Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died earlier this month at the age of 71, was never quiet about his desire for a military assault on Iran.
But previously unreleased footage, filmed for a documentary that was in the works before the South Carolina lawmaker’s death, shows Graham reacting with unrestrained jubilance to President Donald Trump’s decision in late February to launch a large-scale attack on Iran, in coordination with the Israeli government.
“Look what we’ve done here,” said a joyful Graham shortly after the US-Israeli bombing campaign began. “I almost cried. I mean, like, how long have we been pushing this?”
Graham, who has supported US military action against Iran for years, went on to say he “had his challenges” in advocating for the war, as “a lot of people” within the administration “didn’t want to do it.”
“The warmonger got his wish and the result has been a catastrophe,” Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, wrote in response to the footage, adding that it is “particularly outrageous for a US senator to lobby the president to violate the Constitution.”
“Lindsey’s legacy will include the mass slaughter of Iranian children in a school at Minab on the opening day of the war,” wrote Finucane.
Another moment captured by documentary filmmaker Alex Holder was an exchange in early March between Graham and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As The Wall Street Journal noted in its report on the footage, Graham had “planned to travel to Florida” to “persuade President Trump to join Israel in the bombing of Hezbollah in Lebanon.”
But Netanyahu—an International Criminal Court fugitive who is expected to travel to the US this week for Graham’s funeral services—told Graham that “right now that’s not in our interest.”
“We’re concentrating right now on Iran,” Netanyahu told Graham in a March 4 phone call. “If we tell Hezbollah that we’re going all the way, we threaten them, but if we actually do it, then they have no reason not to go all the way against us.”
The exchange was part of hundreds of hours of raw camera footage of Graham accumulated since 2023. “It provides an unvarnished look at Graham’s yearslong quest to topple the Iranian regime and the ways in which he persuaded Trump to strike, at times pushing for even more aggressive action than Netanyahu was prepared to take,” the Journal noted.
In one clip, Graham predicted days into the US-Israeli assault that “in three to four weeks, we’re going to have them in a spot where they start losing control of some cities.”
The war is now in its fifth month without a clear end in sight, and no Iranian cities have fallen.
“America is so much worse off listening to this warmonger’s deranged fantasies,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote on social media.
Over the weekend, the US and Iran paused strikes to provide space for diplomatic talks following the collapse of an earlier ceasefire deal.
Estimates indicate that more than 3,500 Iranians have been killed by US-Israeli bombing since late February. At least 18 American servicemembers have been killed during the war, though there is considerable skepticism about that figure, given the Pentagon’s lack of transparency and accounting maneuvers.
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