The Shift: Lindsey Graham helped push Trump to war

Not long ago, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) developed a reputation as something of a moderate for occasionally exhibiting an independent streak and for running afoul of the Tea Party movement.

Now he’s viewed as a lawmaker who symbolizes every component of the war machine.

He refers to the current attack on Iran as a “religious war” that will determine the Middle East’s next 1,000 years, tells Fox News viewers they’re going to make a “ton of money” off the destruction, and declares that he will “be with Israel till my dying day.”

I’m going back to South Carolina, I am asking them to send their sons and daughters to the Mideast,” said Graham recently. “What I want you to do in the Mideast, my friends in Saudi Arabia and other places, step forward and say this is my fight too.”

Congress has always had a sizable share of eccentric warmongers, but Graham isn’t some crank disconnected from U.S. foreign policy.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a piece from reporter Josh Dawsey detailing how Graham helped push Trump to war. Graham openly acknowledges that he made multiple trips to Israel to meet the members of Mossad. “They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” bragged Graham.

According to Dawsey, Graham also spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during these trips and “coached” him on how to lobby Trump.

While the United States gets bogged down in the Middle East again, Graham is already pushing for more military intervention. In one of his many appearances on Fox News, he said that “it’s just a matter of time” before Trump takes action against Cuba.

“We’re marching through the world. We’re cleaning out the bad guys,” he added. ” We’re going to have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe. I’ve never seen anything anybody like it. This is Ronald Reagan plus. Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago.”

There will always be some support for this kind of rhetoric, but it isn’t 2003 anymore. The attacks on Iran are unpopular with the American public, and, despite no evidence in their favor, a certain segment of Trump’s base actually believed he would avoid becoming entangled in wars.

Graham’s actions and comments have sparked an interesting backlash among right-wingers.

“Let’s get real,” tweeted conservative pundit and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. “The problem with Lindsay Graham isn’t (just) that he’s a homicidal maniac, it’s that Trump likes and is listening to him, and Trump’s favorite channel is parading him around like a Hefner bunny in stockings on every show.”

“Moving ‘all our stuff to Israel’ is not America First,” wrote One America News host and former Trump Attorney General pick Matt Gaetz.

“There are some in the Senate that advocate for war everywhere. Lindsey Graham is one of them,” said Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). “He does NOT tell the President what to do, nor does he control Congress. I have spoken with the administration a number of times, as well as other members of Congress over the last week or so, and nothing has changed regarding boots on the ground. NO BOOTS on the ground. If Senator Graham wants to go fight in a foreign conflict, let him be the first to volunteer.”

Of course, Trump hasn’t ruled out “boots on the ground,” and Democratic lawmakers have expressed increasing concern that it might happen. Luna might talk to members of the administration, but we know Graham has the President’s ear.

Samantha Power and Genocide

There was a notable moment at the Hesburgh Lecture in Ethics and Public Policy, an annual event hosted by Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

The evening’s guest was Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under President Biden.

Power, who gained fame via her 2002 book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was asked about the Biden administration’s connection to the Gaza genocide by a student during “Question and Answer” time.

Journalist Jonathan Guyer supplied a quick transcription of the exchange over his Twitter account:

Student: In your book, A Problem from Hell, you criticize US’s passivity in watching genocide unfold. You also recognize the power of using the word genocide, the G-word, in recognizing genocide. Yet, as you yourself held a position of power in government, you failed to call out the genocide in Gaza, referring to it more as a humanitarian crisis. Given the importance of recognizing genocide and acting on genocide, I’m wondering why you did not name the genocide in Gaza and when you were in a position of power and if you continue to hold that.

POWER: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, Gaza was the most difficult humanitarian crisis I worked in, certainly at USAID and probably my whole career.

My job was to get food and medicine to the people who were living in Gaza, who were not getting access to clean water, to electricity, to adequate medicine, and of course, were suffering in many cases from acute severe malnutrition.

