Before Lindsey there was Fritz, an anti-Iraq war, Israel skeptic

Funeral services for Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly on July 11 at the age of 71, will take place on Tuesday in Washington and Wednesday in his home state of South Carolina.

Graham was known as an astute conservative politician, a military hawk, and an ardent defender of Israel, which made him a polarizing figure in today’s political climate. Along with many world leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid will be attending the memorial at the National Cathedral, according to reports.

But before Graham there was Democratic Sen. Fritz Hollings, with whom Graham served for two years as the junior senator for South Carolina before the older man retired in January 2005 at the age of 83.

Unlike Graham, who became the senate’s standard bearer for military intervention and a boundless champion for Israel, Hollings left the Senate after 38 years deeply conflicted about the war in Iraq (he voted for it in 2002 but reversed course and became a vocal critic) and of Israel, which made him a controversial (though prescient) figure. He finished out his career accused of anti-semitism — an accusation that at the time did little to temper his attitude.

Without using the term “America First,” he openly wondered whether the U.S. was too subservient to Israel’s agenda and criticized by name the role of Israel’s neoconservative supporters, suggesting they pushed Washington into one of its most disastrous wars of the modern era.

Hollings wrote in Charleston’s Post and Courier in May 2004:

Even President Bush acknowledges that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11… Of course there were no weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s intelligence, Mossad, knows what’s going on in Iraq. They are the best. They have to know. Israel’s survival depends on knowing. Israel long since would have taken us to the weapons of mass destruction if there were any or if they had been removed. With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country?

“The answer,” Hollings surmised, was ”President Bush’s policy to secure Israel.” He called out then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, and Fox News pundit and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer for advancing the idea “that the way to guarantee Israel’s security is to spread democracy in the area.”

He was referring in part to the paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which was written for Netanyahu in 1996 by Perle (with contributions from Doug Feith, who later worked as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Bush Pentagon during the war).

It advocated in part taking Saddam Hussein out of power in Iraq as a new approach to Israel’s security in the region.

“He [Bush] was determined to invade and democratize Iraq to secure Israel pursuant to Richard Perle’s plan of ‘Clean Break,'” Hollings wrote in his 2008 memoir. “When George W. Bush was elected president, proponents of ‘Clean Break’ hit pay dirt. Suddenly, those who favored striking at Iraq held seats of power.”

Hollings was one of the first lawmakers to sour on the war. Barely six months after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, he was the only senator to vote against a resolution supporting the troops, calling it “political games.” Hollings criticized Bush for pushing tax cuts instead of funding the war. “If we really supported our troops, we’d pay for this war,” he said. “Instead, we’re telling our troops that they not only have to fight the war, they have to come home and pay for it, too.”

Hollings wished that Bush had elected to stay out of Baghdad altogether, like his father. “Papa Bush said, ‘Never lead American troops into an urban guerrilla warfare and bog down in a quagmire and turn the Arab world against us,'” Hollings told CBS News’ Mike Wallace on his way out of Congress in late 2004.

Later he would compare Iraq to the Vietnam War. “It’s a mistake to try to build and destroy a nation at the same time,” Hollings wrote in his autobiography. He said that the U.S. was “repeating the same wrongheaded strategy in Iraq.”

He consistently asserted what others did at the time: that Bush the younger was trying to accomplish what his father couldn’t or didn’t in Iraq in 1991, adding that Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives in his inner circle spurred on his decisions.

“I mean, (George H.W. Bush) was against going into Baghdad,” Hollings surmised. “But I think George W. wanted to say, ‘I can do what Daddy can’t. I’m gonna show him that he should have gone on and everything else of that kind.’ And it wasn’t a problem. And of course he had the cheerleaders: Pearl and Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld and everything saying, ‘Whoopie!'”

After his retirement, Hollings contended that the Iraq war killed more people than the U.S. supposedly tried to liberate, creating more terrorists and helping to lionize al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 architect Osama Bin Laden in parts of the Middle East.

Hollings’ controversial column suggesting the U.S. fought in Iraq for Israel’s security was published on May 10, 2004. He was inevitably, and swiftly, accused of anti-semitism. He did not back down.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in a May 24 article entitled, “Not So Gentle Rhetoric from the Gentleman for South Carolina,” reported that “several American Jewish organizations reacted strongly to Hollings’ column, accusing him of ‘scapegoating the Jewish community and providing ammunition for anti-Semitic attacks.’”

Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, said Hollings’ comments that “Bush felt tax cuts would hold his crowd together and spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats” was particularly egregious.

“Regardless of whether one feels that America’s war on Iraq was justified, the charge that it is being fought by the U.S. on behalf of Israel grossly misrepresents the legitimate U.S. interests that are involved in the debate,” he said in a letter to Hollings.

Nevertheless, Hollings said “I don’t apologize for this column.”

“I want them to apologize to me (for accusing me) of anti-Semitism,” he said.

That the Iraq war was fought in part for Israel of course remains a source of debate, with critics of Hollings — and even critics of the war — saying that while Netanyahu may have talked up the Iraq invasion, he and his government did not play a role in the final decision to go to war. Feith even said afterwards Israel was more focused on Iran, not Iraq, at the time.

Fellow Democratic senator John Kerry, who would be nominated as the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee just two months after the column was published, called Hollings’ comments at the time “absurd.”

“Comments such as these lend credence to unacceptable and baseless antisemitic stereotypes that have no place in America or anywhere else,” Kerry said.

Sen. Hollings died in 2019 and, to this writer’s knowledge, never recanted any of it.

There’s a case to be made that Lindsey Graham was the last of the Cold War breed. Many call him a neoconservative, too, because he was proudly loyal to the “ironclad” U.S-Israel relationship and to Israel’s security. To him, Washington’s wars in Iraq, Syria, Iran and Libya were in both American and Israeli interests. They were partners, and he was willing to sacrifice American blood and treasure for that bond.

Fritz Hollings would disagree. Many of his fellow Democrats are feeling that way today, too, as evidenced in recent congressional primaries and the vote to strip military aid from Israel in the federal budget. The American people, as evidenced in recent polls, are feeling it too.

South Carolinians will mourn the death of one son this week; but it is worth remembering the words of an older, and perhaps wiser, one today.