Lindsey Graham, the bellicose South Carolina senator full of empty conservative promises and love of mass amnesty for illegal aliens, responded to the Hamas terror attacks in Israel by promptly calling for the U.S. military to attack Iran and destroy its oil refineries.  

Of all the ways we could cripple Iran’s (or Joe Biden’s) financing of Hamas (forbidding Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Joe Biden from handing the world’s leading State-sponsor of terrorism billions of dollars each year would be an excellent start), Graham goes straight to the option that will see already exorbitantly high oil prices skyrocket even further.  It sure is perplexing (not!) how every policy proposal coming from D.C. (regardless of nominal party affiliation) conveniently advances Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” agenda to make private car ownership unaffordable and windmill-powered scooter rentals slightly more appealing.  Graham wants $500/barrel oil and a new “religious war” in the powder keg that is the Middle East — quite the splashy platform for winning over the hippy, Birkenstock-wearing, Earth-worshiping slice of the electorate dedicated to waging war against “people of color.”  

While Sean Penn and Hollywood’s other mental midgets push oil prices up with their steadfast support for death and slaughter in Ukraine, Graham will do the same with his sights set on Iran.  And the “Green New Deal” cult will continue to profit from its unspoken creed: “Make War, not Love” in order to “Save the Planet.”

Of course, Graham’s target audience is not American peaceniks-turned-Ukraine-war-hawks but rather American patriots willing to shed blood for their countrymen.  He seeks to use patriots’ love of God and country to dupe them into fighting for higher oil prices while tap-dancing into yet another endless war with unclear mission objectives and vague definitions of victory.  After a decade-plus of Obama, Biden, and Kerry propping up the Ayatollah’s Nazi State with pallets of cash and undeserved geopolitical clout, shouldn’t the Iran-appeasers be the first ones shoved to the front lines of any future conflict?  Before American patriots again risk life and limb for D.C.’s deadly policies, shouldn’t those most responsible for elevating Iran’s evil regime to the nuclear club first pay the debt they owe to the rest of the world for their misguided, if not malevolent, assistance in making Khamenei’s theocratic dictatorship even more dangerous?     

Fat chance of that happening.  It is Washington’s errant policymakers who always march us into war with their malfeasance, but it is ordinary Americans who ultimately pay the price.  While the permanent ruling class makes a fortune selling U.S. government influence to our enemies, those same Potomac princelings always find a way to hide far in the back of the pack when hostilities draw near.  They cheerlead for war but witness its viciousness only on television screens from the safety of brown leather fainting couches and with the liquid courage that perpetual happy hour provides.

War felt like an excellent idea after 9/11, too.  After several decades of intermittent Islamic terror attacks on American tourists, embassies, barracks, and vessels, 9/11’s murderous wreckage briefly united the country in common desire for retribution.  Responding to a multi-pronged sneak attack comparable to Pearl Harbor seemed righteous and necessary, and patriots quickly volunteered for the fight.  For their service and sacrifice, however, the U.S. government has been an untrustworthy partner.

American warriors spent two decades fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan — leaving their families behind for years at a time — only to have Obama hand the former over to Iranian sympathizers and Biden hand the latter right back to the Taliban.  Taxpayers spent trillions of dollars to decisively defeat Islamic terrorism around the world only to watch that malignant evil posing as a religion mutate into the equally lethal variants spreading today.  After the briefest period of moral clarity in which officeholders rallied against political Islamism, false accusations of “Islamophobia” eventually became more rampant than needed denouncements of Islamic extremism.  

Even after nineteen 9/11 hijackers took advantage of America’s lax immigration laws to carry out their attack, the federal government has still done nothing to secure our borders or deport the tens of millions of unvetted illegal aliens who continue to arrive.  One of the rallying cries in the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was that we would either “fight them over there or over here.”  After resettling into the continental U.S. hundreds of thousands of displaced migrants from those war zones (some deserving refugees, to be sure, but entirely too many who should be on terrorist watch lists), it is becoming regretfully clear that “fighting them over there” has meant that we will also be “fighting them over here” in the not-so-distant future.  

Perhaps most devastating for the long-term survival of the United States, all of the post-9/11 security enhancements purportedly geared toward preventing Islamic terrorism — from the Patriot Act to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security — have been transformed into tools for unconstitutionally spying on Americans, minimizing their freedoms, censoring their speech, criminalizing their dissent, and targeting them as “domestic terrorists.”  An entire generation of Americans has not only been conditioned to let TSA screeners pat them down at the airport but also to permit the federal government to determine what can be written online and spoken out loud.  DHS and other intelligence agencies regularly conduct disinformation campaigns against the American people while simultaneously censoring Americans who notice.  From “promoting democracy abroad” to “saving democracy” at home, the national security surveillance State serves only to preserve and amplify the power of the federal government with hostile disregard for what American citizens have to say.

After 9/11, had the U.S. government told Americans, “We will sacrifice thousands of American warriors, leave tens of thousands suffering from wounds for the rest of their lives, waste trillions of dollars, and inflict extensive damage on the civilian populations of Iraq and Afghanistan as collateral damage only to invite our former enemies to resettle across the country, further weaken the nation’s porous borders, increase oil prices, use the Patriot Act to harass salt-of-the-earth Americans, and accuse anybody still upset about 9/11 of being a hateful racist,” we would not have spent the last two decades at war.  Americans would have buried their dead, said their prayers, and figured out how to replace the permanent ruling class occupying D.C. with new representatives more faithful to their constitutional oaths and more concerned with preserving the freedoms and security of the American people.

The 9/11 Islamic terror attacks wounded America, but the federal government’s response to those attacks has inflicted permanent damage.  At best, subsequent war plans and national security reforms were ill-conceived; at worst, they were calculated and intentional usurpations of Americans’ rights and freedoms under the guise of “patriotic duty.”

That being the case, whenever a chickenhawk such as Lindsey Graham starts clucking for war, prudent Americans should ask serious questions.  What would a war in Iran look like?  What is the ultimate objective?  Is it achievable?  What is the potential for unacceptable collateral damage or unjustifiably risky retaliation?  Would American warriors be given the weapons and authorities to engage the enemy effectively, or would they be forced to tie one hand behind their backs, as they have in almost every drawn-out conflict since WWII?  Are we fighting to win quickly and decisively, or will warriors be made to serve as part of an occupying force?  Would war with Iran require resettling half of Iran’s population inside the United States?  Will the federal government use its war footing to further deprive Americans of their rights and liberties?

After two decades of brutal consequences, American patriots have grown wise.

Image: WolfBlur via Pixabay, Pixabay License.