Branko Marcetic looks at various aspects takes a look at Trump nominee for Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard. He warns that Gabbard doesn’t look much like a an antiwar selection:
Gabbard is by no means the anti-war advocate’s ideal appointee. Rather than large-scale interventions she has said that she supports killer drones and special forces to hunt terrorists in other countries, pushing the self-defeating idea — advanced by the Bush II and Barack Obama administrations, and more recently, by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel — that terrorism can be defeated through bombs and assassinations, and it does not seem those views have changed.
She was hostile to diplomacy with Iran under Obama. She voted for the nuclear deal, but only after repeatedly criticizing his attempts to forge it, and even backing legislation to undermine the agreement. She has been a staunch supporter of Israel and its war in Gaza, calling American college protesters “puppets of these radical Islamist organizations…that stand opposed to our ideology of freedom.”
But the Washington foreign policy establishment has lurched to such extremes over the past decade, that the once fairly banal positions held by former President Barack Obama — who did not view Ukraine as a core U.S. interest worth going to war over, and was wary of growing American military involvement that could provoke a proxy war with Russia — have now become cast as radical, even treasonous. In this context, Gabbard looks like a moderate. (1)
Obviously, anyone who is serving as the top intelligence official needs to be someone who is not going to leak like a sieve to foreign governments, especially to ones not on good terms with the US. I don’t know have serious the concerns many in the intelligence establishment really are. The DNI position a sensitive and important one which in practice exercises real power and influence.
But as Marcetic points out, some of the public criticisms of her as a security risk seem to be based on the idea that advocating any policy that might have looked preferable to Vladimir Putin or Bashar al-Assad makes her a security risk in the more technical sense of leaking secrets. But all of foreign policy involves decisions on how much to align with positions taken by various countries and how much to support stances that various countries oppose.
And if someone is actually selling secrets to Russia or China – and aren’t there always some someones like that? – then taking controversial positions on important foreign policy issues that align with the interest of perceived adversaries is probably not the most discrete way to avoid drawing attention from security investigators.
Ray McGovern in the last third of this interview talks about Tulsi Gabbard’s recent conversion to the concept of allowing warrantless wiretaps on US citizens. (2)
Note: Napolitano may favor a restrained foreign policy. And I’ve posted numerous of the interviews he’s done on foreign policy issues. But he also has a very conservative streak. And near the end of this video he defends an absurd, neo-Confederate arguments about states leaving the Union.
Notes:
(1) Marcetic, Branko (2025): Tulsi Gabbard vs. the War Party. Responsible Statecraft 01/13/2025. (Accessed: 2025-19-01).
(2) Ray McGovern : Tulsi Gabbard and Warrantless Spying. Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom YouTube channel 01/20/2025. (Accessed: 2025-19-01).
Tulsi Gabbard doing her Trumpista left-right mishmash act - it's pretty much just "right" at this point - with economist Jeffrey Sachs. My first take on this video is that Gabbard is pitching an Old Right isolationist narrative in the tradition of the original America First movement, memorialized in this song by Woody Guthrie's song "Lindbergh":
"They say America First but they mean America Next."
Gabbard at 14:35 in the video: "The Democratic Party is led by war hawks, warmongers, who are firmly in the grips of the military-industrial complex."
True enough, honestly. But much more true of the Republican Party. There's a difference between truth and half-truth, something particularly important to keep in mind with this Trumpista America-Firster type narrative.
"They don't know or care about the costs of war. And they certainly don't know who pays the price," she continues.
What was true of the America Firsters and Trumpistas old and new is that they are hardcore nationalists and militarists. The fact that they sometimes pimp pacifist-sounding rhetoric doesn't change that core orientation. It makes me a bit nauseous to share it, but here is a webpage from the rightwing, neo-Confederate Mises Institute presenting a rogue's gallery of Old Right isolationist advocacy, The Literature of Isolationism, 1972-1983 from The Journal of Libertarian Studies.
