Hawks Whitewash Graham's Ghoulish Record
The truth is that he was addicted to the use of U.S. military and economic power to inflict pain and death on other parts of the world, and he delighted in the wars he helped to start.
The Wall Street Journal predictably whitewashes Lindsey Graham’s monstrous foreign policy record:
But his memory shouldn’t pass without recalling the principles he fought for. Above all, he believed that America is a force for good in the world.
If there was one principle that Graham put in practice, it was that war was always the answer. He was not only hawkish when it came to the question of using force, but he was consistently one of the most aggressive supporters of using force indiscriminately and to excess. Graham certainly believed that the U.S. and its clients were entitled to do anything they wanted in the world and then called those things good.
Many observers have remarked on how unusual it was that Graham happened to support Ukraine in its war and also supported Israel in its many conflicts, but this wasn’t all that strange. Graham backed anyone he considered to be on “our” side, and he wasn’t terribly concerned about the details or what the clients were doing with U.S. weapons. When it was the Saudis and Emiratis bombing civilians in Yemen, he was all for it.
When Israeli forces were pummeling and starving the people of Gaza, he urged them to do “whatever they have to do” and endorsed the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples of what that could mean. Graham fell back on WWII precedents frequently when he wanted to excuse the massive crimes being committed against the people of Gaza. “Just flatten it,” he said in another interview. As far as Graham was concerned, if the U.S. committed atrocities in WWII that meant that there was nothing wrong with doing the same thing now.
As I have said before, it is a measure of how rotten our foreign policy is that someone like Graham could thrive for decades while supporting some of the most destructive and monstrous policies. Now he is being lionized as a champion of freedom when his chief contribution to our foreign policy debates was to cheer on the killing and impoverishing of people in other countries. The truth is that he was addicted to the use of U.S. military and economic power to inflict pain and death on other parts of the world, and he delighted in the wars he helped to start.
It comes as no surprise that the start of the Iran war nearly made him weep with joy Sometimes politicians are more interesting than they appear to be in public, and sometimes they really are the dreadful ghouls that we think they are.