The establishment is up in arms because Donald Trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence, and I must admit something – I probably don’t agree with some of the things Tulsi allegedly thinks. I’m generally more hawkish, and she’s generally more dovish. Now, we have to put things in perspective, because what regime media says about Tulsi Gabbard and her beliefs probably has nothing to do with Tulsi Gabbard or her beliefs. But let’s suspend disbelief for a moment – and that’s going to take a lot of suspending – and assume that the regime media is being honest and that she has a quirky foreign policy perspective that rejects the mainstream consensus about dictators like Vladimir Putin and former dictators/rogue ophthalmologists like Bashar al-Assad. If true, that is a good thing.
It’s a feature, not a bug.
Again, they’re never specific about what Tulsi Gabbard supposedly does and doesn’t believe. What’s clear is that she is skeptical of the foreign policy consensus of the last couple of decades and that this threatens those invested in it. We also know she’s a combat veteran and a lieutenant colonel in the reserves who has served faithfully here and abroad. She quit the Democrats, and we know she’s rejected much of what her former party believes in – which is generally that same foreign policy consensus. She was one of the people who crossed the aisle to support Donald Trump, and she has fervent supporters that she brought into Trump’s unprecedented new coalition. If we’re talking about coalition politics, and adults talk about coalition politics as opposed to fantasy politics, then her selection as DNI makes sense. You reward the groups that make up your coalition. I, and likely you, are part of the hard-core conservative component that is a big part of Trump’s coalition but is by no means the only part. Everybody who helped sail the pirate ship gets a share of the booty. So, on that basis, it was important to reward Tulsi Gabbard.
But having her as DNI is also important because the last thing the intelligence community needs is yet another hack nodding along with the conventional wisdom. The practitioners of the conventional wisdom seem to screw up massively whenever it counts. They missed 9/11, they told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they didn’t see ISIS rising, they didn’t see Afghanistan falling, and just a couple weeks ago, they were as surprised as the rest of us that the Syrian regime was collapsing. So, it’s not like this is a collection of super-geniuses with an unblemished track record of success. It’s more like a 1982 Yugo with a flat tire and a COEXIST bumper sticker serving as a clown car for a bunch of Yale and Georgetown grads who couldn’t get a job on Wall Street.
Not only can they not do the job that they do have, but they insist on trying to do a job that they most definitely do not have – that is, trying to undercut the elected president of the United States. From the 51 “intelligence professionals” who either got it wrong or outright lied by calling Hunter Biden’s perverted hard-drive a product of Russian disinformation to leaking dozens of bogus stories about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin canoodling, these clowns somehow got it into their thick skulls that they knew better who should run the United States than those pesky voters. And you know what? They failed. Donald Trump’s coming back.
Yeah, yeah, I know, there are a lot of good people doing good work in our intelligence community. All those good apples, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It still sucks. Did you know all our Chinese intelligence networks got rolled up a few years ago? You don’t have to be an intelligence professional to know that that is very, very bad. They recently let the Chinese hack our telecom companies. And they’re not particularly clever. Just the other day, the NSA decided it was going to try to sidestep the coming hammer drop on DEI by renaming its diversity department, like that was going to fool people. There’s a cunning plan. These guys’ job is to fool the Russians and the Chinese, and they can’t even fool guys on Twitter.
They’re just bad at their jobs, but these are necessary jobs. We need competent, capable spies and spymasters. These people need to focus on their jobs, not DEI and other nonsense, and to stop interfering in domestic politics. They need to figure out what our enemies’ plans are and disrupt them.
Let’s assume they somehow become competent again, though I won’t hold my breath. Let’s assume that they start actively developing intelligence again. Let’s assume they start correctly analyzing it. The next step is to make it useful. But it won’t be useful if everybody is singing the same tune. That’s the real objection to Tulsi Gabbard. It’s not that she lacks relevant experience and skills. Even if she was terrible, she is one of several key intelligence officials and if she’s crazy she can be reined in. It’s not even that the senators want to reject a nominee to demonstrate that they are not Fredo to Trump’s Micheal, though what happened to Joni Ernst taught the squishes an important lesson. It’s that Tulsi Gabbard thinks differently about intelligence and foreign policy, and they fear she may have a point. They fear Trump may listen to her and not them.
But we need someone in the senior ranks who thinks differently. There are somewhere near 20 different major agencies that gather intelligence in the United States government. The last thing we want is every single one of them to think the very same way. That’s a recipe for failure. You always want a red team that gives you a different take on what’s happening. You need somebody to look at things from the outside, from the enemy’s perspective, to disrupt the paradigm that everyone in your organization accepts so that you can look outside the box – which is what your enemy is doing. We didn’t see 9/11 coming. Israel didn’t see 10/7 coming. Why? Because these enemy operations were inconceivable to mainstream thinkers. They didn’t fit into what the establishment wanted to see. The last thing a new President George W. Bush wanted was to have to turn the simmering, sporadic fight against terrorists under Clinton into a hot war, but that’s what we would have had to undertake to stop Osama bin Laden. The same with Israel. Israel’s leadership thought – and desperately wanted – Hamas to be contained and quiet. But Hamas did not want to be contained and quiet. Leaders need somebody in their intelligence agencies to tell them what they don’t necessarily want to hear, what they don’t expect, and what no one else is telling them.
So, it’s not a bad thing that some of Tulsi Gabbard’s ideas reject the status quo. It’s not a bad thing that Tulsi Gabbard sees things differently. And if some of her ideas are outright wrong, then at least she will fit in great with our broken intelligence community.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!
Look, you need to keep up the fight by joining Townhall VIP right now. You get access to a bunch of great stuff, not the least of which is my extra Wednesday column, my weekly Stream of Kurtiousness videos every Friday, and the Unredacted podcast every Monday! Plus, some stuff from Larry O’Connor – and a bunch of other stuff.