The classic text of this more-than-dubious school of thought is Charles Beard's President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948). Former President Herbert Hoover was also part of this tradition, as seen in the massive posthumously published Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath (2011)
Gabbart proceeds to trash those well-known tools of militarism and reaction, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Yes, trolls, I'm being sarcastic!)
Gabbard and Sachs on the Russia-Ukraine War
Dave Troy, a journalist who writes for the left-leaning Washington Spectator, harshes on both Gabbard and Sachs in a Twitter thread. Bruce Wilson, a longtime critical researcher on far-right politics and Christian nationalism, joins in to amplify Troy's criticism.
It takes Gabbard 13 minutes before she launches in to defending Trump against "Russiagate" attacks. The corporate Dems did handle that whole issue fairly dumbly. But there were real and substantial issues with Trump's crew and Russia connections. See: Flynn, Michael.
Sachs uses the term "proxy war," which has become a bit of a propaganda touchstone with Russia saying it's a US-NATO proxy war and NATO saying, no, no, it's just about Russia and Ukraine. Splitting hairs over propaganda phrasing can be entertaining. But it's kind of frivolous here. I suppose since Russia is, you know, a direct combatant in the war, it's not really "proxy" on their side. On the US-NATO side, though, it is, whatever the correct propaganda terms may be.
The most important thing to recognize about this is that the after the internal conflicts in Turkey and Greece just after the Second World War, the USSR and the US managed to avoid any further proxy wars in Europe. They found other places for that activity.
After 29:00 in the video, Sachs states bluntly that the US committed to Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that if Moscow dissolved the Warsaw Pact, the US would never, ever expand NATO. That is simply not so. For one thing, the alleged agreement in question was about the unification of Germany, not about the dissolving of the Warsaw Pact. (Hannes Adomeit, Gorbachev's Consent to Unified Germany's Membership in NATO SWG 11/01/2006)
Gorbachev himself up until his passing earlier this year himself stated that this was not the case, even though he publicly supported Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The alleged agreement was that the Bush I Administration agreed not to station NATO troops in the former East Germany if Moscow agreed to German unification.
And the US held to that agreement. So did the USSR. But there was no formal agreement of the kind Sachs invokes. And neither the Soviet Union nor the Warsaw Pact have existed in decades.
Parsing the background of the war
I agree with the "realist" critics from George Kennan to Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer who thought NATO expansion was a bad idea. But we don't have to invoke a non-existing American agreement to think that. (In any case, that ship has long since sailed! But it is important in understanding the historical sequence that led to where we are in 2022.)
Sachs, on the other hand, says that the agreement he claims happen was "extremely clear." No, it wasn't. To the extent such an agreement existed at all, it was a fuzzy, non-explicit assurance that the US wouldn't expand NATO any time soon. And at least until the second Bush Presidency in the US and the ascendency of Vladimir Putin to the Russia Presidency, there was still some more-or-less serious notion by the US and major European nations that we could and should try to incorporate Russia into some kind of over-arching European security structure.
Otherwise, his description of NATO expansion is matter-of-fact. And he's also right to highlight the significance of the US intervention in Serbia/Kosovo in 1999 in US-Russia relations.
But then he misses a key part about NATO's 2008 Bucharest Declaration that he mentions, but he doesn't explain that it created the worst of both worlds on Georgia and Ukraine. It didn't start formal accession for Georgia or Ukraine, but simultaneously stated unequivocally that both would become part of NATO in the future.
Once he gets to 2014 and the Maidan uprising in Ukraine, he pretty much goes into a justification of Russia's seizure of Crimea and the invasion this year. I'm no fan of Victoria Nuland, who played a dubious role in Ukraine in 2014. But its at best a big oversimplification to treat the change in government in 2014 as a simple US regime-change operation.
