Juan Cole: Wrong Again, Sen. Graham

[marmar]

from truthdig:




Wrong Again, Sen. Graham

Posted on Jan 4, 2011
By Juan Cole


Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., repeated on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday his hope that the United States can maintain at least two permanent air bases in Afghanistan. He was pushing back against Vice President Joe Biden’s pledge that the U.S. would be out of Afghanistan by 2014 “come hell or high water.” Graham has been wrong about almost everything in the Middle East for a decade and a half, so this harebrained proposal is hardly surprising. But it signals the harder line likely to be pursued by Republicans now that they have taken back the House of Representatives and have much strengthened their position in the Senate.

While pundit Bill Kristol has been tagged as perpetually wrong about everything for his various incorrect pronouncements about Iraq, Graham has largely gotten a pass for saying all the same things, from a greater position of power. Graham was among the earliest to be fooled by the ideologues around George W. Bush into thinking that the ramshackle Saddam Hussein regime posed a threat to the United States. Just after the “Axis of Evil” State of the Union address in 2002, Graham told Chris Matthews of Bush, “I think he was very direct about what the nation faces, about Iraq being a possible target sooner, rather than later.” He virtually salivated at the prospect of a war: “I think the danger to this country from Saddam Hussein is great. The president was amazingly direct about people who procure weapons of mass destruction.”

A little over a year later on Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press,” Graham gloated at the imminent outbreak of war, accusing Saddam Hussein of lying when he said he no longer had chemical weapons stockpiles. He accused the dictator of supporting the Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon and of hosting al-Qaida. He denounced then German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as a “chancellor of appeasement” for not jumping on the war bandwagon. He pooh-poohed the notion that Iraq’s factious ethnic and sectarian groups would war with one another once the Baath government was overthrown: “This arrogance that we possess in the West, that there is multifactions, there’s ethnic and religious differences in Iraq and they can’t handle it, is the height of arrogance.”

When former U.S. Rep. Tom Andrews warned that an economist had estimated the cost of an Iraq war at $1.3 trillion, a price tag that might push the country into economic crisis, Graham was dismissive. Everything Graham said was a falsehood. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/wrong_again_sen_graham_20110104/

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[DCKit]

2. A nasty little chickenhawk (in all senses of the word) with a war fetish. nt