Two Unconvincing Defenses of Tulsi Gabbard

by Noah Rothman, National Review, 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.