Graham to announce WH bid on June 1

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) will announce his expected bid for the White House on June 1, he told “CBS This Morning.”

Graham will make the announcement from South Carolina, an early primary state.

{mosads}The hawkish senator will be seen as a long shot for the White House, but could have a big influence on the GOP’s discussion of foreign policy and national security. 

“I’m running because of what you see on television, I’m running because I think the world is falling apart,” Graham said. “I’ve been more right than wrong on foreign policy.”

The hawkish lawmaker has for months signaled that a White House bid was likely, taking his aggressive-foreign-policy-oriented message to the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

On a question that Jeb Bush struggled to answer last week, Graham said if he knew then what he knows now on Iraq, he would have handled the decision to go to war in 2003 differently.

“Saddam Hussein was shooting at our airplanes. He was denying U.N. inspectors access to sites, he was gassing his own people. He needed to go,” Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on CBS.

“But if I knew the intelligence was faulty, I would have reconfigured,” he added. 

Graham suggested Monday that the question before those pursuing the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 should be whether they would commit American troops in Iraq and Syria to combat Islamic militants. 

“I’m afraid that more American soldiers will die in Iraq, eventually in Syria, to protect our homeland,” said Graham, who advocates “somewhere around 10,000” troops to reclaim areas taken by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. 

— This story was updated 9:04 a.m.