This is not a straightforward to make in light of the fact that Petro Poroshenko, the man elected President in 2014 after the Maidan Revolution currently faces treason charges for allegedly assisting pro-Russian separatists: "A prosecutor has alleged Poroshenko was involved in the sale of large amounts of coal that helped finance Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015." (Petro Poroshenko: Ex-president returns to Ukraine to face treason chargesEuronews 01/19/2022)
Current President Volodymyr Zelensky defeated him in the Presidential election of 2019. Poroshenko claims to be actively supporting the Ukrainian position in the current war. (David Brennan, How Zelensky's Presidential Rival Would Try To Defeat PutinNewsweek 08/02/2022) Brennan also reports, "Recent weeks have seen Zelensky's government dismiss top officials, citing alleged involvement with or sympathies for the Russia occupiers." So alleged Western control of Ukraine's government since 2014 has evidently been less than total. As I've noted here before, there have been strong indications that the Biden Administration sees Zelensky himself as a bit of a loose cannon on some issues.
Sachs says (around 26:40), "Biden has [just] played the Deep State game" on Ukraine. Sachs may be fuzzy on some things. But I'm assuming that he knows that the "Deep State" term has been pretty much exclusively a Trumpista one since 2016 or so. He adds, "I don't know who's really calling the shorts, frankly." After have just said it was the "Deep State" doing so.
Sachs borrows some phrases from the "realist" foreign policy narrative. But his own tale of how the Russia-Ukraine war wound up happening is superficial, to put it generously.
Couldn't they at least be a little bit substantive on nuclear war?
Ironically, even though Gabbert frames the entire discussion in terms of nuclear war and Sachs picks up the theme in a superficial way, neither of them mentions this:
In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States, Russia, and Britain committed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against the country. Those assurances played a key role in persuading the Ukrainian government in Kyiv to give up what amounted to the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, consisting of some 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads. (Steven Pifer, Why care about Ukraine and the Budapest Memorandum Brookings Institute 12/05/2019)
Some of the New Cold Warriors have argued that this was tantamount to a US and British commitment to defend Ukraine against any invasion. It wasn't.
But it's certainly a serious setback to nuclear nonproliferation efforts that Russia explicitly pledged in that agreement to respect Ukraine's sovereignty. Every other country in the world negotiating on whether or not they should have or keep nuclear weapons will be very clear on the implications of this precedent: Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and Russia invaded it and has been annexing big chunks of its territory. Stephen Walt argued at the time that it was a mistake for Ukraine to give up its nukes. Would Russia have acted the same way since 2014 if Ukraine had an operative nuclear deterrent?
I've also pointed out before that both Iraq and Libya also gave up their "weapons of mass destruction" programs, though not as part of the Budapest agreement. And what happened? The US invaded Iraq in 2003. And along with France conducted a military regime-change operation in Libya in 2012.
Gabbard and Sachs talk about the nuclear war risk here almost as though they are scarcely familiar with nuclear deterrence strategies that have been the highest-of-high-stakes concerns of the US and other nuclear powers for decades. There's an awful lot more to this than saying, "Nuclear war, yikes!" The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been an excellent source for real-world discussion on this for decades and remains so today. It's not as though they pull their punches on nuclear war risk, just the opposite. At the time this was drafted, the lead story on their website is titled, Nowhere to hide: How a nuclear war would kill you—and almost everyone else.
There has been a lot of actual critical analysis of the current Russia-Ukraine war. And that is something that is really needed.
But Tulsi Gabbard in this video is just carrying on the ugly tradition of rightwing isolationism, the America First mentality that is actually hardcore nationalism and militarism dressed up with superficial peace rhetoric.
Jeffrey Sachs himself would need to be the one to explain why he boosting Gabbard's particular project.
Dave Troy's Twitter thread provides several references on Sachs' apparently oddball political trajectory in recent years. This outing with Tulsi Gabbard doesn't speak very well for him, I'm afraid.
"[Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi] Gabbard may well be angling for a long-term spot on Fox News once she leaves Congress," writes CNN's Chris Cillizza. (What, exactly, is Tulsi Gabbard doing?CNN Politics 10/25/2019)
Since my last two posts had something to do with Congresswoman and Democratic President candidate Tulsi Gabbard, I thought I might as well make it three in a row.
