Fritz Hollings: Iraq War Skeptic Who Foresaw Israel's Role
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- Fritz Hollings, Graham's predecessor as South Carolina's senior senator, served 38 years and was the lone senator to vote against a 2003 resolution supporting troops in Iraq, calling the vote "political games."
- In a May 2004 Post and Courier column, Hollings argued the Iraq War was "President Bush's policy to secure Israel," naming Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer as "cheerleaders" for the invasion.
- Hollings drew heavily on the 1996 paper "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," written for Netanyahu by Perle, which advocated removing Saddam Hussein as a pillar of Israel's regional security.
- The Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman and Sen. John Kerry, then the Democrats' presumptive 2004 nominee, publicly accused Hollings of antisemitism; Hollings refused to apologize and never recanted before dying in 2019.
- Lindsey Graham, who died July 11 at 71, is cast as the Cold War's last neoconservative hawk, proudly loyal to the U.S.–Israel relationship and to wars in Iraq, Syria, Iran and Libya as joint American-Israeli interests.
- The piece frames Hollings' once-controversial critique as vindicated, citing recent congressional votes to strip military aid from Israel and shifting Democratic primaries as evidence his party has caught up.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposition leader Yair Lapid are reportedly attending Graham's memorial Tuesday at the National Cathedral, with Wednesday services in South Carolina.
Why it matters: The obituary reframes a decade of bipartisan foreign-policy consensus: a position that made a sitting senator a pariah in 2004 — that the Iraq War was waged partly for Israel — is now the working assumption of a growing bloc of congressional Democrats who voted this year to defund Israeli military aid. The contrast between Hollings' 2003 lone "no" vote and this year's aid-stripping vote marks the clearest internal Democratic break from the neoconservative Graham era on Middle East policy.
