Tulsi Gabbard: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, first of all, part of the problem of our foreign policy has been how many conflicts, wars, military actions have been waged in the name of this “war on terrorism” in the name of national security, legislation like the Patriot Act that violates our civil liberties and freedoms in the name of the war on terrorism and national security when it’s not justified. I’ll use Afghanistan as an example. I support the initial mission that lifted off shortly after the attack on 9/11, the Islamist terrorist attack on 9/11. It was a relatively small group of US military launched to go after those al-Qaeda cells and Osama bin Laden in the wake of that attack. That is the mission that should have been supported and focused on in its execution. Instead, as you know, attention was diverted very quickly to the regime-change war in Iraq that was waged on false pretenses, and the resources and focus was taken away from that initial mission that went to Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan blew up into something that became about regime change and governance and the Taliban, and less focus on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. And it became this thing that even general officers had a hard time articulating what is the objective here? What are we trying to accomplish? What does winning look like? At what point do we know it’s time to exit and get out? And as you look at things like the Afghanistan files and others, the answers to these simple and essential questions shifted and changed over time, over a very long time. Similarly, in Iraq. I bought into a lot of what was being sold by the administration and by Democrats and Republicans and Congress at the time. And very quickly, even as I was on the ground there, started to have my eyes opened up into how we had been lied to tremendously, and how that protracted war went on for a very, very long time with decisions being made that ultimately served to strengthen terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, the creation of ISIS and others, really undermining our national security interests in the meantime. Understanding the enemy that you are trying to defeat is essential to being able to build a strategy. The declaration of President Biden, for example, saying, “Well, the war on terror is over. The war on terror is over.” What does that mean? Or, “The forever wars are over.” Well, what does that actually mean?” I served on my last most recent deployment in 2021 to East Africa and Somalia, where al-Shabaab is one of those Islamist terrorist groups that follows the same ideology as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas and others. This group has been allowed to grow and be strengthened, even though they are one of the main groups that provides funding to al-Qaeda in that entire region. ology as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas and others. This group has been allowed to grow and be strengthened, even though they are one of the main groups that provides funding to al-Qaeda in that entire region. So any president or politician can declare a war to be over, but when you have an enemy like these Islamist terrorist groups who are still intent on their goal and their objective, which is to ultimately establish their Islamic caliphate and destroy Israel and exterminate the Jewish people, and basically kill or convert anyone who doesn’t adhere to their ideology, that continues on. And they will only become stronger the longer our leaders put their heads in the sand and pretend like, “Oh no, this doesn’t exist.” This kind of war, this war specifically, is one that has to be waged militarily and ideologically. And the ideological component to this, which is defeating their ideology with a superior one, is one that I pointed out in Congress during the Obama administration, we, the collective we, were failing at. The Obama administration was failing at because they were so afraid of being labeled Islamophobes, that they refused to accurately identify that ideology driving these terrorist groups. And instead said, “We are countering violent extremism,” was the term that the Obama administration started to use and was coined and kind of mandated across the US government. Well, again, you have to know the enemy that threatens you and why they’re doing what they’re doing if you have any hope of actually preventing their attack, both militarily, and as we’re seeing now with Hamas’s actions, not only directly in the assault on Israel, but how Hamas achieved their objectives in spreading their ideology around the world. If you look at the lessons learned from the US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, how do you fight terrorism?…

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