Tulsi Gabbard embraces Barack Obama’s historical revisionism as her faction loses an internal debate.
In an answer to a question no one asked, Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, released a video message today in which she all but endorsed Barack Obama’s revisionist and ahistorical account of the end of the Second World War.
Less than a decade after the former president tore at his garments in agony over his country’s sinful decision to end the war against Japan via the application of nuclear force, Gabbard has revived the argument. Indeed, she managed to summon more shame and self-doubt than even Obama could muster.
For nearly three gratuitous minutes, Gabbard languished in the embarrassment that she seems to think should accompany service to this country. But at no point in this extended dirge did the director of national intelligence devote any effort to assessing whether that operation was necessary, to say nothing of whether it was righteous or just.
Gabbard preferred to wallow in the shame imposed on her by the Greatest Generation than describe the millions killed by Japan in its wanton quest for territorial expansionism. She didn’t dwell on Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, or the tens of thousands of U.S. troops who had already died in the effort to force Japan back onto its home islands.
Maybe it would have complicated her argument too much to discuss the plans for Operation Downfall, the name given to the unrealized invasion of the Japanese mainland in which between 100,000 and a half-million more young American men were expected to die. Indeed, American war planners had every reason to believe such an operation would have been a massacre, not just of U.S. troops but the Japanese civilians who were receiving combat training and who were expected to sacrifice themselves — as Japanese civilians had by throwing themselves from cliffs rather than submit to American captivity — for the glory of the emperor.
Nor did Gabbard contend with the scholarship around Japan’s defeat, which establishes the degree to which the imperial high command resisted surrender, organizing failed coup plots and even attempting to kidnap the emperor. To do so would have complicated the pacifist narrative she crafted for the benefit of the terminally naïve.
Indeed, by the time the DNI got around to mawkishly grieving over children’s drawings of the horrors the Japanese experienced at the end of the war, her audience could be forgiven for wondering if this supplicative posture had a point to it. Well, it did, and it is about as grotesque as the shame Gabbard apparently experiences when contemplating America’s victory in the Pacific theater.
We should all ruminate on the sins of our fathers and grandfathers, you see, “because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers,” Gabbard asserted.
The DNI has a lot of nerve to denounce “carelessly fomenting fear” amid her own melodramatic effort to carelessly foment fear. Are we really closer to the “brink of nuclear annihilation” today than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Are we closer than we were on November 9, 1979, when a malfunction indicated to NORAD that a massive nuclear attack on the U.S. was underway? Is it worse than June 3, 1980, when a similar false alarm proved so convincing that Zbigniew Brzezinski resolved to not wake his wife so she would be vaporized painlessly in her sleep? Is the geopolitical situation more unstable than it was in September 1983, when the Soviets experienced their own false alarm — a persistent one that continued despite rebooting the system — in which one Soviet missile officer’s discretion alone averted unimaginable disaster?
No? So, what exactly makes the present geopolitical environment so dangerous? Gabbard did not say. She did, however, recklessly speculate that the cartoonishly malevolent but ill-defined elites she so often denounces are happy to sacrifice you to a “nuclear holocaust” because they think they will inherit the post-war world. “Perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to,” Gabbard said of the imaginary people she imagines are salivating over the prospect of a nuclear war.
This aside makes little sense given the horrors Gabbard had only just outlined: nuclear fire, acid rain, deadly airborne radioactivity, and a suffocating artificial winter that would make life on earth a dubious prospect. We must assume that those dastardly elites are as enterprising as they are evil.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what has inspired Gabbard to impugn her country’s integrity and terrorize the public she serves is the fact that Moscow has proven impervious to Donald Trump’s charms. If you have succumbed to the delusion that Vladimir Putin is honest and that his invasions of Ukraine are a result of NATO’s wanton aggression, the Kremlin should have been satisfied by now. But Trump’s peace overtures and concessions to Russia have failed to dissuade Moscow from pursuing its territorial ambitions with violence. In the conspiracist’s mind, Russia’s recalcitrance is evidence only that American perfidy is even worse than we previously knew.
The Trump administration doesn’t seem as convinced. It has relaxed the arms embargo against Ukraine, teed up a new suite of sanctions against Russia, and even appears open to efforts by congressional Republicans to apply even more pressure on Moscow. That is the crisis that has moved Gabbard to action — the potential that America might grow a spine and provide support for its partners on the ground commensurate with the degree to which they are deserving of it.
It is despicable that Gabbard would take this opportunity — as Russia is raining rockets and drones down on Ukrainian civilian population centers in numbers unseen since the outbreak of this war — to indict her country as a uniquely bloodthirsty malefactor on the world stage. This video was an act of historical vandalism, a campaign of emotional manipulation that makes collateral damage of America’s legitimacy. And why? Only to intimidate the president and the American public out of standing up to the land-hungry despot in Moscow? Craven doesn’t begin to describe it.
The only comfort to be found here is that this message is a response to the fact that Gabbard and her faction are losing an internal argument — one they wholly deserve to lose. Hopefully, the president isn’t nearly as susceptible to the hippie shibboleths Gabbard is retailing as her fellow Democrats might be.