Gabbard is an unusual sort of candidate in the Democratic primaries, because she takes positions on some foreign policy and domestic issues that seems to be left or antiwar positions. Cillizza comments on a couple of her more notable recent decisions:
1) Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, announced she would not seek reelection, choosing instead to focus all her energies on her longshot 2020 presidential bid.
2) She skipped a Latino candidate forum in Iowa, spending that time instead on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News, running down House Democrats' impeachment inquiry. "I don't know what's going on in those closed doors," Gabbard told Hannity. "We as members of Congress do not have access to the information that's being shared. I think the American people deserve to know exactly what the facts are, what the evidence is being presented as this inquiry goes on." [my emphasis]
But some of her positions look more rightwing than progressive. The political press seems to think of her as being on the left because she endorsed Bernie Sanders for President in 2016.
But other progressives worry that her "left" positions are more a-stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day thing. Or left, as the case may be here.
Branko Marcetic wrote about those issues from a left perspective two and a half years ago in Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend 05/26/2017 from Jacobin. ("Jacobin is socialist! Venezuela!! Banning hamburgers, aaii-eeeee!!!" Yeah, yeah, git over it! To use a phrase the Trumpists were putting on t-shirts a few days ago.)
Marcetic notes that Gabbard's left profile has a lot to do with her 2016 Bernie endorsement, and adds (Internal links in quotes not included in this post):
Gabbard is also a pretty reliably progressive voice in the House on a host of domestic issues. As far back as 2012, she was calling for restoring Glass-Steagall. She opposed any cuts to Medicare or Social Security under the Obama-backed Simpson-Bowles proposal. She believes Obamacare didn’t go far enough and supports universal health care. She’s against nuclear energy, pushed to curb the NSA’s bulk collection of data, and personally protested the Dakota Access Pipeline.
But he also explains other matters, like how she has also sent ambiguous signals at best on LGBTQ issues.
And there is a question about whether her foreign policy positions that sound antiwar may be more reflective of an Old Right nationalist-isolationist outlook:
“In short, when it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” she told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald last year. “When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.”
In other words, Gabbard would continue the Obama administration’s foreign policy, which itself was a continuation (and in some ways ramping up) of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. She would keep up the drone bombing of seven Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa — perhaps even expand it — while also relying more on special operations forces, which are already raiding, assassinating, and gathering intelligence in 70 percent of the world’s countries. ...
Not surprisingly, Gabbard has received plaudits from conservatives for her foreign policy stances. The National Review published a glowing profile of the congresswoman in April 2015, complete with a quote from American Enterprise Institute (AEI) president Arthur Brooks saying that he “like[s] her thinking a lot.” [my emphasis]
He also uses her position on the Iran nuclear agreement to introduce the problem of her too-friendly attitude toward Islamophobia:
The Obama administration may have continued much of the Bush approach to the “war on terror,” but it at least recognized the value of diplomacy. Not Gabbard, however, who told Fox News she was “cynical” toward the pact, and agreed with host Greta van Susteren that it was akin to Neville Chamberlain’s infamous Munich agreement with Hitler in 1938.
Her dogmatic attitude toward Islam is something she shares with another of her dubious political-ideological kinships:
But perhaps Gabbard’s closest friend on the world stage is India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi. It’s an ideal match in many respects — not because the two happen to share a faith (Gabbard is the first Hindu American in Congress), but because they both harbor noxious attitudes toward Muslims. [my emphasis]
[Gabbard's] progressive domestic politics are at odds with her support for authoritarians abroad, including Modi, Sisi, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. As right-wing nationalism rises across the globe, it is beginning to be recognized as an existential threat to a world order rooted in liberal democratic values, and Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran, is now being pushed to choose sides. (Gabbard did not respond to The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment.)
