American Amnesia: Why Did We Ever Listen to Lindsey Graham?
"De mortuis nil nisi bonum," said my father whenever a political adversary passed away, repeating the ancient admonition to speak only good of the dead. So, in assessing the career of Lindsey Graham, lately deceased senator from South Carolina, let's note in fairness that he spoke passionately and often in support of Ukraine's struggle against its Russian oppressor, a righteous cause he shared with liberals and progressives in the opposing party.
However much Graham did for Ukraine, what his career shows most clearly is how powerful conservatives routinely escape the memory of their ruinous decisions — and go on to promote further destruction with every breath. Most of them never express regret for the chaos and death they help to cause, and instead persistently attempt to justify the wreckage left behind.
Today, and no doubt for years to come, America will continue to live with the consequences of Graham's blundering and blithering — and our failure to ignore him after the first time around.
Very few American politicians would still seek to justify or excuse the momentously bad judgment that led us to invade Iraq more than two decades ago. Many of the senators who voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution in 2002, including Democrats and Republicans, have expressed at least a degree of remorse for that lethal error. More than once, Hillary Clinton has said it is her deepest regret.
But on that ill-fated vote's 20th anniversary, Graham waved off any pangs of guilt for the thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. "Intelligence was faulty," he dismissively told a reporter, referring to the comic-book depictions of an arsenal of mass destruction hidden somewhere by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. According to the late senator, we should be grateful that Iraq — now governed by Iranian-backed warlords and militias — is a "democracy," kind of. Freedom House still rates it as "unfree."
Keep that troubling history in mind as we turn our attention to the present, in the months before Graham passed away. Contrary to the promises of President Donald Trump — who wanted everyone to believe he had opposed the Iraq fiasco — the United States is again enmeshed in a kinetic Mideast conflict with no discernible strategy, no end game, no possible gain for American interests, and a vast and wasteful expenditure of money if not yet lives.
The Trump White House entered this grossly stupid war of choice for a number of reasons, from the president's animus against former President Barack Obama, whose nuclear deal with Iraq he scuttled, to his childish confidence in his own infallible instincts. But somewhere in that policy miasma lurked Graham.
It is now widely understood that in starting his war on Iran, Trump acceded to years of lobbying by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and that the chief conduit for Netanyahu's message was Graham, who surely slathered every argument with obsequious praise for the president. The senator boasted that he had "coached" Netanyahu in moving Trump toward war and — where have we heard this before? — said that it was "intelligence" from Israel that ultimately drove the U.S. to begin bombing.
Nor did Graham publicly hesitate to offer terrible hawkish advice for Trump. "When this regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going to make a ton of money," he crowed shortly after the war commenced last February. "This regime is in a death throe now; it is going to be on its knees, it's going to fall, and when it falls, we're going to have peace like no other time. We're going to have prosperity unlike anyone could ever imagine."
The regime in Tehran did not fall. We have squandered a fortune and will spend a lot more before this debacle ends. Worse, we may yet lose more brave Americans. And what's hard to imagine is a decent outcome that serves American interests or world security.
I suppose the nation will miss Lindsey Graham, as his colleagues keep telling us, but at least we still have Trump to tell us all those blustering lies.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.
