Lindsey Graham outdoes himself in warmongering with a new call for attacking North Korea:

“Would you be for a preemptive strike?” Today Show host Willie Geist asked the South Carolina Republican. “If that’s what it would take,” Graham replied resolutely. “It would be terrible but the war would be over here (there), wouldn’t be here,” Graham continued. “It would be bad for the Korean Peninsula. It would be bad for China. It would be bad for Japan, be bad for South Korea. It would be the end of North Korea. But what it would not do is hit America [bold mine-DL] and the only way it could ever come to America is with a missile.”

Graham routinely supports the most irresponsible, dangerous, and immoral policies, so it is not surprising that he is in favor of doing this. The striking thing about his answer is how cavalier he is about calling for starting a war that he admits would be disastrous for everyone in the region. Leave aside that he completely forgets about the tens of thousands of Americans stationed in South Korea that would come under immediate attack in retaliation for the so-called “preemptive strike” he wants. Note that the action he’s talking about wouldn’t actually be “preemptive,” but would be an unprovoked attack and the start of a major war. Leave it to Graham to find a way to find a North Korea policy so horrible that it puts the U.S. in the wrong.

The senator casually contemplates a course of action that would likely lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and destabilize the region for years to come and he shrugs it off by saying the war “wouldn’t be here.” It doesn’t shock me that a professional warmonger doesn’t care about the effects of this preferred policies, but it is a bit of a surprise that he is so open about his callous disregard for the lives of civilians and soldiers in South Korea and Japan who would pay the price for the act of aggression he supports. The next time you hear Graham feign concern for lives lost in some foreign conflict or pretend to be on the side of our allies, remember this answer and realize that his only desire is to get the U.S. into more unnecessary wars regardless of the consequences.