Lindsey Graham’s hawkish ideology leaves a legacy of destruction | Moustafa Bayoumi

Summary

Mourn him if you wish, but let’s be honest about what he promoted. Senator Adam Schiff of California lauded Graham’s “sense of humor and how he deployed it to move his policy positions forward”. Nowhere has Graham’s legacy been more consequential than in his constant push for a hawkish US foreign policy and his uncritical devotion to Israel at every turn. The Wall Street Journal described Graham as someone having “outsize influence on U.S. foreign policy”. Before he was elected to the Senate, Graham, who was then a member of Congress, was already pushing for the US to go to war in Iraq. “We’re looking at going after Saddam Hussein,” Graham said in March 2002, “not to contain him, but to replace him.” The US did invade Iraq, but it happened a year later. In a speech to the Halifax International Security Forum in 2010, he promoted attacking Iraq’s neighbor, Iran, to “neuter” it, words that sound almost like Trump’s foreign policy today. “Instead of a surgical strike on their nuclear infrastructure, I think we’re to the point now that you have to really neuter the [Iranian] regime’s ability to wage war against us and our allies,” he said . “And that’s a different military scenario. In 2017, Graham was a prime backer in the push to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, calling Jerusalem “the undeniable capital of Israel”. Graham’s support for limits on Palestinian sovereignty were constant throughout his career but became even more evident after the Hamas attacks of 2023 and Israel’s most recent, and most devastating, war on Gaza began. “Give Israel what they need to fight the war they can’t afford to lose,” he said at a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing. “This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids.” On another occasion, he was asked if Israel’s war in Gaza, which was “killing children, killing mothers, killing families who are not militants”, aligned with “Christian values”. When Norway’s $2tn sovereign wealth fund decided to divest from the US company Caterpillar over ethical concerns (Caterpillar’s machines are routinely used by Israel to enforce its occupation of Palestinian land), Graham responded by publicly threatening Norway with trade tariffs and visa travel restrictions on Norwegian fund executives. It is decades of failed foreign policy continuing the same misdeeds at ever increasing rates.