Al Jazeera:

By Mariamne Everett

Lindsey Graham, the veteran Republican senator who has been pushing for war against Iran for decades, has issued a dire warning to the Iranian government, saying it was worth spending money to “take this regime down”.

“When this regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going [to] make a tonne of money,” Graham, a longtime proponent of US military intervention abroad, told Fox News on Sunday.

Graham, who has been one of the Trump administration’s most vocal supporters of Israel and the war against Iran, appeared to suggest that the US abduction of Venezuela’s left-wing leader Nicolas Maduro and the attack on Iran were launched to gain control over each country’s oil supplies.

“Venezuela and Iran have 31 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We’re going to have a partnership with 31 percent of the known reserves. This is China’s nightmare. This is a good investment,” said Graham.

US wants to ‘partition country, take oil’
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei on Monday accused the US of seeking to take control of Iran’s oil resources.

“Their design is clear, their enterprise is quite obvious – they aim at partitioning our country to take illegal possession of our oil riches,” he said. “Their objective is to violate our sovereignty, defeat our people and undermine our humanity.”

The US-Israeli attacks on Tehran, Graham said, will further escalate over the coming two weeks. The US was going to “blow the hell out of these people”, Graham said, adding “nobody will threaten [the US] in the Strait of Hormuz again”.

“This regime is in a death throe now, it is gonna be on its knees, it’s going to fall, and when it falls we’re going to have peace like no other time, we’re going to have prosperity unlike anyone could ever imagine,” Graham told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo.

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