The vote before the Senate on Wednesday was simple: Should the United States give Israel another $20 billion in weapons, largely paid for by the American taxpayer? (The Senate voted overwhelmingly to continue the arms transfer.) But Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) had something quite different in mind. He took the opportunity to promote the “historic opportunity” to “change the region and change the world” by permanently committing U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia.
That vision is bipartisan, at least as far as Graham is concerned. The Republican senator bragged about his work with the Biden administration over the past two years “to try and build out the Abraham Accords,” the agreements between Israel and several Arab states.
“What I would like to do with President [Joe] Biden before he leaves office is to work with President [Donald] Trump, the incoming president, and President Biden, the outgoing president, to find a solution,” Graham said. “Can we lock down a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel that protects Saudi Arabia—a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia so they’re in our column and they have an antidote to Iranian aggression?”
Saudi Arabia has been demanding a defense pact modeled on the U.S. treaties with Japan and South Korea, which compel American troops to fight and die in those countries’ defense. And the Biden administration has been eager to provide that guarantee. According to investigative journalist Bob Woodward’s recent book, Graham told Biden in private that he wanted to work together “to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia.”
Graham took Wednesday’s debate on Israel as an opportunity to sell a U.S.-Saudi military alliance as a way to lighten Israel’s burden. “Somebody other than Israel has to come in and take over Gaza and reform the West Bank to give the Palestinians a better life. It will not be the United States. We can’t do that. It’s certainly not going to be Israel. Well, who will it be? It would be the Arab world,” Graham said.
However, he immediately made it clear that he also considered propping up the Saudi government a goal in its own right. “The crown prince of Saudi Arabia has a vision for his country and the region that I buy into,” Graham said, noting that Saudi women have been allowed to drive since 2018 and leave the house without a male guardian since 2019. Both of these things have been legal in the rest of the Middle East, including Iran and the Palestinian territories, for decades.
Graham compared his vision to the “generation-plus” struggle to reshape Germany and Japan after World War II. He held up photos of atomic bombings in Japan as an example of what victory took back then, and said that Nazi Germany was not as bad as Hamas. In the process, Graham appeared to declare holy war on Shiism, the denomination that 10 percent of Muslims around the world belong to.
“The religious doctrines of the Shiites in charge [of Iran] compel them to kill all the Jews,” he claimed. “That’s not what Islam teaches most Muslims, but they believe it.”
Graham’s office did not immediately respond to an email asking to clarify whether he was talking about all Shiites. Perhaps the long trips to Saudi Arabia have rubbed off on him; Saudi school textbooks have come under fire for denigrating Shiites (as well as Jews and Christians) as enemies of pure Sunni Islam.
Taking sides in Middle Eastern religious struggles is necessary because Iran and its allies “want to control the region and remake it in their own image,” Graham warned. Therefore, America has to control the region and remake it in Saudi Arabia’s image.
Graham was not the only senator to use Wednesday’s Senate debate on Israel to make a case for permanent U.S. military presence elsewhere in the world. Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) accused Biden of “giving away” Diego Garcia, an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean home to a U.S. bomber base, in order to “in an effort to curry favor with the people at the United Nations who walk around with their NPR tote bags and their organic broccoli.”
Britain, which controls Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands, has been locked in decades-long legal disputes with the nearby nation of Mauritius. In order to resolve those cases, Britain agreed to transfer the Chagos Islands to Mauritian control and Mauritius agreed to lease Diego Garcia to the U.S. for 99 years. Kennedy wasn’t satisfied with 99 years, and enraged with the idea that Washington now has to pay rent.
“They’re giving it away!” he complained, his voice wavering, while gesturing at a Google Maps printout of the Indian Ocean. That’s the mood in some quarters of Washington now—shock and horror at the idea that America would ever give up trying to control and reshape the world.
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