President Trump once said about Senator Lindsey Graham that he “would like to stay in the Middle East for the next thousand years with thousands of soldiers and fighting other people’s wars.” This statement is critical to understanding why Senator Graham has announced that he won’t bring Barack Hussein Obama before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain his role in Russia-gate. Graham knows that Obama targeted Trump National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn because Flynn was opposed to the Obama policy of using the CIA to destabilize the Middle East and bring the Muslim Brotherhood and other Jihadist forces to power.

But here’s the kicker: Graham and the late Senator John McCain were blood brothers with Obama in promoting the “Arab spring” uprisings in the Middle East that left 560,000 dead in Syria alone when a civil war ensued. To make matters worse, the Russians won anyway.

This is a real scandal, in contrast to the phony allegations against Trump that Graham friend and collaborator John McCain gave to the FBI in the form of the Steele dossier. What’s more, it was Graham who actually encouraged McCain to go to the FBI with this bogus document, which was based on Russian disinformation.

Any simple Google search discloses many stories about the “secret” operations ordered by Obama and carried out by John Brennan’s CIA that sent arms through Saudi Arabia and Qatar into the hands of “rebels” in the Middle East that turned out to include Jihadists. The New York Times estimated the cost of the CIA program at $1 billion.

So-called “moderate” forces supported by the U.S. even admitted some of their weapons went to groups like al Qaeda and ISIS.

Incredibly, Graham and McCain turned on Obama only when he failed to escalate the wars even further. They had sought 20,000 more U.S. ground troops in Syria and Iraq in 2015.

These "dirty wars,” a major blot on America’s reputation and standing in the world, are critical to understanding Obama’s involvement in the plot to prevent Flynn from serving as Trump’s National Security Adviser. Remember that Obama had fired Flynn from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and then Flynn campaigned for candidate Trump, who promised an end to unwinnable foreign wars. This was a direct challenge to Obama’s legacy.

Flynn was appointed Trump’s National Security Adviser shortly before an illegal leak to the Washington Post made a “scandal” of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian Ambassador. Flynn was forced out, framed by the FBI, and pleaded guilty under pressure to charges of lying. Belated recognition of the set-up has led the Justice Department to now drop the case against him (although a Clinton-appointed federal judge is trying to keep it alive).

Flynn has been unable to explain his side of the story because of the legal assault against him. But according to his writings and previously known public statements, Flynn considered America’s intelligence regarding the rise of Sunni terrorist groups in the Middle East to be flawed. Citing intelligence from the DIA, the agency he ran, he saw the Obama policies as producing more instability and chaos, even leading to the rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS. In short, Obama’s policy was producing more terrorists.

When Trump ended this disastrous policy in mid-2017, the Washington Post reported the news in a story headlined “Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow.” This was an attempt to keep Russia-gate, which was then underway, going full-speed ahead, by creating the impression that Trump was doing Moscow’s bidding. Echoing the Post, Lindsey Graham sent out a Tweet saying that if the story were true and the CIA program was ending, “it would be a complete capitulation to Assad, Russia, and Iran.”

In fact, using the CIA to destabilize the Assad regime in Syria had already backfired by provoking a Russian military response, in the form of intervention on behalf of Syria in 2015. Assad is still in power to this day, consolidating his victory, and so are the Iranian mullahs.

Eventually, Trump made another smart move – withdrawing U.S. military support for the Kurds, a Marxist-led group seeking their own independent state in the region that claimed to be fighting ISIS.

Wisely, Trump left this problem to the Turks, fellow members of NATO, who opposed U.S. support for the Kurds with good reason, since Kurdish groups have been waging war on Turkish civilians for decades. Trump understood that the Turks were the best defense against Syrian and Russian expansionist designs in the region.

At the same news conference where he rejected Graham’s Middle East policies, Trump went on to say, “The people of South Carolina don't want us to get into a war with Turkey, a NATO member, or with Syria. Let them fight their own wars. They've been fighting for a thousand years. Let them fight their own wars.”

Considering this tension between Trump and Graham (and Obama), Graham’s rejection of Trump’s request for Obama to testify at his upcoming Russia-gate hearings is unsurprising. He knows the truth would backfire on those who were co-conspirators in the Obama/CIA policy that led to so much death and destruction in the Middle East (and which Michael Flynn opposed). Clearly, Graham and McCain were on Obama’s side and bear some of the responsibility for the terrible loss of life in the region, not to mention the millions of refugees.

In order to deflect attention away from those “dirty wars,” the Steele dossier was peddled not only by the Democrats but by McCain and Graham to frame Flynn, Trump, and other officials as Russian agents. No matter how pro-Trump Graham today sounds, in his multiple appearances on Sean Hannity’s Fox program, the cold hard facts tell a different story.

Graham, who helped get Russia-gate started, is now going to hold hearings into how Russia-gate got started? That’s a joke. It’s even more laughable now that Graham says he won’t call Obama as a witness. Clearly, he wants to protect Obama. And by protecting Obama, he hides his bloody hands in Syria and his anti-Trump maneuvers that started Russia-gate in the first place.

*Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org