In a presidential debate with nine candidates and one Beto O’Rourke on stage, it’s hard to stand out. So tonight, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard leaned on her credentials as a military veteran and her reputation for restrained foreign policy, taking a hard stance on the Trump administration that’s sure to stand out.

She said:

The president and his chickenhawk cabinet led us to the brink of war with Iran. I served in the war in Iraq at the height of the war in 2005, a war that took over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniforms' lives. The American people need to understand this war would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything we saw in Iraq.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard calls out Trump's "chicken hawk Cabinet" pic.twitter.com/ehq81YzuzP — Axios (@axios) June 27, 2019

Now, Gabbard’s criticism of President Trump is somewhat unfair. As president, Trump has been fairly dovish, talking us down from the brink of war with North Korea, and making moves toward exiting our seemingly never-ending quagmires and conflicts in Middle Eastern countries such as Syria and Afghanistan.

Yet Gabbard is right to take aim at a few real hawks in Trump's administration, whom she blasts as "chicken hawks." Take national security adviser John Bolton, for example, the hawkish adviser who was a key architect of the failed Iraq War, and has pushed aggressive, dangerously interventionist stances toward North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela, but of course, never served himself.

An excerpt from the Los Angeles Times sums this up nicely:

Has anyone noticed that those national policy makers that have had the heavy burden of ordering our military men and women into harm’s way, such as Gens. James N. Mattis and McMaster, are less inclined to threaten military action against our adversaries that those who managed to avoid military service altogether, such as Trump and Bolton?

Gabbard gets this. Some of the congresswoman’s record is questionable, and much of her policy platform is highly objectionable, but at least she has the veteran experience to back up her foreign policy stances. Maybe we should demand that the Trump officials constantly calling for war have to be the first ones to enlist — as Gabbard points out, they might not be so hawkish if it was their life on the line.