She has the experience, temperament, and professional integrity necessary for the American intelligence community to win and keep the trust of the American people.
She has the experience, temperament, and professional integrity necessary for the American intelligence community to win and keep the trust of the American people.
T he United States has increasingly become a low-trust society, where diminished confidence in the effectiveness and integrity of our institutions is widespread and bipartisan. This now extends to the American national security and intelligence sectors, where that loss of trust is problematic for a country with enduring global responsibilities and interests.
For a vocal portion of the elite national security establishment, however, the remedy for that skepticism is not to entertain that its critics may have a point, but to demand reflexive obedience to an outdated consensus that may no longer be fit for purpose.
This erosion of institutional trust has been fueled, in part, by some of the spectacularly wrong calls the U.S. intelligence community has made over recent years. Its assessment that there was an active weapons of mass destruction program in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq set in motion two decades of regional instability. Its prediction that the removal of Libya’s Qaddafi would improve regional stability resulted in years of civil war in that country and a torrent of refugees to Europe. Its assessment that the Afghan government could sustain itself once American bayonets departed fell apart when that government collapsed within a long weekend.
These failures have had real, lasting effects on the security and credibility of the United States, as it seems to have effectively pioneered militarism without victory. Compounding this is a sense by many Americans that the security services are immune from consequences when systemic failures occur.
There has also been an unwelcome trend where some of the residual prestige and expertise the security services possess has been repurposed to disparage domestic political figures. These included, but were not limited to, public accusations that a sitting U.S. president was the agent of a hostile, foreign power. This flimsy accusation occupied the nation’s attention for years before ending with a whimper. Still, a substantial, partisan remnant of millions of believers in this baseless accusation remains.
These events convinced just as many others on the opposite side of the partisan divide that the same intelligence community that protected the country in the years after 9/11 had perhaps begun to apply to the American people the tactics it had learned against our enemies overseas.
Given all this, restoring the American people’s broad faith in the intelligence community is an urgent task. They need to believe that those entrusted with the vast powers of the national security apparatus will perform their duties in a nonpartisan way that prioritizes constitutional rights, meaningful accountability, and democratic safeguards.
Changing these trends will be hard, and that effort must begin at the top. It is vital the director of national intelligence (DNI), who leads the intelligence community, be someone with high integrity, sound judgment, and a clear understanding of the commander in chief’s intentions. It would also go a long way toward reestablishing credibility with Americans if the next director were someone with a significant, bipartisan background.
Tulsi Gabbard fits these criteria. She has the right experience, temperament, and professional integrity to restore faith in America’s intelligence community.
Gabbard is a career public servant who served in the Hawaii state legislature and for four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the latter capacity, she was a member of the House Armed Services Committee. She was also the vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. She has also worn her country’s uniform for over two decades in the U.S. Army, with a combat deployment to Iraq. As a soldier, she knows both the importance of patriotism and the cost that all military interventions inevitably require.
In addition to serving her country in a combat zone, Gabbard has a different and equally rare form of courage. The DNI needs to be willing to say unpopular — and, sometimes, unwelcome — things in pursuit of accuracy, free of the Beltway conventional wisdom that often serves as blinders.
Sadly, not all policy-makers or senior officials have been willing to ask hard but fair questions of the American national security establishment. During her time in Congress and in her 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gabbard displayed a willingness to think and speak beyond the predictable sound bite. She first made waves in 2015, bucking her party to blast the Obama administration for banishing mention of descriptive terms like “radical Islamic terrorism.”
“[It is] critical that we accurately define our enemy and its ideology,” she told an interviewer in 2016. “The ideology shared by ISIS, al-Qaeda, and affiliated terrorist organizations is ‘Islamism.’ Distinct from the religion of Islam, Islamism is a radical political ideology of violent jihad aimed at establishing a totalitarian society governed by laws based on a particular interpretation of Islam.” Despite relentless attacks from the Left, she has remained an outspoken Democrat critic of some of her party’s terrorism policy — and, by extension, its foreign policy more broadly. This position has aged far better than that of many of her detractors.
For this reason, Gabbard has also been the target of vitriolic criticism and was, like Donald Trump, smeared as a Russian agent. Government officials did not deny the recent revelation that Gabbard was apparently added to the one of the many terrorist travel watch lists the government maintains, despite the fact that she maintains a top-secret clearance as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves.
Her detractors have accused her of making comments supportive of hostile foreign leaders. But these accusations are misleading. Rather than being soft on America’s adversaries, she has been willing to ask hard questions of an often-flawed elite foreign policy consensus.
A telling example is the criticism to which she has been subjected regarding her 2017 visit to Syria and meeting with its former president, Bashar al-Assad. Over the prior several years, the U.S. administration expended tens of thousands of non-U.S. lives and enormous amounts of treasure in a failed attempt to topple Assad. Gabbard argued that involvement in Syria’s civil war wasn’t in the American interest. Not long after her visit, Washington’s elite foreign policy caste itself came to abandon regime change as a priority, due to concern about just who might take over in Syria.
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. Whether or not she was right about this, it shows a willingness to depart from the herd and push back on received wisdom. The intelligence community could have used such a voice prior to the Iraq War, which was erroneously justified by using flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. And it could use a similar internal skeptic of its consensus today.
And now that the Assad regime has fallen, Syria’s chemical weapons program — at least, that which hasn’t been destroyed by the Israelis — is now in the hands of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a designated terrorist group. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, spent his entire adult life as a member or leader of al-Qaeda- or ISIS-affiliated entities. A fair assessment of Gabbard’s record on Syria would note that is just the sort of outcome that concerned her in 2017.
Unique within the IC, the DNI is the one official who can, and must, ask hard questions about the conclusions and recommendations that America’s vital security services are chartered to provide the president and policy-makers. A vigorous review process is vital to avoid the sort of intelligence failures that have needlessly cost American lives and treasure over the last three decades. It is also critical that the next DNI be willing to address the need for systemic, meaningful accountability within the intelligence community, including reassessing the proper size and role of the DNI itself.
It is wrong to fault Tulsi Gabbard for refusing to reflexively assent to every bit of elite, foreign policy conventional wisdom. Rather, independent thinking is an essential requirement of the job to which she has been nominated. The career intelligence community should take this opportunity to welcome a genuine, thorough review of its enterprise to win and keep the trust of the American people.