Graham Platner, the Democratic hopeful running for the US Senate in Maine to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, delivered a sharp rebuke Saturday to the war of choice launched against Iran last week by President Donald Trump—the kind of messaging, say anti-war progressives, that every lawmaker or politician seeking office should be giving in the face of a military campaign that a majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, adamantly oppose.
“We can all see what is happening right now,” said Platner outside Collins’ offices in downtown Portland, Maine on Saturday. “At least with the war in Iraq, they had the decency to try to trick us for months. At least they made Colin Powell go sully his name in front of the UN to try to trick us into thinking WMDs were real. At least then they tried to convince us that it was necessary. This time around, they’re just doing it.”
And the Trump administration is doing it, he continued, “because we have a system that does not hold people accountable. We have a Congress that for decades has abdicate its constitutional role in war making. It never should have been an option that a president can just start a huge regional conflict because he’s afraid we’re going to find out he might be a pedophile.”
In a vote in the Senate on Wednesday, Collins sided against a War Powers Resolution that would have curbed Trump’s ability to wage the war that has already killed more than 1,300 civilians, a large portion of them children. While the joint US-Israeli operation has unleashed chaos across the Middle East and been denounced as a criminal war of aggression by experts, Collins argued that passing the resolution “would send the wrong message to Iran and our troops.”
Platner, who served multiple tours of combat duty in Afghanistan and Iraq as both a Marine and Army infantry soldier, expressed outrage at how willing politicians like Collins are to send young Americans off to kill and die for wars that bring such horror and carnage abroad while costing US taxpayers billions at home.
“Susan Collins is more interested in protecting the wealthy and the powerful. She is more interested in protecting the profits of the defense industry. She’s more interested in protecting the interests of her AIPAC donors,” Platner told the crowd, ripping Collins for her vote against the resolution. “She is more interested in all of that, than in protecting the sacred resource that is the lives of young American men and women who are willing to put their lives on the line for this country. She is more interested in their profits than the shame that we bring upon ourselves when we kill children.”
On the first day of US bombing last week, a school in the southeastern town of Minab was struck, killing an estimated 165 civilians, most of them young students.
Norman Solomon, national director of the progressive advocacy group RootsAction, said “the content and location” of Platner’s remarks made them “doubly vital” and that other lawmakers and politicians would be wise to follow his lead and that others in the US should replicate such rallies where they live.
Across the country, Solomon told Common Dreams, “members of Congress who’ve voted for more high-tech slaughter in Iran are smugly going on with routine business in their offices, insulated from the murderous effects of their political positions. They do not deserve insulation, they deserve nonviolent and militant confrontation.”
Showing up at local district offices of their members of Congress, “to protest with clear moral messaging” like those in Maine over the weekend, said Solomon, “is long overdue and should become widespread. Most of us don’t live far from such offices. Why should politicians who enable mass murder from the skies be able to run their offices every day as though nothing is amiss?”
“Antiwar speeches and picket lines with moral clarity should become standard aspects of the political environment at the decentralized congressional offices,” he said, “that for far too long have been aloof from the carnage and human anguish that craven elected officials continue to inflict.”
Platner has emerged as a potent anti-war voice in the week since Trump launched the US assault on Iran, repeatedly invoking the trauma he suffered and the horrors of war he witnessed as a soldier as a way to condemn repeating history, especially by lawmakers like Collins who appeared to have learned no lessons from the experience of the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Talking to reporters after Saturday’s rally, Platner referred to both Trump and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as “morons” with no plan to get out of the mess they’ve created.
“I don’t think these people have any idea what they’re doing,” Plater said. “And the problem with that is that that incompetent leadership is going to result in dead Americans—and it already has—and it’s going to result in a region thrust into chaos and bloodshed.”
If lawmakers won’t stand up to stop Trump’s war, Platner toldNews Center Maine in an interview that it will ultimately be up to the American people to organize and force an end to the conflict.
“The people who are going to send their sons and daughters off to fight, the people who are going to see their friends and families maimed and killed in combat, the people who are going to have to pay for all of this instead of getting health care,” said Platner, “we need to stand together and show the political class in this country that we are not going to stand another foreign war.”
In a separate post on Saturday, Platner reached out to Trump voters who may be disappointed or disillusioned after the warmongering of a president who told voters he would act to end wars in his second term, not start them.
“To all of those who voted for Trump,” said Platner, “hoping for an end to stupid foreign wars: We may not agree on everything, but I promise to never waste your hard-earned money on a pointless quagmire in the Middle East.”