By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
In the spirit of the high-minded intellectual debate National
Review encourages, I was eager to read two pieces recently published in
these pages in support of former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to
lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I regret that I have
been deprived of that opportunity. It isn’t just that the arguments are not
compelling, though they aren’t. Their biggest problem is that they elide the
fact that the only quality that makes Gabbard a unique candidate for the role
for which she was nominated is also precisely why she should not be confirmed.
In an item published last week, former CIA
counterterrorism director Bernard Hudson makes a case for Gabbard’s confirmation on
not her merits but the demerits of America’s various intelligence agencies.
U.S. intelligence got WMD in Iraq wrong and “set in motion two decades of
regional instability.” (The idea that the Middle East was stable before 2003
would come as a shock to the American service personnel who had spent the
preceding twelve years fighting around and in the skies over Iraq in response to
Saddam Hussein’s aggression.) Moreover, U.S. intelligence predicted that
Moammar Qaddafi’s ouster would “improve regional stability” (citation needed
there, as Hudson’s assessment conflicts with other documents in the public record, as
does his claim that U.S. intelligence assessed that the Afghan government could stand itself up absent U.S. support).
These questionable claims aside, Hudson is justified in
lamenting the degree to which intelligence agencies and operatives have grown
comfortable intervening in and shaping the course of political events abroad.
“These included, but were not limited to, public accusations that a sitting
U.S. president was the agent of a hostile, foreign power,” he wrote. Restoring
“people’s broad faith in the intelligence community” is imperative. Sure.
Granted. Why does that render Gabbard a perfect fit for the role?
In lieu of an answer to that question, Hudson issues a
flurry of compliments. Gabbard served as a soldier before she served as a
public servant — a biography that is shared by any number of qualified
candidates, as is her hostility toward the politicization of U.S. intelligence
agencies. Those equally qualified candidates would come with the added bonus of
not having spent the last decade credulously retailing any anti-American
narrative they encountered regardless of their provenance (which was usually Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus). Hudson attributes criticisms of Gabbard’s
naïveté to “the Left,” which is so obviously untrue that we must assume it is
merely a mechanism to trigger thoughtless tribal loyalty among partisan
Republicans.
At least Hudson tackles the criticisms of Gabbard
head-on, albeit unconvincingly. “Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq occupation, has
also been attacked for questioning the intelligence about Assad’s use of
chemical weapons on his own people,” he writes. “Whether or not she was right
about this, it shows a willingness to depart from the herd and push back on
received wisdom.”
“Whether or not she was right?” She wasn’t. We’ve known as
much for years, even preceding Trump’s belated decision to act on Barack Obama’s
ultimatum to Bashar al-Assad, and we know it now as a result of publicly
available reports produced by governments and investigatory bodies all over the world. Readers may need a
neck brace after reading a lengthy missive about the intelligence community’s
unacceptable inaccuracies only to pivot to a defense of inaccuracies. Hey, at
least they are iconoclastic inaccuracies!
Another item in NR along the same lines, from Senator Rand Paul, doesn’t fare much better than Hudson’s.
Paul makes Hudson’s argument in essentially the same terms. The “swamp thrives
on a system that puts entrenched bureaucrats and political insiders ahead of
the American people,” it begins. The impressive glut of “thought-terminating clichés” in a single sentence
notwithstanding, Paul’s argument isn’t any sounder than Hudson’s.
Paul identifies what he regards as America’s foreign
policy mistakes and attributes them to intelligence failures. He also cites
what he believes are the domestic abuses in which the American intelligence
services have engaged. Finally, he fêtes Gabbard not because she is anything
special but because she has all the right enemies. “Tulsi has been vilified and
ridiculed by the D.C. establishment precisely because she threatens the
privileges and power of the ruling class,” he writes. “Tulsi embodies the qualities
Washington finds intolerable: fearlessness, principle, and an unwavering
commitment to challenging corruption.”
What cartoonish villains these Washington
establishmentarians are. A former CIA official and a U.S. senator serving his
third term ought to know. But the blizzard of buzzwords fails to paper over
Gabbard’s unique defects of character and judgment.
Ultimately, these arguments fall flat because they skirt
around what those who support Gabbard truly like about her. Her credulous
recitation of pro-Kremlin and pro-Assad narratives is not a bug but a feature.
Her openness to the Kremlin’s talking points is no flaw to those who share the
conviction that America’s foreign policy is essentially imperialistic. Gabbard
has been imprudently consistent in her beliefs. Her allies should take a page
from her book and own that outlook just as Gabbard has owned hers.
And yet, unlike Gabbard, her defenders know how to craft a
politically palatable argument. The problem with those arguments is that
dozens, if not hundreds, of highly qualified, decorated career public servants
are just as suspicious of the dominant culture in America’s intelligence
agencies. Those candidates also didn’t devote years to broadcasting baseless lies about America that advance the interests of our enemies.
If it’s really Gabbard or bust for her defenders, we must
conclude that the only truly unique feature of her candidacy isn’t an
unfortunate blemish on an otherwise sterling record. Rather, it’s her foremost
asset.
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