While I know that there’s an impulse on the outside for any official, especially a senior official who has the privilege that I had, to make my own foreign policy, that’s not what happens when you go into the government. I don’t just get up and decide today what US foreign policy is.

I certainly as somebody who wasn’t then, and I’m not now, looking at evidence as a lawyer, and I’m trying to get food from Point A to Point B with my men, and above all I’m supporting my teams, who are doing God’s work 24-7 to do that, and failing by the way a lot of the time, because of the obstruction by the Israeli government. But when you are in government, that is the price of being in government.

It was a very different, analogous circumstance, but on Syria, I had lots of debates and discussions with President Obama on the “red line” and what to do, and this and that. Once I have failed to convince someone within the Situation Room about a course of action that I might favor, then I’m out there representing the administration’s position. And for some of you, that is just going to be too big a price to pay.

For me to have the opportunity every day to get food from Point A to Point B, it was worth all of the understandable criticism that comes from outside. Like I totally respect your position, your frustration… But for me to have resigned and not be doing that work, also not be doing energy repair—not that I was doing it personally—but supporting energy repair in Ukraine when Putin’s taking out the energy, not supporting girls education online for the Afghan girls and women who’d been taken out of classrooms by the Taliban. We were doing so much every day that seemed really significant and impactful.

The price of being part of a team that can do that great work, an administration that can do that great work, is you are going to be part of what the president ultimately decides the policies and the positions are.

So other people might have handled it differently, could have decided that it was better to be back in academia and criticizing from outside, or again mustering evidence as a lawyer even to judge intent and whether the intent rose to the level of genocide. My view was I had the greatest job in the world to try to do as much good as I could in the fleeting time that I had in that position.

There’s a lot going on here, but the gist of Power’s argument seems to be: I couldn’t try to stop the genocide because I was working in the government?

Her response implies that she had no power to shift policy, but if she quit over the genocide (like many Biden staffers did), USAID wouldn’t have been able to repair things in Ukraine or bring back education programs in Afghanistan. We’re expected to believe that someone as well-known as Power quitting her job and denouncing Israel’s actions would have less of an impact than her continuing to work for an administration that was complicit in a genocide?

In 2024, Stacy Gilbert resigned from USAID after 20 years on the job, after she learned that the State Department had falsified a report on Israel blocking aid to Gaza.

“There is so clearly a right and wrong, and what is in that report is wrong,” she said at the time. In her response to the question, Power acknowledges that Israel was one of the biggest obstacles to aid distribution. She saw the same report that Gilbert did.

“People have explained U.S. failures to respond to specific genocides by claiming that the United States didn’t know what was happening, that it knew but didn’t care, or that regardless of what it knew, there was nothing useful to be done,” Power wrote in A Problem from Hell. “I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated.”

Tell me about it.

Odds & Ends

🇮🇱 U.S. support for Israel continues to plummet, despite media’s best efforts

📢 Palestine activists protest the war on Iran

💥 Israel’s goal in Iran is not just regime change, but complete collapse

🗺 The war on Iran is forcing Gulf states to reconsider regional strategy as the U.S. and Israel lead the region into uncertainty

🗳️ Is AIPAC headed for another own goal in Illinois?

📰 Responsible Statecraft: Why did mainstream media slow-walk coverage of school attack?

👀 Jewish Currents: In Illinois, AIPAC-Backed Candidates Defected on Iran

🇮🇷 Electronic Intifada: Have the US and Israel misjudged Iran?

🇺🇸 Counterpunch: America’s War of Choice is Israel’s War of Necessity

📝 The Intercept: Islamophobic Think Tank Helped Write Indictment Against ICE Protesters

🪖 Drop Site News: Trump Might Want to End the War. Iran Won’t Do It on His Terms.

📺 Zeteo:  How the Media Manufactures Consent for War

🍽️ The American Prospect: Killing Kids in Iran While Kids in the U.S. Go Hungry

🌪️ In These Times: The Axis of Chaos

⚠️ Jacobin: US Military Aid to Israel Is a National Security Risk