There will be funerals this week in Washington, D.C., and in South Carolina for Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly from a heart condition on July 11. The fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Washington for Graham's national funeral is striking evidence of the late senator's enormous influence in matters of U.S. foreign policy and national defense.
The funerals take place amid growing intensity in the campaign to replace Graham. There will be a special Republican primary to find a new Republican nominee in South Carolina. It will be a rushed affair; once Graham's funeral is over Wednesday, there will be all of 12 days to campaign before the voting. If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, there will be a runoff on Aug. 25.
The most prominent candidate, of course, is Graham's sister, Darline Graham, who was chosen as his temporary successor by Republican Gov. Henry McMaster and has been enthusiastically endorsed by President Donald Trump. It's easy to simply assume that Darline Graham can prevail because of her name, but in various conversations around the state, there are reasons to believe the result is in no way a done deal. Republican Reps. Ralph Norman and Russell Fry, the two leading figures besides Graham, are already campaigning hard.
Norman has announced endorsements from GOP Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah, as well as former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint and Rep. Nancy Mace. Fry is traveling the state and has announced the endorsements of 43 Republican members of the state legislature. Both men are eager to participate in debates, with at least two scheduled so far. So the race will be a real, if severely truncated, contest.
But this week is about Lindsey Graham. And amid the tributes, there have been startling new revelations about perhaps the most consequential achievement of Graham's 31 years in Congress: the U.S. war with Iran.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Graham granted British documentary filmmaker Alex Holder extraordinary access to film him in virtually all aspects of his life. The result is "an unvarnished look at Graham's yearslong quest to topple the Iranian regime," the Journal reported.
The film—which is not finished and will be made from hundreds of hours of video made of Graham over the last three years—suggests Graham was even more hawkish on the war in Iran than we knew. Among other things, he strategized with Netanyahu in early March on how to get the U.S. more involved in the war than it already was. Graham "planned to travel to Florida ... to persuade President Trump to join Israel in the bombing of Hezbollah in Lebanon," the Journal reported. He was dissuaded from the plan by Netanyahu himself, who thought it was too aggressive a move for Israel's interests.
The video also shows Graham discussing the day U.S. and Israeli forces began the attack on Iran. "Look what we've done here. I almost cried," he said, according to the Journal report. "How long have we been pushing this?" The paper reported that Graham said the president was happy, too. "I talked to Trump this morning," Graham said. "He's jacked. He said, 'best thing I have ever done.' He loves blowing stuff up."
The video makes clear that Graham had a decidedly optimistic view about how the war would work out. He thought that within a month the Iranian regime would "start losing control of some cities," and that with Arab involvement, the U.S. and Israel would "have almost irreversible momentum." It hasn't turned out that way, at least so far.
Graham was certainly not the only voice urging Trump to go to war, but starting the war was Graham's greatest goal. In March, an article in Politico described Graham's lobbying campaign, conducted in offices and golf courses, to convince Trump to act. Graham told Politico that he told Trump that bringing down the Iranian regime would be a world historical achievement. "I told him before he took office ... if you can collapse this terrorist regime, that's Berlin Wall stuff," Graham told Politico.
Now, Graham's death has robbed pro-war advocates in Washington of one of their most effective and well-connected voices. Was there anyone as strongly pro-war and as tight with the president of the United States as Lindsey Graham? Probably not. Sure, there are other determined pro-war voices. But they have lost a real, and possibly irreplaceable, source of strength.
This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/4665386/final-lindsey-graham-moment-dc-south-carolina/.
Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner. Email him at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. For a deeper dive into many of the topics Byron covers, listen to his podcast, The Byron York Show, available on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet.com/series/byron-york-show and everywhere else podcasts are found.
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