RUTHFULLY YOURS

I sometimes wonder what “liberalism” the defenders of the liberal world order have in mind when the subject comes to Tulsi Gabbard. Appalled by radical Islam after 9/11, Gabbard volunteered to serve in the Hawaii National Guard, deploying to Iraq in 2004 and 2005 in a medical unit. She completed officer training at Alabama Military Academy, then served overseas in Kuwait. In 2020, she transferred to the U.S. Army Reserve and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel.

You might think that people who claim to respect the troops so much might hesitate before calling someone with this kind of record a foreign asset or even accusing her of being a foreign agent. You would be wrong.

Since this summer, she has been given the dreaded “quadruple S” status by the TSA — meaning she is being tracked at excruciating expense across every flight she takes — and is subjected to a far more invasive form of search reserved for active terror suspects. This status, for an active Army reservist and officer?

Even the more conventional case against her has some obvious holes. Noah Rothman writes:

She bought wholesale the utterly baseless line retailed by Moscow that Russia and its vassal state were the only countries committed to fighting ISIS. In contrast, she maintained, the United States was helping prop up radical elements within Syria’s anti-Assad rebels (the Assad regime took a hands-off approach to ISIS and even purchased its own oil from the terrorist group while it subdued the more moderate insurgents in places like Homs and Aleppo).

To my knowledge, Gabbard has not repudiated those positions. They cannot be described as “anti-war,” as so many of her boosters would like to claim, because she deploys them in support of war — Syria’s wars, Russia’s wars, and the terrorists’ wars, just not America’s wars.[Emphasis added.]

Both as a matter of active policy, and gross policy negligence, the United States was propping up radical elements with Syria’s anti-Assad rebels.

Our poor screening allowed fighters posing as Free Syrian Army “moderate rebels” to obtain U.S. weapons before promptly defecting to al-Nusra (al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria). Sometimes, in desperate circumstances, our preferred Syrian proxies would give material to al-Qaeda just to survive. See the Fox News report, ‘I gave the US trucks and ammunition to al-Qaeda.’ These incidents were well known and fueled opposition to American involvement in Syria among U.S. military personnel. When Ted Cruz warned against “becoming al-Qaeda’s Air Force,” he was amplifying not an Assadist talking point but one commonly heard among grunts.

Far from Gabbard having to repudiate her view of Syrian rebels, the U.S. government has done so. One of the U.S.-sponsored and armed rebel groups in Syria, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, made worldwide headlines in 2016 when they posted a video of themselves beheading a child. “If we can prove that this was indeed what happened and this group was involved . . . it would give us pause about any assistance or, frankly, any further involvement with this group,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters at the time. Nothing was done. It was only after incoming president Trump was shown the same video that the government cut off its support of Nour al-Din al-Zenki through the CIA.

The Syrian conflict was plagued by similar “genius” brainwaves of American intelligence. By 2016, the CIA-backed Fursan al Haq was firing U.S. weapons on the DOD-backed Syrian Democratic forces. Perhaps most perverse of all, though al-Nusra was persistently the beneficiary of these efforts, the legal mandate to continue these missions was the same AUMF after 9/11, which mandated a war against al-Qaeda. The mission of overthrowing the Syrian government was rather pointedly rejected by the U.S. House when it had the chance to vote on it.

The same sort of disasters go on today. U.S. arms given to the U.S.-trained Iraqi army are now routinely passed off to Iranian-backed militias like Kataib Hezbollah and used to fire on our poorly manned outposts, such as Tower 22, where three reservists were killed last year.

If you can’t see why someone who was so horrified by Sunni extremism against America that she signed up for the military and deployed to Iraq might be critical about joining a war effort in which al-Qaeda was likely to be the largest beneficiary, you’re probably the same sort of person who has been looking away from what’s happening in Iraq. You’ve probably become an expert at not seeing uncomfortable truths.

That’s what populism is for. Replacing people who have become expertly blind to corruption and perversion. Tulsi Gabbard reacted to 9/11 like a normal patriot, with a healthy hatred for al-Qaeda, and served her country honorably in uniform for 20 years. The intel agencies had more nuanced views; they think Sunni child beheaders are great allies, and they treat our own National Guardsmen as terror threats. Gabbard being nominally in charge of these freaks is poetic justice.