Tulsi Gabbard’s Syria Stance Is a Stain on Her Record

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 02, 2024

 

There are very few actors in the militant drama unfolding inside Syria that we could plausibly call pro-Western. There was a time when that mantle would have been applicable to some of the forces attempting to dismantle the murderous Baathist regime in Damascus, but they were snuffed out. Bashar al-Assad’s forces shelled and starved them, and Vladimir Putin’s air force pummeled them into submission. All the while, an acquiescent West facilitated the depopulation of the areas those rebel groups disputed, after which it looked away while Assad’s armies established precisely the conditions that provided the regime with a new lease on life.

 

The despot and his apologists claimed when it was not true that the Syrian civil war was a binary conflict. The West had to choose between a bloody secular authoritarianism or savage jihadists (whom the Assad regime incubated). Now that this binary dynamic has prevailed, partly because of the Assad regime’s defenders’ advocacy, they have the gall to insist they were right all along.

 

We should expect no contrition from those who think they’ve had this conflict pegged from the start despite its many fluctuating subtleties. But the reignition of the Syrian civil war over the past several days amid the advance of a Turkish-backed Islamist rebel group should also prompt a variety of reflections on how that war unfolded, to say nothing of the factors — from Russia’s diminishment on Ukraine’s battlefields, to the degradation of Iran’s Shiite militias in the region, to the illegitimacy of the Assad regime — contributing to regional instability. Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to serve as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence grants us just such an opportunity.

 

The Free Press’s Eli Lake recently provided his readers with a pile of evidence indicating why the public should be skeptical of Gabbard’s instincts, but he also dispensed with some of the more unfounded accusations dogging the onetime Democratic representative. There is no evidence, for example, that Gabbard has ever been employed by or collaborated with foreign intelligence services. It doesn’t make it any better if Gabbard came to her habit of defending Moscow’s and Damascus’s abuses honestly. And if Gabbard is to be confirmed in her role, Lake notes, “The former Hawaii lawmaker will have to show that some of her positions have evolved.” Indeed, we should hope she’s undergone a wholesale metamorphosis.

 

“Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States,” Gabbard told MSNBC in 2019. That is a bizarre thing for any informed person to say, much less a veteran of the Iraq War. The Assad regime facilitated the introduction of insurgent elements into Iraq from the outset of the war. Sometimes, Syrian military personnel supported the efforts of former Saddam Hussein regime loyalists and jihadists to kill American soldiers. U.S. special forces even mounted raids inside Syria during the insurgency to neutralize the militants set on slaughtering Americans and scuttling the American project in Iraq. Only a truly warped worldview would lead someone to conclude that, because they oppose a U.S. mission, setbacks to that mission — even the bloodiest sort — cannot be described as threats to U.S. interests. We can only hope Gabbard’s views have shifted in the last half decade.

 

But they probably haven’t. Gabbard has promoted her belief that U.S. support for its objectives via proxies on the ground in places such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and even Afghanistan only contributes to the jihadist threat — a shockingly chauvinistic outlook that assigns all agency to the United States and none to its enemies, not just the jihadists themselves but the enemy capitals that support them. Indeed, Gabbard too often accepts at face value the pronouncements of America’s enemies, unbelievable though they may be.

 

Trump’s ODNI-chief nominee rushed to defend Assad against charges leveled by the Trump administration when she insisted that it could not be responsible for the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack in which over 70 were killed and hundreds seriously injured. She mindlessly called Trump’s punitive strikes on chemical weapons targets — a key U.S. strategic objective, given Washington’s interest in preventing chemical warfare from becoming the status quo of the battlefield — “illegal regime-change war to overthrow the Syrian government.” On that front, her views stubbornly refused to evolve.

 

Gabbard also lent undue credence to Moscow’s narratives, the foremost of which was that the Russian-Assad axis was busily degrading jihadist elements in Syria while the U.S. and its allies were backing them. “Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria,” the representative wrote in 2015. “But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.” She ill-advisedly added that, while Barack Obama refused to attack the al-Qaeda terrorists arrayed against both the U.S. and the Assad regime, “Putin did.”

 

What “Putin did” was execute a preview of the total warfare against civilian population centers it would later apply to Ukraine. Russian warplanes bombed hospitals and maternity wards. Moscow’s forces backed Syrian forces on the ground cordoning off whole cities and blocking the distribution of humanitarian assistance to starve out their defenders. While the Assad regime purchased its own oil from the nascent Islamic State, Russia targeted the anti-Assad opposition to the exclusion of the jihadist elements the Obama administration was (extremely reluctantly) compelled to eventually act against.

 

“Jabhat al-Nusra’s methodology positions it to rise as the Syrian opposition fragments under Russian pressure,” one Canadian government study from the period concluded. “Despite its stated intent, Russia’s intervention is helping Jabhat al-Nusra transform the Syrian opposition and establish a base for attacks on the West.” In other words, the very radicalization and consolidation effects Gabbard so often frets about when those conditions can be attributed to U.S. actions were occurring, but Moscow was the cause of it. If Gabbard couldn’t see that then, why would she see it now?

 

Retailing the baseless Russian version of events can be most charitably attributed to ideologically motivated blindness. But it’s not harmless. The attractive proposition in these Soviet-style narratives isn’t that they render Assad and Putin the good guys in a pat morality play. What proved too tempting to resist was the notion that America was the bad guy all along.

 

The Syrian civil war is the historical font from which so many of the world’s traumas have sprung. It was the training ground for Russia’s marauding militias and the sandbox in which it perfected the brutal tactics it is now bringing to bear in Europe. It was and remains a source of civilian refugees destabilizing the prevailing political compacts in the nations that surround it. It has become a finishing school for Islamist terrorists. It was where Barack Obama’s credibility was laid to rest. And it was the place where noninterventionists tested to its limits the theory that the U.S. could forever divorce itself from a fight over some of the most consequential territory on earth without suffering any blows to its permanent interests abroad.

 

All this didn’t seem particularly confusing at the time. It appeared only to befuddle those who approach geopolitics from the premise that the United States is a malignant force on the world stage, and it would be better for everyone if it retreated behind its borders. If Gabbard has given up on all that, it represents quite the evolution. But she wouldn’t be where she is today absent the paranoid iconoclasm that has come to characterize her career in national politics. I wouldn’t hold my breath in anticipation of a convincing conversion narrative.