Sen. Lindsey Graham is famously flexible in his principles — his toadying up to Donald Trump a clear contrast to his prescient warnings about embracing Donald Trump is a clear example — but he’s always steadfastly, unbendingly in favor of the worst violence the United States and its allies dish out.
More of the same over the weekend:
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday called Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “naive” for believing further civilian casualties in Gaza could produce even more insurgents and said he has “lost all confidence” in him.
“He’s so naive, I mean I just lost all confidence in this guy,” Graham told CNN’s Dana Bash, adding later, “This is a radicalized population. I don’t want to kill innocent people, but Israel is fighting not just Hamas, but the infrastructure around Hamas.”
[Snip]
“If we were attacked like this, which we were in 9/11, if somebody called for us within two months to have a ceasefire against al-Qaeda, we would’ve laughed them out of town,” he said.
It’s important to note here that Austin didn’t call for a ceasefire against Hamas. Instead, he said Israel should try not to kill so many innocent people. Which is morally right as well as being strategically correct! Austin explained:
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Israel risks a “strategic defeat” if it does not work to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza amid its war on militant group Hamas in the region.
“The center of gravity is the civilian population and if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat,” Austin said in a speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif., on Saturday.
And this is, like, very true. It’s been 15 years, but I still remember this Spencer Ackerman story about why insurgents were flocking to Iraq five years after the American invasion. It’s about “Mr. AQI” — that’s short for “Al Qaeda in Iraq” — a composite profile created by the U.S. military to understand the kind of person who came to Iraq to fight Americans.
So what brought Mr. AQI to Iraq? At the mosque, he met a man who could tell Mr. AQI just wanted to belong to something. That man told Mr. AQI he had something Mr. AQI needed to see. Very often, according to Colonel Bacon, it was an image from Abu Ghraib. Or it was a spliced-together propaganda film of Americans killing or abusing Iraqis. The narrative that weighed heavily on Mr. AQI, Colonel Bacon said, was that it was his "religious duty go to Iraq," where he would serve as "an avenger of abused Iraqs."
What Austin is saying is just basic counterinsurgency doctrine, which says that killing and alienating civilians is a pretty good way to lose a war. From the Army’s counterinsurgency manual:
.. commanders and staffs must consider the law of war principle of proportionality. The anticipated injury or damage caused to civilians or civilian property must not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated by an attack on a military objective. Commanders and staffs using targeted threat infrastructure must also ensure it is not contributing to the recruitment of insurgent fighters by using too heavy a hand against elements of society that are not fully or willingly supporting the insurgency.
Basic stuff. And again: The entirely moral thing to do is to not kill noncombatants. But Graham seems to be under the impression that there is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.
“Strategic defeat would be inflaming the Palestinians? They’re already inflamed,” Graham continued. “They’re taught from the time they’re born to hate the Jews and to kill them. They’re taught math: If you have 10 Jews and kill six, how many would you have left?”
Graham knows the soul of every Palestinian, and has pronounced each and every one of them worthy of death.
It’s horrific.
The war began because Hamas brutalized and massacred Israeli civilians. We can never forget that. But America’s experience should show that the horrors of repaying those civilian deaths with exponentially more civilian deaths is both wrong and counterproductive. Graham is too bloodthirsty to learn the lessons of the very wars has cheered on.