Americans who watched Fox News Sunday got a close look at the deranged war fantasies of Israel-first GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Graham wants to send Marines to attack Kharg Island, the site of Iran’s main oil terminal, responsible for 90 percent of petroleum products. The Marines can do so, he said, because they tackled Iwo Jima in February 1945. “My money is always on the Marines,” he told hostess Shannon Bream. He didn’t bother to mention that almost 7,000 Marines died on Iwo Jima.
But Graham isn’t the only U.S. senator who pushed President Donald Trump to attack Iran. GOP Senator Ted Cruz of Texas admitted that he was alone with Trump the day before the attack and told him it must go forward.
During a now-famous interview with Tucker Carlson, Cruz showed that he knows nothing about Iran.
Graham Goes Nuts
Proof that the neoconservative Graham might have lost his marbles is his blithely suggesting that the Marines can take Kharg Island, no problem.
“Here’s what I told President Trump,” he began. “Keep it up for a few more weeks, take Kharg Island, where all of the resources they have to produce oil [are], control that island, let this regime die on the vine.”
Bream asked whether U.S. troops would be “on the ground,” and cited a piece in the far-left Atlantic, which reported that taking Kharg Island wouldn’t be all that easy. It would be a “grinding war of attrition,” she quoted. As well, said the paper, “Iran has given every indication that it would likely escalate by striking oil-and-gas facilities in the region, just as it did to Qatar and Saudi Arabia after the Pars South gas field was struck.”
“I’m sorta tired of all his armchair quarterbacking,” armchair quarterback Graham told Bream.
“This has been an amazing military operation. … I trust the Marines, not [the Atlantic author],” Graham said:
I trust [the Department of Defense]. We’ve got two Marine Expeditionary Units sailing to this island. We did Iwo Jima. We can do this. My money is always on the Marines.
Last week, three ships, including the USS Iwo Jima, left San Diego for the Persian Gulf with 2,200 Marines. That force followed the first, which left Japan the week before. Now, almost 5,000 Marines are headed for the region … and not for nothing.
Mace Responds
Responding to Graham on X, America-first GOP U.S. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina did everything but call him a chicken hawk.
Yesterday, she began lobbing shells at the childless bachelor.
“Lindsey Graham needs to be removed from the Situation Room,” she exploded:
I don’t want to hear one word from a guy with no kids, desperately sending our sons and daughters into war on the ground in Iran.
Then she attacked again:
Lindsey Graham has one foreign policy: send someone else’s kids to war.
He was wrong about Iraq.
He was wrong about Afghanistan.
Now he’s wrong about Iran.
“Iwo Jima cost 6,821 American lives,” Mace, a Citadel graduate, continued.
Then, “Lindsey Graham wants American troops on the ground in Iran”:
Not his kids. Yours. Not for freedom. But for the price of oil.
Unless he’s suiting up for Kharg Island himself, he should sit down.
“Senator Graham, why don’t you deploy to Iran yourself if you’re so eager to send everyone else over there?” she asked on X this morning.
A few hours later she reiterated that Graham wants American kids to die “for the price of oil.”
Cruz Pushed for War
Yet Graham isn’t the only senator who pushed for Americans to die for oil and Israel.
So also did Cruz, who revealed during an interview that he pressed Trump to attack.
Speaking on the Triggernometry podcast last week, Cruz explained.
“I urged the President to launch this attack. … I was with him pretty much the entire day on Friday before the attack launched on Saturday,” he said.
Cruz said he flew with Trump to Corpus Christie, Texas, and that the president asked him to ride in “The Beast,” the presidential limousine.
“Pretty much the whole time he was asking me what I thought we should do on Iran. And I said, look, I think we should not miss this moment,” Cruz said:
I think the regime is weaker than it ever has been, and we have an opportunity — if we can collapse this regime, America will be much, much safer. There are very few things on planet Earth that would do more to improve American national security as much as seeing this regime collapse. And he asked me … do you think we should negotiate further? And I said no. I said, I don’t believe they’re negotiating in good faith, they are liars. I think the ayatollah just wants to delay and delay and delay, while they rebuild. I said, as far as I’m concerned, the only deal you should be willing to take is the same deal you offered Maduro.
Before the military operation to arrest Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Cruz explained, Trump offered him a chance to leave the country and live elsewhere.
During his interview with Carlson, Cruz revealed that he didn’t know even basic facts about Iran.
“How many people live in Iran, by the way?” Carlson asked.
“I don’t know the population,” Cruz replied.
Carlson: At all?
Cruz: No, I don’t know the population.
Carlson: You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?
Cruz: How many people live in Iran?
Carlson: 92 million.
Cruz: OK.
Carlson: How could you not know that?
Cruz: I don’t sit around memorizing population tables.
Carlson: Well it’s kind of relevant because you’re calling for the overthrow of the government.
Carlson quickly established that Cruz’s ignorance is exceeded only by his desire for war on behalf of Israel.
Cruz admitted that he vowed to be Israel’s top supporter in the U.S. Senate when he was elected in 2012.