Gabbard was embraced early on by pro-Modi elements of the Hindu-American diaspora in the U.S., who have donated generously to her campaigns. But as she flirts with the idea of running for president, she has publicly cut ties with those fervent supporters on at least one occasion, while continuing to court them in private. [my emphasis]
Yes, there are some serious questions about Tulsi Gabbard's political identity. "Despite her past support of Sanders and progressive policies, Gabbard has drawn favor from the right thanks to her criticism of Clinton, opposition to military involvement overseas and support for the Second Amendment," writes Igor Derysh. (Tulsi Gabbard announces she won't seek re-election to Congress amid speculation of a third-party bidSalon 10/25/2019)
There is a lot of inside-baseball type speculation about Gabbard prepared for a third-party 2020 Presidential run, most notoriously from Hillary Clinton. But as of now, she's still a Democratic Presidential candidate.
Since I mentioned the current Hillary Clinton/Tulsi Gabbart flap in a long previous post, I'm going to follow up with a couple of links and some comments.
The Clinton statements in question came in an October 17 interview with David Plouffe on his podcast, Campaign HQ. The interview is around 45 minutes, and an interesting and informative one. Hillary is smart and has an incredible amount of experience in politics and law.
The Tulsi Gabbart moment comes in the second half. PolitiFact has provided a partial transcript that includes the Gabbart part. (Miriam Valverde, In Context: Hillary Clinton on Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump campaign and Russia 10/22/2019) This is from the transcript, talking about the 2020 general election and assuming that Trump will be the Republican candidate:
Clinton: "Well, I think there's going to be two parts and I think it's going to be the same as 2016: ‘Don't vote for the other guy. You don't like me? Don't vote for the other guy because the other guy is going to do X, Y and Z or the other guy did such terrible things and I'm going to show you in these, you know, flashing videos that appear and then disappear and they're on the dark web, and nobody can find them, but you're going to see them and you're going to see that person doing these horrible things.’"
"They're also going to do third party again. And I'm not making any predictions but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, 'cause she's also a Russian asset."
Plouffe: (Inaudible)
Clinton: "Yeah, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally.
"And so, they know they can't win without a third party candidate and, so, I don't know who it's going to be it but I will guarantee you they'll have a vigorous third party challenge in the key states that they most need it."
The part that PolitiFact quotes begins in the podcast at around 33:00 minutes.
After listening to the whole podcast, my judgment is still that Clinton was strongly implying that Tulsi Gabbard is being groomed by Russia to be a spoiler third party candidate. She doesn't use Gabbard's name, but I've yet to see anyone suggest she was talking about Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, or Amy Klobuchar. Even in the quote included above, it also sounds like she's implying that Gabbard is a "Russian asset" like she specifically accuses Jill Stein of being.
Anyone can misspeak. But Hillary Clinton is not exactly new to giving media interviews. And as the rest of the interview shows, she's able to deliver her points articulately and convincingly. Earlier in the interview at around 22:00, she talks about Trump's campaign and Russian interference and how she expects it to happen again in 2020. After the interview is over, Plouffe also assumed that she was talking about Tulsi Gabbard in that section quoted above.
So that's my reading of what she was saying about Tulsi Gabbard without naming her explicitly. And I won't recap here what I said about why that's problematic in my earlier post.
But I would also encourage people to listen to the postcast. For one thing, it's an illustration of how impressive Hillary Clinton comes across in this format, as opposed to her stump speech style. And she's providing some well-informed political analysis here. She comes across very strongly on her criticism of voter suppression.
But I will add that, unlike what she presents in this podcast, I haven't seen the evidence from the post-election voting and polling analyses that the third party voting in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was decisive to the 2016 Electoral College outcome.
The political Twitterverse this weekend was buzzing about Hillary Clinton's strange, insinuated-but-clear accusation that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is some kind of tool of the Russian government.
I have big reservations about Gabbard as a politician. Her continuing friendliness to Hindu fundamentalism and her apparent Islamophobia add up to what looks too much like a "War on Terror" foreign policy orientation for my liking.
But if you're going to accuse someone of being a Russian agent or puppet or something similar, whether directly or by heavy-handed insinuation, you should be able to point to something more substantial than some foreign policy position that may not be in direct opposition to the Russian government's position of the moment. And since we know from what's in the public record about Russian political propaganda efforts in US elections that they try to spread confusion on all sides, it's likely that every member of Congress takes some political position that Russian bots propagate to someone on some platform.
