Veteran Graham Platner is attacking Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s vote to authorize the war in his campaign to unseat her.
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BAR HARBOR, Maine — Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) voted to authorize the Iraq War over two decades ago.
Graham Platner (D) served three tours in Iraq.
That dynamic between a longtime Senate incumbent and an upstart liberal challenger is becoming a clear policy disagreement in one of the nation’s most high-profile Senate races, thrusting the politics of the Iraq War back to the forefront of an American election. Platner is driving the focus on the war, tying it to the Iran conflict he hopes will imperil Collins’s bid.
“We’ve watched her for decades vote to support these stupid, pointless foreign wars like the one she voted to send me off to fight,” Platner told a crowd in this resort town Friday night. “Susan Collins hasn’t met a war she didn’t like.”
Platner’s three combat tours in Iraq have also become a key defense of the candidate as he weathers allegations that he sent sexually explicit text messages to women while married and had volatile relationships with women. He told his supporters at the rally he went through a period of “darkness” when he returned from war and was battling untreated PTSD, and he feels that past has been “weaponized” against him.
“We broke thousands of young men by sending them into dumb wars,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) said after Platner spoke, praising his effort to become a “better man” in recent years.
For over a decade after the war began in 2003, the unpopular conflict dominated politics, and a lawmaker’s position on the war was a frequent campaign attack. But the issue largely faded from the campaign trail after the 2016 presidential election, in which both Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and Republican nominee Donald Trump in the general lambasted former senator Hillary Clinton for authorizing the war.
Now, the issue is back at the forefront in Maine. Collins hit back against Platner in late May by noting he chose to enlist in the Marines during the Iraq War.
“I respect anyone who steps forward to serve their country, but the fact is that was Platner’s decision to serve. He was not drafted,” Collins told reporters.
The comment incensed Platner, who in an interview with The Washington Post on May 29 described Collins’s view as “a wild, wild thing to believe” and argued that it shows the senator “has learned no lessons” about her support for the Iraq War.
“When running against someone like me who has lived the material consequences of her bad decisions,” Platner said, “I don’t really think she knows what to do with that.”
Collins defended her Iraq War vote in a statement to The Post, saying she was addressing the “greatest terrorist attack in our history.”
President George W. Bush’s administration’s “decision to protect the United States against terrorism was a logical response to that attack in my judgment,” Collins said, before noting that the vote was bipartisan and included now Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Delaware). No federal investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including the congressional joint inquiry, found any evidence linking Iraq to the attacks.
In her 2002 speech announcing her support for the war, Collins cited then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.
None were found, and Powell has acknowledged the intelligence he was using at the time was misleading, calling his push to war a “lasting blot” on his record.
Collins described herself in her statement as “one of the leading advocates for reasserting Congress’s war powers authorities” no matter which party controls the White House.
At Platner’s rally in Bar Harbor, some voters cited his service as a reason they continued to trust the candidate during one of the worst weeks of his campaign so far. Platner had already explained to voters last fall that some controversial posts he made on Reddit were due to PTSD.
“He’s been very open about his life and his mental state when he returned,” said Kathleen Grover, a 73-year-old retiree. “If I had been in Iraq all that time, I would have come back a complete nut job.”
Although a majority of Americans supported military action in the months before the Iraq War, support quickly plummeted.
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“People were just tired. And they wondered why we had made these decisions and why we have sacrificed so much,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on the use of military force.
In 2006, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut) lost his primary campaign to Ned Lamont, who ran expressly on the incumbent’s support for the Iraq War. Lieberman held on to his seat by running as an independent in the general election.
“With this war in Iran, I feel like I’ve seen this movie before,” said Lamont, now the governor of Connecticut. “Politicians have short memories, as Iran has shown us. What did we learn from our experience in Iraq 20 years ago?”
In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois) frequently attacked Clinton for voting to authorize the war. After defeating Clinton in the primary, Obama used a similar argument against Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), accusing him of following “George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq.”
The politics of the war became less potent after the conflict ended in 2011 and lawmakers who had voted to support it began to retire.
That has the Senate race in Maine looking something like a throwback, with Collins, 73, running for a sixth term against Platner, 41.
Iraq War Army veterans Alex Vindman in Florida and Seth Bodnar in Montana are also running for Senate, but not against incumbents who voted to authorize the war. Both are opposed to the war in Iran, in part, because of their service in Iraq.
Majority Forward, a Democratic super PAC, is running ads in Maine attacking Collins for initially voting against a measure that would have reined in Trump’s war in Iran. In late April, as the war dragged on, she began voting for the resolution, saying Trump exceeded the 60-day deadline to act without Congress under the War Powers Act.
In a sign that Republicans believe they need to shore up veteran support for Collins, the GOP group One Nation announced a $3 million ad campaign focused on the senator’s work for veterans in Maine.
Platner, despite getting thrown out of a 2002 Bush rally in Bangor for protesting the looming conflict, joined the Marines in 2004. He later deployed to Afghanistan as a member of the National Guard and said that he “had wanted to be a soldier since I was about 3 years old” despite being “very critical of my government.”
“I did everything I could to stop the war. The war came anyway,” Platner said. “And when the war came, I still felt like it was my duty to my country to enlist. So I did.”
Platner said his experience in combat showed him “there is a true human cost to” decisions made in places like the Senate. “It is what put me on a path of being incredibly critical of the American political establishment,” he said.
Platner’s military service has been injected into the race because of a Fox News report about vulgar comments the veteran made on Reddit in 2019 about the actions of a Purple Heart recipient who was nearly killed in a 2012 firefight in Afghanistan.
“Dumb motherf—er didn’t deserve to live,” Platner wrote in now-deleted posts.
Platner, in the interview with The Post, declined to say whether he regretted the comments, but he said “it was a totally different time in my life” and that he was “not going to stand by language I used” or “ways that I describe things.”
“When you’re an infantry small-unit leader, when you engage in combat, you are deeply, deeply critical of both yourself and other small-unit leaders, because it’s life and death,” Platner said.
That line of defense has frustrated some veterans, including Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
“I am always in support of veterans running for office, but not at the expense of the integrity of the broader community,” said Rieckhoff, a political independent. “There are plenty of us who have advocated for greater mental health support. … I don’t know anybody who has used it as an excuse for their bad behavior.”
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