“Why were you the lone voice out there going after the neo-cons, going after the people who took us into these wars?” Chris Mathews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, asked presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D‑Hawaii) after Wednesday night’s debate.
Pro-peace candidates do well with voters, but still most politicians and the media remain hawkish. The only time “the mainstream media fawned” over President Trump was after airstrikes against Syria.
“I deployed to Iraq in 2005 during the height of that war,” she told Mathews. “I served in a medical unit where every single day I saw that terribly high human cost.”
Contrasted with former Vice-President Joe Biden, who voted for the Iraq War as senator, Gabbard pledged not to “bend to the whims of the military-industrial complex or the foreign policy establishment.”
“Today the Taliban claimed responsibility for killing two American service members in Afghanistan,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had posed during the debate. Noting that “leaders as disparate as President Obama and President Trump” have wanted “to end US involvement,” Maddow inquired of Rep. Tim Ryan (D‑Ohio), how he might get us out?
Instead, he argued: “We must be engaged in this.” That led Gabbard to cut in, calling Ryan’s answer “unacceptable.”
“We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan,” she declared. “We are no better off in Afghanistan today than we were when this war began [nearly 18 years ago].”
Offered the opportunity, not one of the other eight candidates on the stage addressed the country’s longest war.
This is a problem, since, as I’ve repeatedly posited in this space, there is no plan to defeat the Taliban, only to negotiate power-sharing with them.
Ceaseless intervention.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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1 reply on “Who’ll Stop the Wars?”
And here I thought “the people who took us into these wars” were the Muslim terrorists.