There you have it, that’s why and how Republicans justify their role for triggering our wars. Democrats use different tactics.
On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 3:30 PM Tom Pauken via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:
The leading opponent of our getting into a war with Russia is a conservative, Tucker Carlson; and most authentic conservatives are also against it. Only discredited neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol, John Bolton, Max Boot, et al, are actively engaged in promoting a war with Russia. Victoria Nuland and the neoliberals within and outside the Biden Administration are pushing for war as is the mainstream media which surely doesn’t classify as “conservative”. Unfortunately, Estabishment Republicans are blithely going along with this craziness, but grass roots conservatives by and large reject the arguments and agree with Tucker Carlson. Tom Pauken--Sent from my iPadOn Feb 22, 2022, at 8:48 PM, Todd Pierce via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:
--This is what I love about the Republicans: there is no point of madness that the Democrats can go to, that they won’t find Republicans there waiting for them, and asking what took so long for them to get there. Lindsey was always there, with John McCain, ahead of the Democrats, except for their “Third Amigo,” Joe Lieberman, who was there to provide the appearance of bi-partisanship, unless you realize there was only one “Party,” represented in that, the Militarists. The Trumpites are part of the same “Party,” except preferring to extend more effort to obfuscating what they stand for, having such a gullible constituency of “non-interventionist conservatives,” while conditioning the information war battlefield in preparation for kinetic war against China, as they’ve worked so zealously at, under the direction of Commandante Steve Bannon.
But the 2018 statements by Lindsey quoted in The Intercept article at bottom can easily be repurposed for today to rephrase the statement about Koreans below to read, to paraphrase: “All the damage that would come from a war [with Russia] would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said . . . .
and;
(to paraphrase) “If there’s going to be a war to stop [Putin], it will be over there,” . . . “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here. And [Donald Trump’s] told me that to my face.” Graham continued: “That may be provocative, but not really. When you’re president of the United States, where does your allegiance lie? To the people of the United States.”
Lindsey Graham: Putin is doing “exactly what Hitler did” as Russia begins invasion of Ukraine (Hey Lindsey, we’re following in Wehrmacht tank tracks, and have been since the 1990s with your PNAC/Carnegie friend Robert Kagan, et al. The Russians are the ones in overall retreat, with US forces/weaponry encircling them, and the British Navy doing port calls in the Black Sea, which would have included at Sevastopol had defensive measures not been taken, looking at this strictly objectively as seeing the military reality of what we’ve been up to for a couple decades now.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. (WCBD) – Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Monday called for tougher sanctions against the Russian government — and oligarchs — just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin issued decrees recognizing the independence of two separatist-led Ukrainian regions, effectively setting the foundation for a Russian incursion into the sovereign country.
Graham doubled down on his comments Tuesday, saying during a press conference that the world order is at stake.
“This is the 1930’s all over again. What Putin did [Monday] was tear up an agreement made 25 years ago. That’s exactly what Hitler did in the 1930’s.”
While Graham acknowledged he does not believe a third World War is likely, he said he expects “conflict at every turn, and the stability we’ve enjoyed in Europe that has benefitted the United States is going to be lost.”
On Tuesday afternoon, the Biden Administration announced what it called the first round of sanctions against Russia. The sanctions target Russian financial institutions as well as Russian oligarchs, a tactic Graham suggested Monday.
Graham said that the oligarchs are “Putin’s partners in crime,” and they should be punished by taking away “their yachts, luxury apartments, and their assets.”
The Biden Administration also coordinated with European allies like Germany, which put on hold the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Graham agreed with the decision to target the Russian oil and gas sector, referring to Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a nation.”
While he criticized the Biden Administration’s “minimalist” approach thus far to deterring Russia, he said that the severity of the issue requires bipartisan action, noting that if something isn’t done, “we’re gonna live in some of the most dangerous times since World War II.”
Graham reiterated that he and many other republicans stand “ready, willing, and able to work with the Biden Administration to impose the most crushing sanctions possible on the Russian economy.”
Why Does Sen. Lindsey Graham Think Killing Millions of Koreans Would Be “Worth It”?
The Republican senator says “all the damage” would be justified for U.S. security. This kind of disdain for the lives of foreigners led to the Iraq war.
![WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 01: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) talks to reporters about the suspect in a vehicle attack in Manhattan during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol November 1, 2017 in Washington, DC. Graham told reporters he talked with President Donald Trump about Graham's belief that the suspect, Sayfullo Saipov, should be designated an unlawful enemy combatant. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)]()
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., talks to reporters about the suspect in a vehicle attack in Manhattan during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 1, 2017 in Washington, D.C.Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesWhy do so many leading U.S. politicians make mass murder sound like an ad for L’Oréal?Go back to May 1996, when Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes” sat down with Madeleine Albright, the then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “We have heard that a half million children have died,” Stahl said, referring to the reported impact of United Nations sanctions on Iraq. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And — and you know, is the price worth it?”
To which the dead-eyed Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”
Half a million dead kids. Worth it. A now-infamous statement, which was much-quoted across the Middle East, yet provoked no public outcry in the United States at the time: no banner headlines, no scathing op-eds, no political fallout whatsoever. In fact, the very next year, the much-lauded Albright was promoted to secretary of state. It would take the former Clinton administration official seven long years to show even an ounce of regret or contrition for her outrageous remark, finally calling it “crazy” and a “terrible mistake” in her 2003 memoir, “Madam Secretary.”
Now, fast-forward to March 2018.
“All the damage that would come from a war [with North Korea] would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said in an interview with CNN last week.
What would that “damage” look like? Whether nuclear or non-nuclear, multiple studies and surveys of experts suggest millions of innocent North Koreans, South Koreans, and Japanese could be killed in such a conflict, making the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan look like minor skirmishes in comparison.
Top U.S. officials seem to agree. Listen to Defense Secretary James Mattis, speaking to CBS News in May 2017: “A conflict in North Korea … would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”
Listen to Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in July 2017: “It would be a loss of life unlike any we have experienced in our lifetimes. Anyone who has been alive since World War II has never seen the loss of life that could occur if there’s a conflict on the Korean peninsula.”
Yet Graham, a former Air Force colonel and self-styled GOP “moderate,” thinks this unprecedented “loss of life” — millions of innocent men, women, and children shot, bombed, burned, starved, and gassed to death — would be “worth it.”
Why? Because non-American blood is cheap. Because non-American lives are considered collateral damage. Because the non-American victims of American bombs and bullets in faraway war zones — Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan — are what the British historian Mark Curtis calls “unpeople”: those whose “lives are deemed worthless, expendable in pursuit of power and commercial gain.”
Does that sound hyperbolic? Well, listen again to the Republican senator from South Carolina, who has form when it comes to calling for the killing of innocent civilians on the Korean peninsula. “If there’s going to be a war to stop [Kim Jong Un], it will be over there,” Graham told NBC’s “Today” show last August. “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here. And [Donald Trump’s] told me that to my face.” Graham continued: “That may be provocative, but not really. When you’re president of the United States, where does your allegiance lie? To the people of the United States.”
But what about an allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war? Or to international law, which forbids one country from attacking another? (“To initiate a war of aggression,” concluded the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, “is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”)
Above all else, how about an allegiance to basic morals and ethics? How in good conscience can any democratic politician demand the deliberate killing of millions of innocent human beings in a preventive — not a preemptive — war and then suggest that such a death toll would somehow be “worth it?” How is that not the mindset of a terrorist? Or of a sociopath?
Yet whether or not Graham is “out of his damn mind,” to quote former Obama-era National Security Council official Tommy Vietor, is besides the point. As Albright’s 1996 interview so vividly illustrated, showing indifference to the dark-skinned victims of U.S. wars, sanctions, and arms sales has always been a bipartisan habit in Washington, D.C. Remember: Dozens of top Democrats, including presidential candidates such as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, lined up to endorse President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and later ignored the growing number of Iraqi civilian casualties. “As difficult as [the Iraq war] was,” Leon Panetta, Obama’s defense secretary, nonchalantly remarked in 2011, “I think the price has been worth it.”
There’s that L’Oréal line again: Iraq, apparently, was “worth it.” For the record: In 2015, a detailed report co-authored by Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that at least 1.3 million people, and possibly “in excess of two million” people, had died as a result of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
So to be fair to Lindsey Graham, what’s another couple of million dead on the Korean peninsula?
Listening to U.S hawks breezily describe the devastating destruction of countries other than their own as “worth it,” in the name of “democracy” or “national security” or “stability,” provides us with an insight into their imperial and, yes, racist view of rest of the world. It is also a reminder of how political rhetoric is regularly deployed to justify, or even cover up, actions that would be deemed war crimes or acts of terror if they were carried out by anyone other than the United States. To borrow a line from George Orwell, the language of Graham, Albright, Panetta, and the rest “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
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