Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina let his inner genocidal maniac loose on Sunday, defending Israel’s total war on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and he appeared to urge the nuking of Gaza. He said on NBC,
“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. That was the right decision.”
The weaselly Mr. Graham slides easily from one position to another, having lambasted Donald Trump in 2016 and then having ended up kissing the ring (or other parts of the anatomy) once Trump won. It is therefore hard to take him seriously, since he pioneered the role of “Congressional troll,” later taken up by nonentities such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. It is now possible to fundraise nationally off clownish bombast, and flamethrowers play to an increasingly unhinged GOP base.
His argument is that when the United States faced an existential threat in 1945, it used nuclear weapons, killing on the order of 200,000 civilians in Japan. The problems with this argument from any rational point of view are manifold. First, the United States was not facing an existential threat from Japan in 1945 — the empire had been defeated. The only question left was the terms of Japanese surrender. The US vaporized hundreds of thousands of children, women and noncombatant men in hopes of forcing an early capitulation on terms favorable to the US. It was not about protecting the American mainland.
Second, Israel is also not facing an existential threat. Only 2.2 million Palestinians lived in Gaza, while Israel’s population is 9.5 million. Hamas only had, by Israel’s count, some 30,000 armed men in the Qassam Brigades, along with a few thousand irregulars from other groups, such as Islamic Jihad. The group has no Air Force, no fighter jets, no armored divisions, no significant artillery, and its homemade rockets typically land uselessly in the desert.
Israel has 169,000 active duty military personnel and 465,000 reservists. It is ranked as in the world’s top 20 military powers. NDTV notes that Israel has “241 fighter jets [including highly advanced F-35s], 48 attack helicopters, and 2,200 tanks. . . . Israel also has over 1,200 artillery units; this includes 300 MLRS, or multiple launch rocket systems. This includes smart bombs that can strike targets with minimum collateral damage.”
So the Qassam Brigades do not pose an existential threat to Israel, though they are capable of guerrilla actions and terrorist strikes. Israel lost 2,500 or so troops in the 1973 war, over twice the death toll (some 650 of them innocent civilians) lost on October 7. So the latter attack was not in existential threat territory, however horrific and disgusting it was.
Even if a country were existentially threatened, it would be immoral and illegal to target innocent noncombatants, and also would be stupid and ineffective. If an enemy military is attacking in such a way as to pose an existential threat, then you should be concentrating your firepower on the military instead of wasting it on grandmas and toddlers.
“Strangelove Graham,” Digital, by Juan Cole, Dream / Dreamworld v. 3, IbisPaint, 2024.
Graham not only delivered himself of a response suitable to a war criminal, he also talked out of both sides of his mouth.
Because Graham has postured over the killing of innocent civilians quite a lot, when his enemies rather than his friends have done it.
Here is what Mr. Graham said on “CBS Mornings,” “Conversation With Sen. Lindsey Graham,” on Thursday, March 3, 2022, about Russian war crimes in Ukraine:
- TONY DOKOUPIL: On the war crimes question, what was the breaking point for you before this extraordinary press conference yesterday?
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): When they started using banned munitions like cluster bombs, vacuum bombs. Everything he is doing is illegal under the Law of War . . .
There is no rule of law in Russia to hold Putin accountable. So this international tribunal [the International Criminal Court] is the right way to go . . .
Economic sanctions, aid to the Ukrainians so they can fight back. But I want every military commander in every pilot to know in Russia, that if you carry out these atrocities against the Ukrainian people, you do so at your own peril, you`re going to wind up in the dark.
So if a sniper shoots a Russian soldier from an apartment building, what we would do is try to isolate the sniper. What they will do is destroy the apartment building.
He`s going scorched earth here. He`s going to start disassembling all resistance. He has no — look at Aleppo. If you want to know the playbook for Putin, Chechnya — he leveled the place. Aleppo, Syria, barrel bombs coming out of helicopters. That`s the Russian game plan and they`re all war crimes and the world complain, but we moved on. We can`t move on when it comes to Ukraine.
The Syria example recalls an old crusade for Mr. Graham. In 2016 at the height of the Russian/ Syrian campaign against Aleppo, he issued a statement with the late Senator John McCain: “For four long years, Aleppo has been at the center of the Assad regime’s war on the Syrian people. Together with its Russian and Iranian allies, the Assad regime has relentlessly targeted women and children, doctors and rescue workers, hospitals and bakeries, aid warehouses and humanitarian convoys.”
The Israeli military, of course, has a long history of insisting on using cluster bombs in southern Lebanon, and has been condemned for it by the U.S. government and some of Mr. Graham’s colleagues in Congress. The U.S. sent two shipments of cluster bombs for use in Gaza to Israel last fall.
As for “vacuum bombs,” these are also called “thermobaric bombs.” Israel has used them extensively in Gaza. The Financial Express writes, “the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have employed Thermobaric bombs, a devastating and controversial weaponry previously unused on civilians. These weapons have resulted in 4th degree burns and caused significant harm to those unfortunate enough to be within their blast radius.”
When these bombs are dropped, the first compartment causes an explosion and create a cloud and, FE continues, “a second charge ignites the cloud, resulting in a massive fireball, a formidable blast wave, and the creation of a vacuum that absorbs all surrounding oxygen. This weapon has the capacity to demolish reinforced buildings, destroy equipment, and cause harm or casualties to people within its range.”
Israeli fighter jet pilots are behaving in Gaza in precisely the way Russian pilots behaved in Syria: “So if a sniper shoots a Russian soldier from an apartment building, what we would do is try to isolate the sniper. What they will do is destroy the apartment building.” Israel has behaved so much like this that a majority of domiciles in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed and over 34,000 people have been killed, with likely another 10,000 under the rubble of those buildings that the Israelis knocked down no less assiduously than the Russians knocked down buildings in Syria.
It is scorched earth.
As for violations of International Humanitarian Law, even the State Department of Antony Blinken, the chief defense counsel for Israel’s extremist cabinet, has admitted that Israel is in breach of it, though mysteriously avoiding the conclusion that US arms should be cut off as required by the Leahy Act.
And nothing could better describe the Israeli military’s behavior in Gaza than Graham’s denunciation of Russia and al-Assad for having “relentlessly targeted women and children, doctors and rescue workers, hospitals and bakeries, aid warehouses and humanitarian convoys.”
So it turns out that not cluster bombs, nor vacuum bombs, nor thumbing his nose at international law, nor targeting women, children, physicians, aid workers, hospitals and bakeries were actually what ticked Mr. Graham off about Mr. Putin. Otherwise he would be similarly peeved with Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu.
Graham just found a political and personal benefit in grandstanding on Syria and Ukraine and in being a Russia hawk. No principles are involved here, no actual concern for innocent life, since those are universal and not tribal.
Meanwhile, South Carolina is 42nd in the US for life expectancy.
In contrast, it is the 8th highest state for deaths of mothers in childbirth.
And there is an “alarming” increase in the infant mortality rate in South Carolina.
Perhaps Mr. Graham might concentrate on doing something about these health statistics in his state, which are in the gutter, rather than daydreaming about playing Slim Pickens riding a nuke, in the last scene of Dr. Strangelove.
© 2024 All Rights Reserved