Few have ‘empowered’ Iran more than Lindsey Graham

When Republican senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul walked out of a military briefing Wednesday over the recent US attack that took out top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, they were not happy about how that exchange went.Sen. Paul said the briefing was ‘less than satisfying’, blasting the meeting as ‘insulting to logic and the Constitution’.A fiery Sen. Lee elaborated further. ‘I had hoped and expected to receive more information outlining the legal, factual, and moral justification for the attack,’ Lee said. ‘The briefing lasted only 75 minutes, whereupon our briefers left. This, however, is not the biggest problem I have with the briefing, which I would add was probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the United States Senate.’‘What I found so distressing about that briefing was that one of the messages that we received from the briefers was: do not debate, do not discuss the issue of appropriateness of further military intervention against Iran,’ Lee added. ‘And that if you do, you’ll be emboldening Iran.’Lee and Paul were accused of ’emboldening’ Iran by demanding moral justification for the US strike and questioning the constitutionality of the administration’s actions?Apparently, this was precisely the accusation leveled during the briefing, as evidenced by Sen. Lindsey Graham doubling down on that line of attack when he criticized Lee and Paul after the meeting.‘They’re libertarians,’ Graham said dismissively of the duo. ‘I think they’re overreacting, quite frankly. Go debate all you want to. I’m going to debate you.’‘Trust me, I’m going to let people know that at this moment in time to play this game with the War Powers Act, whether you mean to or not, you’re empowering the enemy,’ Graham charged. He’s got to be kidding.Lee and Paul are no doubt libertarian-leaning Republicans. Sen. Graham is also no doubt their polar opposite within the party — an authoritarian-leaning Republican who sees few civil liberties worth protecting and even fewer wars not worth fighting.Yet it has been Graham’s overall foreign policy agenda that has unquestionably emboldened and empowered Iran more than anything else this century.In January 2019, the United States Army released an assessment of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. ‘In terms of geostrategic consequences, the war produced profound consequences,’ the document read