While President Donald Trump is desperately trying to de-escalate the war with Iran and issue a peace plan, his occasional golf partner Senator Lindsey Graham can't get with the program and wants the war in Iran to become a war of astronomical human losses.
Is there something seriously wrong with South Carolina Republican Graham? We could call Graham a RINO—and I actually wrote an entire column about that for Human Events—but Graham has put the spotlight on himself with recent comments that we should send the Marines to seize Iran's Kharg Island because in his words, "We did Iwo Jima, we can do this."
"Here's what I tell President Trump: Keep it up for a few more weeks, take Kharg Island where all of the resources they have to produce oil, control that island, let this regime die on a vine," Graham said on Fox News Sunday.
I was not aware that Graham was one of those courageous American men who met Japanese forces at Iwo Jima and defeated them, at a staggering cost of 7,000 Marines, soldiers, and sailors killed in action.
No, I don't mean 7,000 casualties, which means killed and wounded. I mean 7,000 dead in a battle that raged for about five weeks in February and March 1945, when the Japanese Empire was essentially already dead and would soon be obliterated with the first two atomic bombs ever used in warfare.
That kind of body count is not only completely unknown in modern warfare—at least, potentially, until now— it would be utterly unacceptable for Americans today. Can you imagine your average MAGA supporter looking at the media reports and saying, "Hey, hun we lost 7,000 men and women in this invasion of Kharg. Wow. Sounds kind of high."
Those are the kind of figures associated with Civil War battles when incompetent Northern generals threw their formations against massed fortifications and saw them sawn in two. Or when idiot British generals told the army to walk—slowly—into the machine gun fire at the Somme on July 1, 1916, because the week-long artillery barrage had made the passage safe.
We do not want the Battle of Kharg to become part of the United States Marine Corps legacy. They have more than enough to be proud of without being saddled with this potential debacle. Nor should it become another battle honor on the flag of the 82nd Airborne—that has also reportedly been tasked with taking this little island about 20 miles off the southern coast of Iran.
The brave men and women do not need to be killed because a mad senator from South Carolina never knows when he should keep his warmongering mouth shut and just give peace a chance. Graham's invocation of Iwo Jima in his call for the Marines to seize Kharg prompted a strong response from Republican Rep. Nancy Mace (S.C.), who argued that Graham has been wrong about past conflicts.
"Graham has one foreign policy: send someone else's kids to war," she posted on the social platform X. "He was wrong about Iraq. He was wrong about Afghanistan. Now he's wrong about Iran."
Mace might know a thing or two about the military, as she was the first female cadet to graduate from the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina. Graham knows a thing or two, too, because he spent 30 years in the Air Force Reserve as a military lawyer.
Sorry, despite what you might have seen on the TV series JAG, military lawyers don't get anywhere near the action and shouldn't be calling for the sacrifice of American men and women because he wants to win this one for—for whom? Graham has no children, looks more like he's winning this one for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alone. President Trump quite simply isn't going to send one Marine, soldier, or sailor on a suicide mission for Graham. And even Trump's worst detractors need to realize this: the president can read the history books, and he knows we don't want to repeat Iwo Jima to make people like Lindsay Graham feel good.
Another USAF veteran took issue with Graham's love of war: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) said she was "deeply upset" by Graham's comments. "I am deeply upset at the lack of respect for life Sen. Lindsey Graham is displaying when talking about our troops. He is acting as if they are expendable cattle. This is unacceptable and dark. There were over 26,000 American casualties at Iwo Jima," she wrote on X.
Few people remember that Graham replaced the very controversial Sen. Strom Thurmond, the first Democrat and later Republican legislator who, as the leader of the Dixiecrat Party, famously ran against President Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election. Thurmond hung around for decades after that. Well, it is time for this senior senator from South Carolina to either retire or be defeated in the nomination process. All the energy Trump is expending on having Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) removed should be directed, in a similar fashion, to getting Graham back into private life.
If there is someone in the Capitol who is more despicable and more embarrassing to the president, please let them step forward. Otherwise, it is time for Graham to go.
