Those who hated him, a group that spans no small share of the internet, pointed to a February interview with Hadley Gamble of Sky News. Gamble noted that Israel had flattened Gaza, and Graham responded in a tone that read less like grim acceptance than outright endorsement, saying, “Just flatten it. We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo.”

The clip united detractors of Graham, on the Left and the Right alike, and even caused his allies to squirm.

I am among those squirmers.

To be clear, I agree with Graham’s fundamental stance toward the Middle East — that eliminating the Islamic Republic of Iran is a precondition for peace. Like Graham, I believe it is a malignant force, motivated by an evil theology that demands the eradication of Israel and global Islamic domination. Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is no less than a matter of survival for the West.

That’s because, as President Donald Trump rightly insisted Monday, Iran would use a nuclear bomb to annihilate Israel — and the regime wouldn’t blink.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not an ordinary villain of history, but a uniquely dangerous cult animated by an apocalyptic eschatology. It is not driven by money or power but by the fulfillment of a religious prophecy.

It does not want to negotiate; it wants leverage — the fabled “Iranian moderate” will never emerge from this regime. It just wants to watch the world burn. And so it must be destroyed.

This simple and powerful logic animated Graham’s worldview. His consistent application of it made him a bulwark against an emerging consensus, on both the Left and the Right, that America can simply look away.

Yet the Sky News clip lingers uncomfortably. Does Graham’s logic, or anything, justify “flattening” a city and burying thousands of women and children beneath the rubble?

What’s more, does his apparent enthusiasm for doing so speak to something darker beneath his aw-shucks manner — or was he simply saying out loud what total victory over an enemy like Hamas, propped up and armed by Iran’s Islamic Revolution, actually requires?

Graham’s supporters shouldn’t sidestep the discomfort. Supporting the logic of a war does not mean assenting to every proposed means. Neither does admiring one aspect of a fallen leader mean he must be canonized in full.

Watching how the exchange with Gamble unfolded allows for a more careful reckoning with these questions.

“Many people in this part of the world say what happened in Gaza does not align with Christian values: killing children, killing mothers, killing families who are not militants,” Gamble began.

Graham cut her off: “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t buy that at all. Because what did we do in World War II? Did we think for one minute about starving the Germans? Did we bomb every city into smithereens? So this is war.”

One exchange deep, both sides are already distorting the record. Gamble’s framing erases Israel’s basic right to self-defense after Oct. 7, 2023, and Hamas’s use of human shields, casting a nation that has repeatedly ceded land for peace as a colonial aggressor.

Meanwhile, Graham’s response erases the very real Allied reckoning with civilian suffering in World War II, framing the matter of innocent suffering as irrelevant. The idea that the Allies didn’t “think for one minute about starving the Germans,” for instance, is simply untrue — and saying so paints the Allies in a villainous light, a framing that would delight both the Right’s isolationist wing and the Left’s harshest critics of America.

In the United Kingdom, debate raged over the morality of the eight-month naval blockade Britain imposed on Germany after the fighting ended in World War I. Hard-liners backed the blockade to force Germany’s hand at Versailles, but others saw the resulting civilian malnutrition and excess mortality as needlessly cruel.

John Maynard Keynes, for one, resigned from the British Treasury delegation at Versailles in protest, later writing that the peace terms would starve and radicalize the very people they were meant to punish. Within a generation, history proved him right.

The pattern held in World War II. Winston Churchill privately distanced himself from the Dresden firebombing even as his own government had approved it. Dozens of Manhattan Project scientists petitioned President Harry Truman not to drop the bomb on a city at all without warning. None of it was done lightly.

Indeed, the debate about the morality of these events rages on. Some historians still argue that the bombs saved millions of lives that an invasion would have cost. Others argue in earnest that nothing could possibly justify incinerating tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Others still maintain the bombings were never really about Japan at all — the real target was Joseph Stalin and the Cold War that was about to commence.

Graham’s insistence that we didn’t “think for one minute” about any of this erases the very real moral reckoning that occurred and reduces the gravest of all possible decisions to a shrug. Worse, it lends the impression that Americans and our allies are above such concerns. This is exactly the caricature our enemies use to paint America as the real villain.

And yes, it does say something about Graham the man.

The most charitable explanation is that Graham’s comments were merely sloppy — a hallmark of Graham’s long career as a maximalist, showman-like advocate for military intervention. Gamble’s framing seemed to get under his skin, and in the heat of the exchange, he matched glib for glib.

That explanation is comforting. But on multiple viewings of the clip, it’s hard to sustain.

It’s no surprise that Graham believed that total war was justified in World War II, nor that he didn’t feel the need to hide it. But his enthusiasm for it during the interview is unnerving — he appears jarringly comfortable with mass civilian death.

“Without military victory, there is no hope of breaking radicalism,” Graham said later in the interview — correctly, I believe, and with admirable resolve.

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“We flattened Germany, we flattened Japan,” he then repeated with relish.

And it is that enthusiasm in his voice that rattles me — leaving me struggling to weigh the late senator’s legacy and unwilling to pretend the question resolves easily.