Duckworth should ditch war party

My senator Tammy Duckworth penned a 1,155 word op ed defending herself from atrocious name calling spewed at her by Fox News superstar Tucker Carlson. The new right wing darling called her a “fraud, moron and a callous hack who hates America” simply for implying we should have a national discussion on possibly re-evaluating the records and monuments dedicated to early American leaders such as George Washington. Carlson is simply the latest charismatic Fox bomb thrower, making millions coarsening U.S. discourse.

But the Carlson-Duckworth brouhaha was totally irrelevant to the real issue we should raise with Duckworth’s leadership: her near total support of U.S. interventionism around the world. Having fought and been grievously wounded in the murderous and criminal Iraq war, one would hope she’d abandon the glorification of wartime service and U.S. exceptionalism that enables the U.S. war party to continue its deadly warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Niger and others of which we’re kept in the dark. Instead we get Duckworth saying to us “Even knowing how my tour in Iraq would turn out, even knowing that I’d lose both my legs in a battlefield just north of Baghdad in late 2004, I would do it all over again. Because if there’s anything that my ancestors’ service taught me, it’s the importance of protecting our founding values”. Duckworth somehow confuses criminal war that killed hundreds of thousands, forced out millions and squandered trillions as protecting our founding values.

Last December 7, the 79th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, Duckworth warned of the growing peace movement pushing back against endless U.S. wars saying, “We don’t want to go back to where we were on Pearl Harbor day, with an isolationist policy and being dragged into foreign conflicts. We have to oppose those tendencies”. That is straight out of the U.S. war party’s talking points promoting perpetual war.

Sadly, Senator Duckworth learned the wrong lesson in Iraq.