united. If she were merely a member of
Congress, her tropism toward murderous dictators would be disturbing, but as
head of America’s intelligence community, it’s utterly insane. This is the
furthest thing from America First.
