Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died unexpectedly on Saturday at the age of 71.
I was born and raised in South Carolina and was his constituent for most of his three decades in Congress.
Graham became a member of the U.S. House in 1995. In 1996, my own political journey began in my early 20s as a Pat Buchanan conservative who avidly supported his insurgent populist bid for the Republican presidential nomination that year.
Graham entered the Senate in January 2003, three months after Buchanan cofounded this magazine as a much-needed conservative outlet opposing any potential war with Iraq. Three months after Graham became a senator, the U.S. invaded Iraq.
For all of that time, through the Clinton, Bush-Cheney, Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies, right up until Saturday, Graham was arguably the most vociferous advocate in Congress for the neoconservative vision of American foreign policy. More than even most other neocons, Graham thirsted for U.S. intervention anywhere, at any time, for virtually any reason, and at any cost, including lives, foreign or domestic.
In this light, I can’t help but remember now how cheap Graham considered the lives of so many others throughout his entire political career.
In the early years of the U.S.–Iraq war, Graham was less distinguishable from other Republicans, almost all of whom considered unquestioning support for the war their core party identity.
But by 2008, the country had significantly soured on the war (by then, 63 percent of Americans were calling it a mistake), the Democrats had a rock star presidential candidate in then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, whose primary campaign message included a resounding rejection of Bush-Cheney and particularly the Iraq boondoggle.
Campaigning for his longtime neocon-brother-in-arms and 2008 GOP presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ)—who, on the campaign trail, said he’d be fine with the U.S. spending “a hundred” years in Iraq—Graham said the following:
Calling for more troops to be sent to Iraq was one of the most unpopular things John McCain could have done. Some said it was political suicide. But you know what? It was the right thing to do… because losing in Iraq would have been a nightmare for America.
America had already lost in Iraq, and for most Americans, it had already long been a nightmare. By the end of 2008, there were over 4,000 U.S. military deaths. The Pentagon concluded that nearly 77,000 Iraqis had died in the same period.
These numbers never seemed to be a consideration for Graham when he advocated sending even more U.S. soldiers into wars most Americans were done with.
Four years after the U.S. formally declared the Iraq War over, McCain and Graham lobbied in 2015 for President Obama to send 20,000 U.S. soldiers to Iraq and Syria.
This didn’t happen, about which Graham would say in 2015, right before he launched a presidential campaign of his own, “At the end of the day, I blame President Obama for the mess in Iraq and Syria, not President Bush.”
The U.S. didn’t wage war enough in Iraq. Surely that was the problem.
Graham’s visions of war-related death and destruction had become increasingly more bizarre with age.
In 2013, Graham was pushing for U.S. military action against Syria, declaring, “I believe that if we get Syria wrong, within six months—and you can quote me on this—there will be a war between Iran and Israel over their nuclear program.”
Graham also warned of Iran-backed terrorists smuggling a nuclear bomb into America if the U.S. didn’t drop bombs on Syria soon.
“It won’t come to America on top of a missile, it’ll come in the belly of a ship in the Charleston or New York harbor,” Graham said.
As a native Charlestonian, I can report that a nuclear bomb never did detonate in my home city, then or since.
A big war with Iran, however, did come 13 years later, launched not just by Israel but also by President Donald Trump, with Graham as the lead cheerleader. The war, still ongoing, is the culmination of a long-simmering Israel–Iran conflict that intensified after Israel launched its war in Gaza.
Barely two years ago, in May 2024, Graham said of Israel’s war on Gaza and Hamas, “When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by the bombing [of] Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki with nuclear weapons.” He called that “the right decision.”
“Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war,” the nuke-happy senator added. “They can’t afford to lose.”
The August 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities are estimated to have killed over 200,000, overwhelmingly Japanese civilians. President Dwight Eisenhower said in 1963 of those bombings, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Eisenhower, a former general and no stranger to the horrors of war, here showed some regret for what had been done. Graham’s comments, by contrast, were flippant to the point of inhumanity about possible nuclear use. Moreover, Ike had been talking about a world war in which the U.S. was a direct participant, not a regional war waged by a foreign nation in a strip of land the size of Portland, Oregon.
Graham wasn’t finished beating his chest about using nukes on Gaza.
“Why is it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war? Why was it OK for us to do that?”
Graham said he was OK with it. “So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state,” he added. “Whatever you have to do.”
“Whatever” you have to do. This is not remotely in the realm of just war theory, not that Graham could have been expected to care about that. His reasoning did fit comfortably within Al Qaeda terrorists’ theories of war.
In late March of this year, roughly three months before his death, Graham basically said he didn’t mind if Americans died invading Iran.
You would think that at least this line would be a no-go zone. Apparently not.
On potentially sending U.S. ground troops to Iran’s Kharg Island, Graham told Fox News, “We did Iwo Jima, we can do this.”
‘Wait, what did he say?’ was the reaction of many.
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh was dumbfounded by Graham’s remark.
“Today Lindsey Graham, who for some reason has been the White House’s top spokesman for this war, went on TV and invoked Iwo Jima while calling for more escalation in Iran,” Walsh wrote. “Iwo Jima of course involved 26 thousand US casualties. It’s extremely troubling that Graham has so much influence with the administration and has been so empowered to speak on its behalf.”
Walsh continued, “He is not conservative, he is not America first, he has never done a single thing in his career to advance the interests of actual American citizens, and he clearly wants this war to continue indefinitely and doesn’t care how many Americans die in the process.”
Walsh was not overstating his case. Graham really didn’t appear to care about prioritizing any lives that happened to conflict with his political agenda.
Maybe some of this registered with me more than it should have because of my own antiwar politics. Yet for my entire adult, politically conscious life, this is what I saw year after year in this callous man—and I’m leaving out a lot due to the practical confines of this essay.
But from a South Carolinian, American, and certainly a pro-life perspective, I strive to never be dismissive of life (though I don’t always succeed), even that of someone who was so dismissive of it throughout his own.
Humans should never strive for inhumanity. I wish Lindsey Graham had thought the same.
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