I n the summer of , three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies. Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.
In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination. Her journey from anti-war Democrat to Moscow-friendly Maga warrior began in Syria. The devastating conflict was sparked by pro-democracy uprisings in , which were brutally crushed by the Assad regime.
It descended into a complex web of factions that drew extremist Islamists from around the world and global powers into the fray. It said at least , civilians had died in that same time, with the Syrian government and its allies responsible for , of those deaths. She saw Assad β and Russia, when it entered the conflict β as legitimate defenders of the state against an extremist uprising. Putin did. Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who testified twice on Syria to the House Foreign Affairs Committee when Gabbard was a member, spent years debunking her various conspiracy theories about the war.
They included a suggestion that Syrian rebels staged a false-flag chemical weapons attack against their supporters to provoke Western intervention against Assad β something the US intelligence agencies she will soon lead had concluded was false. She declined to call Assad a war criminal when pressed , despite masses of evidence, and used a video of Syrian government bombings to criticize US involvement in the war.
In fact, two years later, she went to Damascus to meet the Syrian president in person and came away even more convinced of her opinions. The congresswoman said her visit to meet Assad β the first by a sitting US lawmaker since the conflict began β was aimed at bringing an end to the war. Gabbard was forced to defend her embrace of Assad and other dictators during her run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Gabbard appeared to fall for various conspiracy theories about the conflict that were promoted by Russia, as she had done in Syria.