The spread of political ideas and philosophies has never been limited to official political boundaries. And all of foreign policy from whatever ideological viewpoint involves with making choices about which other nations' political positions one approves or wants to work with and those one prefers to oppose. Every international treaty is a formal recognition of shared positions by the participating nations on the subject of the treaty.
That's why I find myself asking questions like this into the Twitter chaos:
When we are talking about direct violations of American election law, such as the one documented in the now infamous summary of President Trump's call with the Ukrainian President released by Trump's own White House, that really is pretty straightforward. Dubious business and financial arrangements, domestic as well as foreign, and self-dealing in violation of the Emoluments Clause, are real issues for the Trump family. (And the Bush family, too!)
In Hillary Clinton pushes theory that Russia is "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard — who hits back on TwitterSalon 10/18/2019, Igor Derysh writes, "CNN commentator Bakari Sellers declared that Gabbard is the 'antithesis' of what the Democratic field stands for and claimed 'there is no question that Tulsi Gabbard … is a puppet for the Russian government'." One would hope that people making such a charge can show more than vague suspicions to back that up.
On the other hand, lazy thinking about foreign policy is lazy thinking, whatever country's momentary position may happen to correlate with it.
That struck me in this commentary on the current crisis in northern Syria from Maximilian Popp. He's one of the authors of a story in the current print addition of Der Spiegel (43:2019), "Der Machtwechsel". According to him, Vladimir Putin now personally controls Syria. Popp gives a video commentary in Europas Versagen, that indulges in some surprisingly simplistic assumptions.
Am I exaggerating? Here is my transcript and English translation from the German:
Eigentlich ist der Krieg jetzt für Assad und für allem auch für Putin gewonnen. Der Westen hat kapituliert, die USA ist zurückgezogen, die Europäer spielen ohnehin keine Rolle. Die Autokraten, spricht Putin, Assad und Tayyip Erdoğan teilen Syrien jetzt unter sich auf.
Bis vor eine Woche, bis vor dem Einmarsch der Türkei in Nordösten Syriens, kontrolliert die YPG, also die Kurden, ein Drittel syrischen Staatgebietes. And da sie war mit den USA verbündet waren, kann man sagen auch die USA hatten eine gewisse Kontrolle über diese Region. Das gilt jetzt nicht mehr. Die Kurden haben um sich vor Erdoğan zu schützen, Assad zurück zu Hilfe [gerufen?].
Assads Truppen sind einmarschiert, damit ist das Projekt der kurdischen Selbstverwaltung gescheitert. Und Assad ist wieder am Ruder, kann aber allein nicht regieren. Er ist abhängig von Putin, seiner Schutzmacht. Putin ist der eigentliche Herrscher über Syrien, und in Wahrheit passiert in Syrien was Putin will.
Das gilt für Assad aber auch für Erdoğan. Der Erdoğan bekommt seine Pufferzone, die er auch mit dieser Invasion anstrebte nur dann wenn Putin es zulässt. ...
Dann man muss sich erinnern, Assad ist der, wurde ich sagen, schlimmste Diktator, größte Massenmörder, des 21.Jahrhunderts. Und mit Hilfe Putins, und mit Hilfe einer rücklosen Kriegführung, eine Reihe von Kriegsverbrechen, ist den Beide gelungen, ihrer Macht zu konsolidieren. Assad ist jetzt stärker als je zuvor. Und das ist ein Trauerspiel, das ist eine Tragödie für die Menschen Syrien, aber auch alle die an Demokratie, Rechtstaatlichkeit und Gerechtigkeit glauben. [meine Hervorhebungen]
[In fact, the war is now won for Assad and, above all, for Putin. The West has capitulated, the US has withdrawn, the Europeans are not playing a role anyway. The autocrats, Putin, Assad and Tayyip Erdoğan are now dividing Syria among themselves.
Until a week ago, before Turkey invaded northern Syria, the YPG, i.e. the Kurds, controlled a third of Syria's territory. And since it was allied with the US, one can say the US also had some control over this region. That is no longer the case. The Kurds have called Assad back to help in order to protect themselves from Erdoğan.
