Tulsi Gabbard might be catching heat for her refusal last weekend to describe Bashar Assad as a war criminal, but the Democratic Party’s problem with pro-Assad sentiment goes well beyond the Hawaii congresswoman.
Take House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s April 2007 trip to Damascus.
Visiting the Syrian dictator as he enabled al Qaeda in Iraq to flood weapons and fighters across the Iraqi-Syrian border, something Pelosi should have known from her “Gang of Eight” intelligence briefings, Pelosi made a rather remarkable comment. Meeting Assad, the then-new speaker said she “came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace.”
Pelosi’s biblical reference was already idiotic at the time, but it has aged disastrously.
It would be unfair to blame Pelosi for not foreseeing the Syrian civil war, which started in 2011 and has cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. Still, even aside from its support for al Qaeda’s war on U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, the Assad regime’s penchant for massacring civilians wasn’t exactly a secret in 2007. The 1982 purge of Hama fits perfectly with the regime’s ongoing annihilation of Idlib.
And, sadly, the Democratic Party trend continues. As the civil war broke out in 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed back against calls for tougher U.S. action against Assad. Her rationale: “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”
That same month, the man who would become President Barack Obama’s next secretary of state, John Kerry, said that he was “very, very encouraged” by Assad’s leadership.
Then came Obama’s August 2013 “red line” collapse.
The Syrian dictator tested the president at his word and found it wanting. Our adversaries around the world noticed with glee. Our allies, the French in particular, who had jets ready to launch alongside our own, were blindsided. It continued. As the Obama administration left office, the president’s foreign policy guru was still confused why Russia and Assad were slaughtering Syrian civilians.
So, yes, criticize Gabbard’s comments all you want, but don’t pretend her party is much better on Assad. It isn’t and hasn’t ever been.
