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Bob Graham Was Among the Rare Dissenters to Dare Resist Bush’s Iraq War Lies and Follies

April 19, 2024 | FlaglerLive | 6 Comments

Bob Graham speaking at an Obama campaign rally at the Tallahassee Senior Center in September 2008. (Florida Memory)
Bob Graham speaking at an Obama campaign rally at the Tallahassee Senior Center in September 2008. (Florida Memory)

By Dick Polman

How sad it is that few Americans have heard of Bob Graham, who died Tuesday at 87, because this guy was truly a profile in courage when we needed it most. And how sad it was, at a pivot point in our history, that few of his fellow Senate Democrats heeded his prescient words of warning.

Graham was many things in life – a Florida senator and governor who connected with voters by creating what he called “workdays,” guest-laboring as a bellhop, plumber, tomato picker, citrus packer, and road paver – but most of all he deserves to be remembered for defying the litany of lies ginned up by the George W. Bush regime to justify an invasion of Iraq. If only we had more Grahams today, to cut a swath through our Orwellian disinformation culture.




War fever was rampant in October of 2002 – 9/11 was still raw – and Team Bush was busy smearing anyone who voiced any qualms about kicking butt. Dissent was deemed “unpatriotic.” But Bob Graham had qualms and refused to knuckle under.

The Senate, in a bipartisan capitulation, voted to give Bush the authority to launch his preemptive war against Saddam Hussein despite zero evidence the dictator had any weapons of mass destruction. Most Senate Democrats voted yes, clearly afraid of being tagged as “soft” on national security. The capitulators included virtually every Democrat with presidential ambitions: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Joe Biden.

Graham had presidential ambitions, too. But unlike the others, he told the unvarnished truth. When he sought the 2004 Democratic nomination (he dropped out early because he needed heart surgery), he said stuff on the campaign trail that was very uncool at the time. Such as: “The quagmire in Iraq is a distraction that the Bush administration, and the Bush administration alone, has created. (Bush has) knowingly deceived the American people.”

Only 21 Senate Democrats voted no on that fateful day back in 2002. Graham, chairman of the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, was arguably the most prominent naysayer. He thumbed his nose at the war mob because – unlike most of his Democratic colleagues – he actually did his homework.




Shortly before the big Senate vote, he was “stunned” (his word) to learn the Bush team had never asked the intelligence community to formally assess whether Hussein actually possessed WMDs. How are we supposed to know whether Hussein has such weapons, Graham asked, if there’s no official assessment? Are we supposed to just take Bush and Cheney at their word?

ocd flaglerliveGraham invoked his senatorial authority to order an official assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Three weeks later, the intel community complied. Graham read the 90 classified pages and saw there was no hard evidence that Hussein had WMDs. Indeed, Graham said later, the report featured “vigorous dissents.” He also learned that the intel community had no sources inside Iraq, nobody on the ground who could verify the Bush-Cheney pre-war spin.

But most of his fellow Dems didn’t read the report. Instead they relied on a declassified 25-page version that was released to the public. Magically, none of the dissenting opinions appeared in the sanitized report.

On Oct. 11 the senators voted on whether to give Bush his blank check. But first, they debated. Graham’s words would stand the test of time. He said that invading Iraq, which had no role in 9/11, would detract from the mission to find 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. It is wrong, he said, “to focus our military and intelligence resources on the wrong target.” He quoted Churchill, who once warned that those who surrender to wrong-headed war fever become “the slaves of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.” Graham said: “With sadness, I predict we will live to regret this day.”




And so we did. We spent $728 billion on the Iraq war (according to the Defense Department), we logged 4,492 Americans killed in action, we treated 32,292 wounded Americans (health costs not included in that $728 billion), we killed roughly 200,000 Iraqi civilians, and we destabilized that region of the Middle East.

Graham took no pleasure in being right about what he later called “one of the most serious security mistakes in the history of the United States.” The tragedy is that so few of his colleagues had the guts to follow his lead.

He once said, “We need to make a greater investment in human intelligence.” Given the pandemic of stupidity in our current political discourse, that strikes me as sound advice – and a worthy epitaph.

dick polman columnistDick Polman is the national political columnist at Philadelphia NPR affiliate WHYY, and has covered or chronicled every presidential campaign since 1988. A Philadelphia resident, Dick roamed the country for most of his 22 years at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has been blogging daily since 2006. He’s currently on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as “Writer in Residence.” He has been a frequent guest on C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, and various NPR shows – most notably Philadelphia’s “Radio Times” on WHYY-FM. He is cited by the Columbia Journalism Review website as one of the nation’s top political scribes, and by ABC News’ online political tip sheet as “one of the finest political journalists of his generation.”

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Laurel says

    April 20, 2024 at 3:40 pm

    Graham was the real deal. I remember that he really did go to different jobs and worked right along next to the working people. Nothing like today’s snowflake, who claims to be our retribution while whining about the courtroom being too cold, or Mr. Nopersonality who works in the dark taking away Floridian’s rights.

    We miss you Bob! We need more like you.

  2. Denise Calderwood says

    April 20, 2024 at 9:23 pm

    Bob Graham was a great influence on me and it is a great loss. He came to Bunnell Elementary when I was eight years old on one of those workdays. I happened to spill hot coffee on him and he was very gracious. Several years later he came back to Flagler and I reintroduced myself to him by bringing him coffee again but that time not spilling it on him! Very few leaders read all the documents. He was the exception!

  3. Skeptic says

    April 21, 2024 at 12:14 pm

    Interesting that we haven’t learned. We now have a hawkish administration that’s spending billions and billions of our money on more foreign wars, but the best this writer does is focus on the distant past. Say what you want, but Trump didn’t get us into more war. I think that’s why the media (owned by the same people who finance wars) hate him. Follow the money folks, not the narrative.

  4. William Moya says

    April 21, 2024 at 12:37 pm

    At least read who the “capitulators” were.

  5. Laurel says

    April 21, 2024 at 2:32 pm

    Skeptic: You apparently are not skeptical enough! If you are excepting of a man, who sells his own version of the bible, puts his children in high government positions, is fact checked as a liar thousands of times, cares about the Constitution only when it suits him personally and otherwise would be happy to remove it permanently, then maybe you should be a bit more skeptical, for find a more suitable handle.

  6. Jane Gentile-Youd says

    April 21, 2024 at 2:58 pm

    Bob Graham and his wife Adele were loved by all their neighbors in the town of Miami Lakes created by the Graham family and which is now a City which boasts trees trees trees, green, green and nightlife very similar to Coral Gables in a smaller setting but lots of ‘lakes’…
    The famous night November 2000 the night Gore won the Presidency , then oops, no he lost …. Mark and I were in the same large room as Bob Graham, Bob Butter worth in the Fountainbleau So Fl. Democratic Headquarters and we all gasped together after we won for about 2 or 3 or was it 4 minutes….

    Mark had a chance to thank him in person that very night for his office staff’s help in tracing down Mark’s Citizenship Papers to Miami from San Diego or somewhere in California in time for Mark to become a US Citizen and vote in the November 2000 election. – Whew – in late August then Senator Graham’s office called us – after less than 1 week of working on this – they found Mark’s papers – they set his ‘final interview’ for him ( at the then Dupont Plaza) and we attended the big Official Swearing In ceremony in Miami Beach and headed for the Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections herself to register Mark to vote as a US Citizen.. Mark was so proud to thank Bob Graham in person although the night was a bummer for everyone in the room and every Democrat across the nation.

    He was a real person with a real smile.

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