Gabbard:

US mistakes cause increased human suffering

Rasa - US Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a critic of her country’s recent missile strike on Syria, has warned that mistakes like the one which plunged the United States into Iraq War would increase “human suffering” on a large scale.

News ID: 428849

Date: 12 April 2017 - 21:17

RNA - “We need to learn from Iraq and Libya — wars that were propagated as necessary to relieve human suffering, but actually increased human suffering many times over,” Gabbard said in an email to The Hill on Tuesday.

The Democratic representative from the US state of Hawaii noted that officials in the White House are ignoring the lessons of recent history after leaving the country mired in costly Middle Eastern conflicts for more than a decade.

"I and thousands of my brothers- and sisters-in-arms went to war in Iraq based on false intelligence and lies from our leaders — our president, military and political leaders. We should have been skeptical then, and we weren’t,” she said. “The cost was thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars down the drain. What to speak of millions of non-American lives.”

Gabbard made the remarks days after US President Donald Trump ordered missile strike on a Syrian airfield in retaliation for a last week’s gas attack blamed on the Syrian government. The suspected chemical attack on the town of Khan Shaykhun in Syria’s Idlib province claimed over 80 lives.

The lawmaker has also publicly acknowledged that the US government has been supporting terrorists in Syria.

Gabbard unveiled a measure in Congress late last year that would prohibit Washington from funding or arming militant groups seeking to overthrow the Syrian government, including Fateh al-Sham, al-Qaeda, and Daesh.

The Daesh (ISIL) Takfiri terrorists were amongst militants initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government.

The congresswoman has also argued that Syria would descend further into chaos if President Bashar al-Assad relinquishes power in the midst of the deadly conflict.

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