Pat Buchanan Democrats

Pat Buchanan was on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday, but more noteworthy than Buchanan’s predictable anti-Israel fulminations was the tacit agreement with Buchanan voiced by Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who sought his party’s presidential nomination early in the 2004 campaign cycle.

Graham sat silently while Buchanan attacked Israel, nodding in agreement on occasion. And when he finally did speak he revealed just how much he has in common with Buchanan. The difference, of course, is that Buchanan has become a marginal figure on the Right, with no standing in the Republican party, while Graham is about as mainstream a Democrat as you’ll find.

When it comes to blaming U.S. policy for Islamic terrorism and complaining that President Bush has not been “fully engaged with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Graham is a Buchananite through and through – a Buchanan Democrat, to coin a phrase, as are a distressing number of his fellow party members.

Russert started the exchange by reading a passage from Buchanan’s new book. (Graham is also out with a book, which he refers to in his comments below).

MR. RUSSERT: ‘U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here. And while their acts were murderous and despicable, behind their atrocities lay a political motive. We were attacked because of our imperial presence on the sacred soil of the land of Mecca and Medina, because of our enemies’ perception that we were strangling the Iraqi people with sanctions and preparing to attack a second time, and because of our uncritical support of the Likud regime of Ariel Sharon’ in Israel.

MR. BUCHANAN: Sure. That’s one of the reasons given by Osama bin Laden. In his fatwa of 1998, he wrote that there are three causes of the problems and three causes for a declaration of war by all Arabs and good Muslims against the United States. One, America’s imperial presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. Secondly, the sanctions policy against Iraq which was persecuting and basically starving, he said, the Iraqi people, and we were planning another invasion. Third is the United States’ uncritical support of the Ariel Sharon regime in Israel, which he argued is persecuting the Palestinian people.

In my judgment … this one-sided support for Sharon, the refusal to condemn that wall snaking through the West Bank, the agreement to support Sharon’s claim to virtually half of the West Bank, this has caused enormous hostility and animosity and hatred for this country in that part of the world, not just among the Palestinians. And if we want to drain off some of this hatred, this venom against us, we have got to adopt a more evenhanded policy here.

We have got to stand up for the same rights for the Palestinian people, a homeland, a nation, a state of their own, a viable one, on the land their forefathers farmed for a thousand years, because those are first our principles and secondly, that is in the national interest of the United States of America. I don’t care what Ariel Sharon believes.

MR. RUSSERT: They are not attacking us because they hate us and hate our culture?

MR. BUCHANAN: This is the fundamental point. Are they attacking us because of who we are and what they believe or are they attacking us because of what we do? I believe it is our policies, not our principles that are causing these attacks….

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Graham, you buy that theory?

SEN. GRAHAM: I think that our policies have been the key to the terrorist motivation. In the book, you’ll see several discussions with leaders in Egypt and Syria and Lebanon, and they all point to the urgency of the United States being fully engaged with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to try to bring it to a resolution and a concern that President Bush has not been significantly committed to achieving that goal.