If you want to understand how a baby-faced freshman Republican Senator from conservative South Carolina has come to be standing against President George W. Bush on the issue of how to interrogate and try terrorism suspects, it helps to know how Lindsey Graham spent part of his summer. A month ago, when most Senators were back home campaigning and fund raising, he was in Kabul, Afghanistan, answering to "Colonel." Wearing desert fatigues, with an M9 pistol strapped to his hip, Graham was conducting a two-day tutorial on the principles of U.S. military law at the Afghan Defense Ministry. He recalls coaching Afghan military lawyers, who are modeling their system after that of the U.S.: "It's important that when the troops act badly, they are punished to keep good order and discipline, but it's equally important that people believe that the punishment and the system itself are fair." The only Senator now serving in the National Guard or reserve, and the first in decades to do military duty in a combat zone, Graham adds, "It has to be based on what the person did and not who the person is."
That's pretty much the same argument that Graham is making back in Washington, where he is helping turn what looked like a smart political strategy into an internecine battle among Republicans on Capitol Hill. White House and congressional leaders had hoped that focusing on terrorism in the final months before a tight midterm election would give their party an advantage over the Democrats. But they didn't count on a rebellion in their own ranks, made worse by the fact that it is led by Graham and two more senior members of the Armed Services Committee who also have impressive military credentials: chairman John Warner, a former Secretary of the Navy who was a Marine ground officer in the Korean War, four years before Graham was born; and John McCain, a former Navy pilot whose father and grandfather were admirals and who still suffers from what he endured during 5 1/2 years in a North Vietnamese POW camp.