Mark Patricks – Throughout President-Elect Donald Trump’s election campaign, a constant refrain of his foreign policy positions was to say that the U.S. should not get needlessly involved in external conflicts — that we should never have gone into Iraq, Libya or numerous other countries where the U.S. has invaded and sown chaos, death and destruction (and expended thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars in the process).

There’s much merit to these words, and now, a Congresswoman has gone beyond them to actually make a bill that would outlaw the U.S. arming and/or funding extremist groups and armies, as it has done for the last five years in Syria and in other places. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has introduced legislation that would outlaw U.S. aid for extremist organizations, either directly or indirectly, via intelligence assistance, field training or weapons delivery.

This restriction would apply to both overt and covert aid given by any branch of government. It also would outlaw giving indirect assistance via a second nation, so we couldn’t, say, give arms to Lebanon, which could give them to a terrorist organization such as Hezbollah, for instance.

The bill would require the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to formulate a list of individuals, groups and rogue nations that could be considered such terrorist organizations or states and/or supporters of them.

The immediate scenario this would apply to would be in Syria, where the cast of belligerents ranges from the Syrian government — which at times the U.S. has strongly opposed and at other points it’s warmed up to due to the government’s opposition to ISIS — to indisputably brutal terrorist factions. In fact, there are many analysts who argue that “ISIS” is simply another name for the “rebel groups” the U.S. has extensively funded and armed.

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