The veteran GOP senator appears to suggest that the war on Iran was launched to gain control over its oil supplies.
Lindsey Graham, the veteran Republican senator who has been pushing for war against Iran for decades, has issued a dire warning to the Iranian government, saying it was worth spending money to “take this regime down”.
“When this regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going [to] make a tonne of money,” Graham, a longtime proponent of US military intervention abroad, told Fox News on Sunday.
Graham, who has been one of the Trump administration’s most vocal supporters of Israel and the war against Iran, appeared to suggest that the US abduction of Venezuela’s left-wing leader Nicolas Maduro and the attack on Iran were launched to gain control over each country’s oil supplies.
“Venezuela and Iran have 31 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We’re going to have a partnership with 31 percent of the known reserves. This is China’s nightmare. This is a good investment,” said Graham.
US wants to ‘partition country, take oil’
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei on Monday accused the US of seeking to take control of Iran’s oil resources.
“Their design is clear, their enterprise is quite obvious – they aim at partitioning our country to take illegal possession of our oil riches,” he said. “Their objective is to violate our sovereignty, defeat our people and undermine our humanity.”
The US-Israeli attacks on Tehran, Graham said, will further escalate over the coming two weeks. The US was going to “blow the hell out of these people”, Graham said, adding “nobody will threaten [the US] in the Strait of Hormuz again”.
“This regime is in a death throe now, it is gonna be on its knees, it’s going to fall, and when it falls we’re going to have peace like no other time, we’re going to have prosperity unlike anyone could ever imagine,” Graham told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo.
After the US-Israel joint attack on Iran on February 28, Graham was one of the many Republicans who expressed support for it.
“An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be a dire threat to every American,” US President Donald Trump said on March 2.
The Trump administration justified the attacks, claiming Iran posed an imminent threat, a claim experts said was legally unfounded and an abuse of international law.
The war has also caused oil prices to top $100, affecting the global economy, as well as drawing retaliatory Iranian strikes on Gulf nations hosting US military assets. Oil and gas production has been hit, fuel tankers have been stranded, and airspace in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has been shut amid the Iranian attacks.
Several weeks before the latest war in the Middle East began, Graham made numerous trips to Israel to meet the members of Mossad, the country’s intelligence agency.
“They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” said Graham.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Graham also spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during these trips, “coaching him on how to lobby the president [Trump] for action”.
Netanyahu then showed Trump intelligence that “persuaded” him to launch the joint war on Iran, said the US senator. Israel has been pushing the US to go to war against Iran for decades, claiming Tehran planned to build nuclear bombs. Iran has reiterated that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes and that it has no ambition to make weapons.
“You see this hat? ‘Free Cuba.’ Stay tuned. The liberation of Cuba is upon us. We’re marching through the world. We’re clearing out the bad guys. Cuba is next.”
Trump and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the son of Cuban immigrants – have made no secret of their desire to bring about government change in Havana, which has been under a US trade embargo for decades after Fidel Castro led the revolution that toppled the pro-US dictator in 1959.
Washington re-established ties with Havana in 2015 under President Obama, but Trump reversed the policy during his first term as president.
