Lindsey Graham is the little war devil on Trump’s shoulder

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” brilliantly parodied the lunacy of the nuclear threat during the Cold War. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” says Air Force Col. and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Buck Turgidson, one of the film’s most memorable characters, while agitating the president in the war room for a first strike against the Soviet Union. “But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks.”

Unbelievable as it sounds, Turgidson was based on a real-life war hawk. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay advocated immediate airstrikes and a full-scale invasion to destroy the Soviet nuclear missiles. Even after President John F. Kennedy’s naval blockade proved successful, possibly preventing a nuclear war between the superpowers, LeMay called it “the worst defeat in our history.”

He was also known for another quote: “We should bomb them to the stone age,” a sentiment expressed thousands of times during the era by drunk right-wingers propped up at the end of the bar. Turns out, LeMay borrowed the phrase; the words were originally coined by satirical columnist Art Buchwald, but they lived on as the ultimate hawkish critique of the American strategy during the Vietnam War. Right-wingers believed that the U.S. needed to go all-out and prove their enemy’s cause was hopeless. The belief was that by bombing all of North Vietnam’s infrastructure to rubble, not to mention killing a massive amount of people, the Viet Cong would be forced to surrender.

This idea has held the imagination of the right-wing in America for more than 60 years: if only we had taken the gloves off — if only we had obliterated Hanoi, or gone into Baghdad in 1991, or attacked Iran years earlier — all the wars we have lost or brought to a draw would have been won. America’s presidents, cowed by public opinion, just didn’t have the stomach for what it takes to really demonstrate our superiority and put our enemies in their place. 

Lindsey Graham is the contemporary embodiment of this philosophy. As the quintessential Trump suck-up who sees the president as an opportunity to advance his own personal agenda, he knows all too well — like so many other establishment Republicans — that Trump is barely hanging on to sanity at this point, and that he should never be allowed to wield such massive power. But Graham is the Senate’s version of LeMay — a hawk who wants to see the United States use its mighty military to settle scores and punish any and all who have been a thorn in its side. And he has learned how to persuade Trump to be his instrument in that cause. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, Graham has been the most relentless and the most successful of all the hawks pushing for Trump to attack Iran. He finds ways to get next to the president on the golf course and at his resorts to lobby for major military incursions, and he’s also been traveling overseas to tutor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on how best to speak to Trump to get him to agree. Obviously, Trump listened. 

Despite his claim of being the president for peace, Trump has always believed in the idea that the U.S. military should be unleashed to do its worst so as to teach the country’s adversaries a lesson they won’t soon forget. In this he was largely contained during his first term by good-faith officials and staff, and by his own insincere promise to keep America out of wars. He also, one suspects, has been haunted by a personal fear of making a mistake in an arena in which he has no experience. 

Trump knows that a failed war would be the ultimate black mark on his legacy, and until now he was reluctant to go all out. But Graham was there, the little devil on his shoulder, whispering sweet nothings into the presidential ears about how Trump will be remembered as one of history’s greatest leaders if only he will do what no president in his lifetime has been willing to do: launch wars of choice to demonstrate American military might.

Until now, even the most hawkish Republican presidents knew this notion was absurd. They had learned from the mistakes of Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, and Richard Nixon, a Republican. Over three years, from 1965 to 1968, the U.S. conducted Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign with the objective of putting the Viet Cong in their place — and it was remarkably unsuccessful. Nixon tried it again with Operation Linebacker in 1972, and it was equally a failure. The North Vietnamese were not cowed. They just kept on fighting until the U.S. finally pulled up stakes three years later and withdrew.

Of course the hawks all said that the military just didn’t go hard enough, destroy enough, kill enough or it would have worked — an argument that persisted throughout the rest of the Cold War and the years of Iraq and Afghanistan. America was restrained by what our current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently called the “stupid rules of engagement” and “outdated” international norms like the Geneva Convention. Hegseth believes that the United States must be “ruthless” and “uncompromising,” willing to use “overwhelmingly lethal” force geared to “winning our wars according to our own rules.” 

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Over the weekend, Graham took to the airwaves and agreed, making Buck Turgidson look like Mahatma Gandhi by comparison. He told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo about Iran, “You just wait to see what comes in the next two weeks. We’re going to blow the hell out of these people.”

Then the senator turned his attention back to the Western hemisphere. “If we get in a fight,” he said, “I want to win it quick. I’m in Miami. You see this hat? ‘Free Cuba.’ Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. We’re marching through the world. We’re clearing out the bad guys. Cuba is next.”

Subtle, Graham is not. It’s clear that this bombing campaign in Iran has him high on his own supply. He sees that Trump is loaded with over confidence from the administration’s successful action in Venezuela, which saw the seizure of the country’s president Nicolás Maduro, and he is now champing at the bit to get going on Cuba, which the president has been talking about incessantly. At a White House event last week with soccer players, Trump blurted out to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “Your next one is gonna be Cuba. [Rubio’s] waiting but he says, ‘Let’s get this one finished first.’ We could do them all at the same time, but bad things happen.” That’s what passes for prudence in this administration. 

When Graham says that they’re “marching through the world,” he means it. According to the Journal, he is also pushing Trump to bomb Lebanon back into the stone age, although it appears Israel is well on its way to doing that already. Graham called up Trump and pitched the idea of “‘Operation Semper Fi’ in honor of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American personnel.” He told the president he could go even farther than Ronald Reagan, which, in this context, is an interesting statement, since Reagan rattled some sabers initially but actually made the judicious decision to withdraw.

With his inane bleating on television about taking over the world, Graham sounded unhinged. But like so many members of the GOP establishment who signed on to the MAGA movement as a way to either line their pockets or fulfill their ideological holy grails, he knows what he is doing. Graham is finally getting what he always wanted. 

I suspect the late John McCain would be dismayed to see his protegé thinking that Donald Trump could be trusted with such decisions. The late Arizona senator may have been a war hawk, but he knew the president was a disaster. But then, so did Graham — until he realized Trump could be manipulated for his own ends. 

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