It’s an old adage that politics is the art of compromise, of wheeling and dealing between disparate views to advance your own. That truism has always made politics a difficult fit for ideologues seeking to wield substantial power. And everyone in politics must determine how far they’re willing to compromise to be productive before violating their own principles or even losing their soul to the process.
It’s clear that after this weekend and the joint, unprovoked American–Israeli attack on Iran, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard must choose to resign or forfeit any respectability in the America First movement.
She has chosen principle over power before, and we must ask her to do it again.
The youngest woman ever elected to a state legislature, Gabbard chose to forgo reelection to the Hawaii House of Representatives so she could participate in a deployment to Iraq as a member of the Hawaii National Guard. “My goal is to actually be of service, not just to hold onto my position,” the 23-year-old said at the time. (Lt. Col. Gabbard remains an active member of the National Guard.)
Elected to Congress in 2012, Gabbard was initially toasted by Democratic leadership in Washington who tripped over themselves to elevate a woman of color and war veteran. As a freshman she was unanimously elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, but she resigned in February 2016 to endorse the progressive presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders. She forfeited any goodwill she had with the party establishment when she publicly criticized the DNC for violating its supposed neutrality and putting its finger on the scale in favor of eventual nominee Hillary Clinton.
Years later, during her own insurgent presidential campaign in 2020, Gabbard effectively conceded her ability to seek reelection in the House when she truthfully labeled Clinton “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long…”
More than any presidential candidate since Dr. Ron Paul—whose 90th birthday she attended last year—Gabbard branded herself as an opponent of Washington’s global empire and the endless wars in the Middle East.
As I reported for The American Conservative in 2020, her campaign was not uniformly anti-interventionist—her complaint was always more about wars on behalf of Al Qaeda than wars against it, and she held to the opinion that the motivation for terrorism was Islamic extremism, rather than seeing it as blowback for past interventions. But her rallying to the antiwar cause was unmistakable, particularly on Iran.
“This president and his chickenhawk cabinet have led us to the brink of war with Iran,” she declared on the Democratic debate stage in 2019, indicting Donald Trump during his first term. “The American people need to understand that this war with Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything that we ever saw in Iraq. It would take many more lives, it would exacerbate the refugee crisis, and it wouldn’t be just contained within Iran. This would turn into a regional war. This is why it’s so important that every one of us, every single American stand up and say, ‘No war with Iran.’”
“No war with Iran” read the t-shirts Gabbard sold on her campaign website, something that’s become a viral meme since Saturday.
Fast forward four years, and Tulsi Gabbard was now a member of the Republican Party, campaigning alongside Donald Trump, who promised to “expel the warmongers, the profiteers, and take over our government and we will restore world peace and it will be again, peace through strength.”
At that same event, in front of the National Guard Association, Tulsi explained, “This is one of the main reasons why I’m committed to doing all that I can to send President Trump back to the White House where he can once again serve us as our commander-in-chief. Because I am confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war. We cannot be prosperous unless we are at peace…”
“We’re uniting forces to end the endless foreign wars,” Trump said as they shared the stage, and after his November victory, he nominated Gabbard to serve as Director of National Intelligence.
Since her appointment, she’s attempted to find an uneasy balance between the White House line and her own career-defining beliefs.
During her confirmation hearing she had to reverse her longtime opposition to key provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but even under pressure from both Republican and Democratic senators, she refused to label Edward Snowden a traitor or condemn his exposure of mass, illegal surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Gabbard’s tenure has not been without success. Her declassification and presentation of a staff oversight report produced by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence exposed meddling by the Obama White House in proffering their insufficiently evidenced conclusions that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election and conspired with Donald Trump’s campaign.
She became the highest-level American official to use “the most humane and regretful language” in describing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as I described in TAC last year. That remembrance gave her a platform to warn about the prospect of “nuclear annihilation” today, which “incensed” President Trump.
Prior to the 12-Day War last June, when Israel first attacked Iran and was later joined by the United States for the stated purpose of eliminating Tehran’s ability to enrich uranium at any level, Gabbard confirmed in congressional testimony that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.” That’s the same conclusion her predecessors had reached for 20 years.
But when Trump undermined her influence, telling reporters flatly, “I don’t care what she says,” Gabbard tried to straddle the fence. She said that Iran “can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly.” That was a restatement of her initial conclusion reworded to give cover to the president.
When the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow and Natanz, there was public discussion over whether Gabbard was on her way out, and disappointment from her former supporters that she was not taking a more forthright stand on the facts.
But she’s remained in charge of the intelligence community, and in October, during a security summit in Bahrain, she gave a full-throated condemnation of neoconservative arrogance in foreign policy:
For decades, our foreign policy has been trapped in a counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation-building. It was a one-size-fits-all approach of toppling regimes, trying to impose our system of governance on others, intervening in conflicts that were barely understood, and walking away with more enemies than allies. The result: trillions spent, countless lives lost, and in many cases, a creation of greater security threats, the rise of Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS.
Evidently, that’s not what the Trump White House and their Israeli allies wanted to hear. The administration “excluded Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from months of planning to oust Nicolas Maduro because her previous opposition to military action in Venezuela cast doubt on her willingness to support the operation,” reported Bloomberg News in January. White House aides joked that DNI had come to stand for “Do Not Invite.”
But after Saturday, all the chips are down. Ayatollah Khamenei is dead and the purpose of the war is complete regime change in Tehran. Israel’s strategic goal—demonstrated by their defenestration of civilian leadership, including former heads of state and even imprisoned opposition leaders—is the destruction of Iran as a coherent, functional state. That result will allow them to conduct periodic bombing campaigns to destroy civilian infrastructure and cause terror, as Tel Aviv has continued to do in Lebanon and Syria after their defense capabilities were wrecked, all in service to Zionist hegemony in the Middle East.
As Gabbard predicted years ago, Iran has responded by expanding the conflict into a regional war, striking the Gulf Arab states, closing the Strait of Hormuz, and targeting U.S. bases—which has resulted in dead American soldiers. There is nothing more of value that Gabbard can render to this administration without sacrificing her own credibility.
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a MAGA diehard who had her own falling out with Trump last year over the 12-Day War and the attempted Jeffrey Epstein coverup, challenged Gabbard and Vice President J.D. Vance to speak out publicly against the war.
There is precedent.
When Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912, he selected three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan as his secretary of state. The two worked together cordially and effectively until the outbreak of World War I in Europe. Bryan insisted on true neutrality, and he favored warning American citizens against traveling on belligerent ships through war zones and prohibiting American passenger ships from carrying ammunition.
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In the aftermath of the sinking of the British RMS Lusitania (in which 128 Americans were killed) and President Wilson’s provocative response to the German government, Bryan submitted his resignation rather than carry out a policy
which I cannot join without violating what I deem to be an obligation to my country, and the issue involved is of such moment that to remain a member of the Cabinet would be as unfair to you as it would be to the cause which is nearest my heart, namely, the prevention of war.
Tulsi Gabbard should follow the same example: resign her post in opposition to the Iran War, and publicly condemn Donald Trump’s betrayal of the American people and his promise of no more endless wars. She has proven in the past to be a woman of conviction and a patriot. Just shy of 45-years old, Gabbard could have a long career of advocacy and public service ahead of her, including another presidential campaign that upholds the legacy of America First. The principles that made her popular and respected are not worth throwing away in service of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity.