Assad's forces have invaded, so the project of Kurdish self-government has failed. And Assad is back at the helm, but cannot govern alone. He is dependent on Putin, his protective power. Putin is the real ruler of Syria, and the truth is that what Putin wants is happening in Syria.
This applies to Assad, but also to Erdoğan. Erdoğan will get his buffer zone, which he sought with this invasion, only if Putin allows it. ...
Then you have to remember, Assad is the, I would say, the worst dictator, the greatest mass murderer, of the 21st century. And with the help of Putin, and with the help of a ruthless brand of warfare, a series of war crimes, both have succeeded in consolidating their power. Assad is stronger than ever. And this is a tragedy for the people of Syria, but also for all those who believe in democracy, the rule of law and justice.] {my emphasis}
The idea that the US had a certain amount of control over the self-administered Kurdish area prior to Trump greenlighting Turkey's invasion is probably a bit of a stretch. The US troops were there as a material sign that the US policy was for both Assad and Turkey to not attack the Kurds.
But Putin is the real ruler of Syria? This is fantasy land. As the Spiegel article reports, Russia has also been playing a complicated diplomatic-military game involving Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. Syria has reportedly agreed with the Kurdish YPG to attack the Islamist-fundamentalist anti-Assad rebels in Erbil province, which can easily exacerbate the refugee problem for Turkey and potentially Europe. Erdoğan is scheduled to meet with Putin in Moscow this week. (Turkey's Erdogan to travel to Russia for talks with PutinAljazeera 10/18/2019)
Russia has an economy around the size of Italy's. Its military budget is reportedly a little more than that of Germany and France combined. Their occupation of Crimea and support for separatists in Ukraine is straining their resources. They have a quite a long border with China, with whom they currently have peaceful relations but they also know they have to be prepared to defend that border. Yes, Russia has nuclear weapons, and the whole world urgently needs to take nuclear nonproliferation and arms reduction much more seriously.
But political commentators need to look at maps sometimes. Does it look like Syria is closer to the US or to Russia? EU and NATO members Greece and Bulgaria are kind of close. Greece, Italy, and other EU nations are affected by the massive refugee crisis the Syrian civil war has caused. So is Turkey, which is Syria's direct neighbor and a NATO member.
But whatever regional security interests Russia perceives that require involving itself in the multiple conflicts in Syria, it's certainly not controlling events there. The far more economically and militarily powerful United States found that remaking Iraq, Syria, and even Iran according to its liking - the dream of the neocons backing the disastrous Iraq War - has turned out to be remarkably complicated.
And when it comes to identifying what "Russian talking points" are, the current Syria-Turkey-Kurdish situation offers quite a few possibilities. The Russians have provided aid to the Kurds, and the Syrians who are supported by Russia are also teaming with the Russians to attack the Islamist anti-Assad rebels in Idlib. That may not entirely please currently Russia-friendly Turkey, which has provided support for just such anti-Assad rebels in the past. Plus, Russia-friendly Turkey is currently invading Russia-friendly Syria in violation of international law which all United Nations members including the US recognize as legitimate. Turkey is a NATO ally of the US. And the Kurds were informal US allies two weeks or so ago.
So I'm pretty sure that someone can be pro- or anti-Assad, pro- or anti-Turkey, pro- or anti-Kurds, pro- or anti- the anti-Assad rebels in Idlib that may be pro-Turkey and/or pro-US or used to be, and still manage to be using Russian, Turkish, Kurdish, US, and/or Syrian talking points at the same time.
And at the same time you might find yourself also agreeing with an awful guy like Pat Buchanan. And maybe disagreeing at the same time, too. (Is Putin Really the New King of the Middle East?The American Conservative 10/18/2019)
Also, a week from now, there could be a whole set of new talking points.
It's not an argument for ignoring the Syrian situation just because it's complicated. It's important for Americans, not least because it seems for the moment to have raised the possibility of actually impeaching Trump and remove him from office. I'm just saying we shouldn't be relying or dumb or simplistic assumptions about it. Unless you're Donald Trump, in which case you really can't make any different kind of assumptions.
