Tulsi Gabbard .

Of all the plot twists of the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates .  If there ever was a chance for a woman President I would vote for Tulsi Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran who made history in 2012 as the first Hindu elected to the US Congress, has cemented herself as a rising star within the Democratic party.  He chances of wining the nomination of her party is so far out . Knowing that elections could be rigged again . BUT she deserves a second look .  ONLY one  that seems not to follow what the two party line has been for decades . Shortly after being elected to the U.S. House in 2012, she discussed her faith with the New York Times, telling them via email: “I am much more into spirituality than I am religious labels. . . . My attempts to work for the welfare of others and the planet is the core of my spiritual practice. Also, every morning I take time to remember my relationship with God through the practice of yoga meditation and reading verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. From the perspective of the Bhagavad-Gita, the spiritual path as I have described here is known as karma yoga and bhakti yoga.”  But in the following years,  (1)>>Gabbard staked out foreign policy positions that shocked her allies. She joined Republicans in demanding that Barack Obama use the term “radical Islam.” She was the member of Congress most willing to advocate for  (1.2)>>Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. She dubbed herself a “hawk” on terrorism. Gabbard isn’t like the Democrats’ typical candidates. But she’s not one of the restive moderates or the activist socialists, either. On closer inspection, she’s representative of some major new currents in public opinion nationwide.On no issue is that clearer than foreign policy. Gabbard volunteered to serve in the National Guard shortly after the invasion of Iraq. She was soon deployed — and returned a member of the antiwar wing of her party. That seemed great to Democrats, until Gabbard began to pursue her agenda by meeting with the likes of Bashar al-Assad and Donald Trump himself. Suddenly, Gabbard’s once-fringey views on finding a path to peace — even if it means striking deals with “bad guys” — is right at the heart of the debate for the Democrats. The main point of a Tulsi campaign would be to open up debate on Middle-Eastern wars. The fact that there is already some debate around this is a positive sign.(2)>>Both the hawks and the establishment figures in the Democratic Party see Gabbard as a threat, one that needs to be dealt with as harshly as possible and as soon as possible.  Gabbard targeted both President Trump and his critics in the foreign policy establishment in her remarks. She thinks the president is misleading the American people: “We must stand up, stand up against this administration that claims to believe in America first, but who sells our troops, our weapons, and our interests to whichever foreign country is the highest bidder.” She thinks that his traditionalist critics are too eager for war: “We must stand up, stand up against powerful politicians from both parties, who sit in their ivory towers, thinking up new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and undermining our economy, and our security, and destroying our middle class.”This foreign policy malpractice, as Gabbard sees it, “is undermining our national security. It is depleting our resources and exhausting our military. As your Commander in Chief, I will work to end the new Cold War and lead us away from the abyss of a nuclear war that could destroy our world in mere minutes.” She plans to avoid Armageddon by working to “build partnerships with other nations based on shared interests, leading with a foreign policy not based on conflict, but instead cooperation.” To this end, she says she “will have the courage, to meet with both friends and adversaries, in the pursuit of peace and our national security. Because, if we lack the courage to meet with those we disagree with, the only alternative is war.”  (3)>>The left has been slow to respond, the moral clarity that came with opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq giving way to confusion and stasis — exacerbated by the hubris that sometimes comes with having been right, and devastatingly so. At worst, yesterday’s battles take the place of engaging today’s disconcertingly new fights, a faux-isolationist “realism,” and fixation on U.S.-led regime change, leading some to seek accomodation with the monsters birthed by a dying liberal order; a false peace, by any means necessary.But ironically, while it was Gabbard’s anti-war bona fides that were both the motivation for her initial run for Congress and the impetus for her rising profile, it is her foreign-policy views that are raising questions on the left. She presents a challange to the the war hawk Democrats who side with the Republicans . Gabbard, meanwhile, is helping lend a progressive veneer to the world’s leading reactionaries.


NOTES AND COMMENTS:
(1)>>Gabbard staked out foreign policy positions that shocked her allies. It’s not surprising within the American political party system that if you don’t agree with ‘the gang’, they come for your blood, and this is exactly what’s happening to Gabbard. Her previous fact finding visit to Syria in 2016 had already began to turn heads, but now after the CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer, who happens to all of a sudden ‘like’ Donald Trump, the Democrats are circling Tulsi Gabbard in increasing droves. The establishment Democrats, interventionist hawks, and Military Industrial Complex are scared, very scared of Tulsi, because she approaches foreign policy with common sense. She knows the costs of war because she witnessed them first-hand. She wants to end the US policy of regime change war all over the world. (1.2)>>Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.  In Gabbard’s revisionist history, there was never an uprising against the Assad regime. Rather, “since 2011, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and these other countries started this slow, drawn out regime-change war. That would be fine, to oppose U.S. military intervention in Syria, but there’s a lie here, by omission: the intervention that is already going on. Gabbard, who met with Assad just weeks after her visit to Trump Tower, echoes the Syrian dictator’s propaganda, just as she echoes Trump on the virtues of a U.S.-Russia alliance: it is not Assad, Putin, and their air forces responsible for the devastation of Syria, but everyone else — indeed, they are only bombing terrorists. She does this while feigning objectivity and expressing a simple desire for peace (at all costs).  (2)>>Both the hawks and the establishment figures in the Democratic Party see Gabbard as a threat, one that needs to be dealt with. Apparently the Democratic establishment think she's enough of a threat to try to crush her right out of the gate.  The fact that most Democrats — indeed most of the House — voted for the bill doesn’t make Gabbard exceptional within a hawkish Democratic Party. But it hardly tracks with her image as a trailblazing rebel rejecting national security orthodoxy. In her public rhetoric, Gabbard rejects much of U.S. intervention across the world. As a Democrat, that anti-interventionism puts Gabbard to the left of her party’s Establishment. She’s been critical of former President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy positions and priorities, and, again, her Stop Arming Terrorism Act, which was introduced in the Senate by Senator Rand Paul, would severely curtail U.S. interventionist policies by stopping American funding of armed groups that are fronts for known terror organizations, specifically Al Qaeda in Syria.  (3)>>The left has been slow to respond, the moral clarity that came with opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Ironically, it’s Gabbard’s diplomatic approach to foreign policy, which now draws heavy party criticism, that was once a mainstream position in the Democratic Party. In 2004, Democratic frontrunner John Kerry was heavily critical of what he saw as the Bush administration’s aggressive, unilateral approach to a regime change in Iraq. In 2008, eventual President Barack Obama stated his willingness to meet with the leaders of countries such as Iran, Cuba and North Korea. Gabbard’s opposition to the consistently disastrous practice of regime changes in the Middle East should be a commonsense proposal among progressives. Yet she is criticized for these positions by an increasingly hawkish Democratic Party, a party that seems ever more concerned with petty political spats than legitimate policy proposals. Nevertheless, Gabbard has remained ideologically committed to ending America’s various foreign policy blunders. In 2017, she introduced House legislation aimed at ending America’s funding of suspected terror groups via the aptly named Stop Arming Terrorists Act.