Danial Larison - The Madness of Lindsey Graham

I didn't know who Lindsey Graham was when I first saw him but I realised straight away he was a very dangerous person. KV

Danial Larison - The Madness of Lindsey Graham

For some mysterious reason, Lindsey Graham is taken seriously when he talks about foreign policy, and yet everything he has to say about these issues is either nonsense or maniacal. Here he is rambling about why the U.S. should be willing to attack North Korea despite the massive loss of life that would follow:

Well, you know, so let’s understand what we’re saying here. We’re saying that as a last resort, we’ll use military force to destroy the regime’s nuclear program, which basically means destroying the regime. Now yes, that will be, that will be difficult. It will be devastating to the region. But 20 years from now, if they keep building nuclear weapons and missiles, they’re going to sell it to somebody who will use it. Iran is different. They have a religious mission. They’re religious zealots. They’re religious Nazis. If they get a nuclear weapon, they’ll use it for religious purposes, to purify the Sunni faith, destroy Israel and come after us. So where does a terrorist get a weapon, a nuclear weapon, that they would actually use? From a regime like North Korea or Iran. So the President has calculated for the good of the world, for the good of the United States, I’m going to take off the table North Korea having nuclear capability to threaten the homeland and the world at large. And if it takes a war to end that nuclear threat, so be it. And the war will be over there. The people dying will be over there, and he doesn’t want to do that. But he’s going to pick regional conflict to secure the homeland [bold mine-DL]. I hope people understand that.

Graham has shrugged off the likely deaths of millions several times before by asserting that they will be “over there.” Never mind that hundreds of thousands of Americans live in South Korea and would suffer along with the rest of the population there, and never mind that North Korea likely already has the ability to strike U.S. targets with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. Graham is enough of a warmonger that these things wouldn’t make him think twice anyway. Just consider the monstrous inhumanity required to talk up the virtues of starting a war that would devastate multiple countries and claim millions of lives and then shrug it off because it supposedly won’t affect us. Add to this the nonsensical raving about Iran’s supposed zealotry that would lead its government to commit national suicide, and you have a very clear window into the warped and disturbed thinking of one of our country’s leading pro-war fanatics.

It is tempting to dismiss Graham’s rhetoric as nonsense and leave it at that, but there is a strong and worrying likelihood that the president shares Graham’s demented views and may be willing to act on them. Now that Bolton is advising Trump, the president will have another equally fanatical voice in his ear telling him to do just that.

Danial Larison - The Madness of Lindsey Graham