Presidential hopeful soldiers on, in uniform

Democrat Tulsi Gabbard will take a break from the race for the White House to take part in military exercises in Indonesia.

Tulsi Gabbard on the campaign trail in Des Moines, Iowa, this week. Picture: AP

Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard will take a break from the race for the White House to take part in military exercises in Indonesia.

“I’m stepping off of the campaign trail for a couple of weeks and putting on my army uniform to go on a joint training exercise mission in Indonesia,” the 38-year-old Hawaii National Guard member told CBS yesterday. “I love our country. I love being able to serve our country in so many ways, including as a soldier.”

The Hawaii congresswoman since 2013 is polling at about 1 per cent in the contest to become the Democratic nominee for 2020.

“So while some people are telling me, like, ‘Gosh this is a terrible time to leave the campaign, can’t you find a way out of it?’ You know that’s not what this is about,” she said.

Ms Gabbard, the first Hindu member of congress and its first Samoan American, is among the youngest candidates in the Democratic field. Seen from the outset as an outsider, she has delivered confident debate performances, particularly in the second round at the end of July. Pundits in Detroit, Michigan, praised the congresswoman for a forceful ­argument in favour of ending ­“regime change” wars and instead pouring the money into improving communities back home.

Tulsi Gabbard with her army medical unit in Iraq in 2004.

She is one of three Democrats running for president with military experience, along with South Bend, Indiana, mayor, Pete Buttigieg and Pennsylvania congressman Joe Sestak, who served as a vice-admiral.

Ms Gabbard served in the Hawaii Army National Guard in Iraq from 2004 to 2005. She served a second deployment in Kuwait in 2008 and 2009, working with the Kuwaiti Army. She holds the rank of major and has served as a medic and in the military police.

This week, she will be heading to Hawaii for preparation before her departure to Indonesia where her unit will participate in a training exercises that include counter-terrorism and disaster response.

“There’s the supplies and the logistics and the uniforms and just getting all the things that I need to get packed and get ready,” she said yesterday. “And then there’s the actual preparation that we need for this training exercise. The putting together, the operations orders and all of the different background pieces that we need so that once we get there we’ll be able to dive straight into the work that we have to do.”

Ms Gabbard has argued that one of her main qualifications for the presidency lies in her experience as a soldier as well as her foreign policy expertise. Even so, Ms Gabbard has come under fire for an unannounced trip to Syria she took in 2017 to meet dictator ­Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo.

The visit drew criticism from Democrats and Republicans, as it wasn’t sanctioned by Democratic leadership. Senator Kamala Harris, one of her rivals for the nomination, called her an “apologist for Assad”, a phrase Ms Gabbard dismisses.

“It’s a baseless smear that has been used to try to undermine my campaign, unfortunately, by people who refuse to actually debate the issues,” she told CBS.

“Assad is a brutal dictator in the vein of Saddam Hussein being a brutal dictator in the vein of Gadaffi being a brutal dictator. That doesn’t mean that we should be sending more of my brothers and sisters in uniform to go and fight, acting as the world’s police stopping these brutal dictators.”

AFP