Yes, Bipartisanship is what we need! Why hasn't anyone thought of that before?
In the Van Jones clip, Gabbard also goes Bipartisan by repeating one of the favorite lines of the radical xenophobic right: "Unless we have a secure border, we don't really have a country."
The 2020 Presidential primary race in the Democratic Party effectively started the day after Election Day 2018. The mainstream press seems to be looking for stories to bash the leading progressive candidates Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbert. For the more centrist candidates, not so much. That will come, though, sooner rather than later. Politics is politics.
I've been following some of the recent criticisms of Gabbard from left perspectives. Here is a Jacobin from 2017 (so maybe a bit dated in terms of the 2020 race) article that, as the title indicates, takes a dim view of her record: Branko Marcetic, Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend 05/26/2017. It puts a lot of stress on her anti-LGBT record in the past, which The Young Turks segment below also addresses.
Michael Brooks on his podcast show named for himself, The Michaael Brooks Show, stresses his concerns about her shortcomings form a left viewpoint in a sensible evaluation of her record, Is Tulsi Gabbard Far Right? Chris Matthews Impressions. (TMBS 72) 01/12/2019:
Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian looked at Gabbard's record and the criticisms directed at her, with particular reference to her record on LGBT issues. While recognizing real left concerns about Gabbard, they stress here the need for a critical attitude toward the dim view that the corporate media take of progressive candidates. Tulsi Gabbard Attacked For Anti-Gay PastThe Young Turks 01/14/2018:
My biggest concern about her from what I know is her fondness for the Indian Prime Minister since 2014 Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist leader in his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). As Marcetic recounts, Modi has promoted Islamophic notions, as has Gabbard:
... most appalling was his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the western state of Gujarat, which left one thousand people dead, nearly eight hundred of whom were Muslims. Modi was the state’s chief minister at the time and has long been accused of allowing the riots to happen, with a former senior police officer testifying in 2011 that Modi said the night before the riots that Muslims needed to be taught a lesson.
Despite all of this, Gabbard has been one of Modi’s most prominent boosters in the US. “He is a leader whose example and dedication to the people he serves should be an inspiration to elected officials everywhere,” she said of Modi in 2014.
For about a decade, the United States refused to give Modi a visa to travel to the US in light of his involvement in the Gujarat riots. For Gabbard, this was a “great blunder,” and she later told the press that “there was a lot of misinformation that surrounded the event in 2002.” She personally congratulated Modi on his 2014 election, and was later involved in organizing his first trip to the US. She also met two BJP leaders who had visited the United States beforehand, and spoke alongside them at an event in Atlanta. [my emphasis; internal links not included]
Marcetic also argues that Gabbard's anti-interventionism in foreign policy may have a lot in common with isolationist-nationalist assumptions, including opposing the Iran nuclear agreement.
To the media, Gabbard is a curious spectacle. She’s a Hawaii Democrat, coming from one of the nation’s most progressive and dovish chapters of the Democratic Party, but she’s also an Iraq war veteran, and she’s consistently tried to outflank President Obama and the rest of her party to the right on foreign affairs. Last month she openly mocked Secretary of State John Kerry during an appearance on CNN, saying that he thinks, “if we give them [Islamic extremists] $10,000 and give them a nice place to live that somehow they’re not going to be engaged in this fighting.”
To Gabbard, the fact that Syria and Iraq have been through years of brutal civil war, wrecked economies and massive displacement is irrelevant; the only reason they have an extremism problem is because of Islamic theology.
But the case of Tulsi Gabbard becomes less curious and more expected once you look at her links to a different set of ethnic and religious hardliners: the Hindu nationalist Indian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since her election to Congress, Gabbard has tied herself closely to this party, which has a history of condoning hatred and violence against India’s Muslim minority. Many of her stateside donors and supporters are also big supporters of this movement, which disdains secularism and promotes religious sectarianism.
