by
Dave Lindorff
We
already knew that Tulsi Gabbard was courageous, when the Democratic
congresswoman from Hawaii resigned from her position as vice chair of
the Democratic National Committee in disgust during the primary
season in 2016, declaring publicly what we now know to have been true
— that the DNC was manipulating the primaries to favor Hillary
Clinton over Bernie Sanders — was courageous. Now as basically the
only member of Congress with the guts to call out the US as the cause
of our current knife-edge threat of a nuclear war, she’s
demonstrated her courage again.
Gabbard,
interviewed on ABC News, declared unambiguously that the reason that
North Korea has worked so diligently to develop nuclear weapons and
missiles capable of delivering them to the US is that the United
States over several decades and under a number of presidents, has had
a policy of “regime change,” and a history of violently
attempting to overthrow governments that it doesn’t like. As she
put it in an interview over the weekend with ABC news host George
Stephanopolos, “Our country’s history of regime-change wars
has led countries like North Korea to develop and hold on to these
nuclear weapons because they see it as their only deterrent against
regime change.”
Rep.
Gabbard, who has been calling for the US to negotiate directly “and
without pre-conditions” with North Korea to resolve the crisis,
says the US also needs to recognize the reality that North Korea
already has nuclear weapons and is not going to give them up unless
it feels secure from US attack.
She is
firm in saying that the US history of overthrowing Libyan leader
Muamar Gaddafi after first convincing him that if he dropped his
efforts to develop a nuclear weapon they would not attempt to
overthrow his government, and then invading and overthrowing him, and
of invading and overthrowing Saddam Hussein after trumping up a fake
claim that he was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, will make it
all the harder to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to agree
to halt or scale back, much less eliminate his nuclear weapons and
missile arsenal. She adds that President Trump’s current threat to
cancel an agreement reached by his predecessor, President Barack
Obama and the leaders of Iran to terminate their nuclear fuel
enrichment program in return for the US dropping sanctions on that
country will also undermine any future efforts by the US to reach
negotiated agreements on weapons and nuclear disarmament with Kim and
any other countries that might seek to go nuclear.
It was
all a little more than Stephanopolos, once a press spokesman for the
administration of President Bill Clinton, who asked her, feigning
incredulity, “Just to be clear, are you saying that Kim
Jong-un’s nuclear arsenal is our fault?”
That’s
the point in an interview where your typical American pol would
backpedal like mad to defend the sanctity of American exceptionalism,
but Gabbard remained as forthright and direct as her analysis was
correct, replying, “What I’m saying is the Democratic and
Republican administrations for decades, going back over 20 years,
failed to recognize the seriousness of this threat, failed to remove
it, and we know that North Korea has these nuclear weapons because
they see how the US in Libya, for example, guaranteed Gaddafi ‘We’re
not going to go after you. You should get rid of your nuclear
weapons.’ He did, and then we went ahead and led an attack that
toppled Gaddafi.”
Of
course Rep. Gabbard is correct. A country that acts unilaterally,
violating international law by overthrowing the governments of
sovereign nations and that lies about its intentions when
negotiating, is a country that will never be able again to negotiate
to solve international problems. It will only have force remaining as
a tool (and we’ve seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria how costly
and ineffective a tool US force is these days). But as Gabbard also
says, pointing to the chaos and panic that ensued when Hawaiians were
given what appeared to be an alert about an actual nuclear missile
attack on the islands by North Korea, when dealing with a nuclear
power — even one as small as North Korea — force is simply not an
option. There is only negotiation. And because nuclear weapons are so
destructive, the size and power of the parties is irrelevant in such
negotiations — it is inevitably a negotiation between equals.
Brava
for this singularly courageous and outspoken member of Congress! Once
again she has proven that she stands head and shoulders above her
colleagues, Republican and Democrat, in the Capitol, just as she did
when she quit the DNC and outed it for its perfidy in stealing the
primaries for Hillary Clinton.
This
Samoan American, elected to the House in 2013 from Hawaii, also, by
the way, has been courageously calling for the US to “get out of
Syria,” where she correctly notes it has been supporting Al
Qaeda-linked terrorist groups — another position that puts her at
odds with almost all of her congressional colleagues who are afraid
to challenge US militarism. At the same time, she also happens to be
a major in the US Army, a member of the Hawaiian National Guard, and
is a member of the House Armed Services Committee. She served a tour
in Iraq in 2006 and volunteered for a second tour in the Middle East
in 2009, again making her a standout among all the chicken hawks of
both parties in Congress and the White House.
As far
as I’m concerned, Gabbard, not Opra, is the person Democrats should
be talking about as the ideal candidate for 2020 to give Trump the
boot.
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