Well, John Kerry is out there. I don’t know what it is. I get under this guy’s skin. He put a press release, a statement, on his website on Friday telling me to go get a doughnut or to stop getting a doughnut (laughing) and instead pull out a history book, because he didn’t like what I said about Democrats’ position on Israel versus Bush and Republicans. We have that coming up. Morton Kondracke! I don’t know what’s happening to these guys. I don’t know what’s happening to people on our side. I don’t think Mort’s really on our side, but he called me a ‘hot dog’ again. He called me a hot dog and (laughing) compared me to these kooks on the Democrat blogs, on his little-watched television show, The Beltway Boys, on the Fox News Channel on the throwaway Saturday time slot.
We’ll have that coming up. There’s a big controversy. (I don’t know how big it is.) In some circles of the conservative movement there is controversy raging over the comments Bill Buckley made in a CBS interview about George W. Bush, saying he’s not conservative, and that the Iraq war was a mistake and so forth. We’ll weigh in on all this as the program unfolds today. First, let’s start with what is troubling me here in the Middle East conflict, not the least of which is Kofi Annan on television again here. You know, have you people heard this phrase going around today and over the weekend called ‘sustainable ceasefire’? It’s a diplomatic term: sustainable ceasefire.
The diplomats are trying to come up with a sustainable ceasefire that would leave in place a terrorist organization, Hezbollah, as — in effect as — a functioning sovereign government. That’s the diplospeak that’s going on right now, and I’m also going to tell you this. I’m a little perplexed at Israel’s restraint. This is not the old Israel. This is not the way Israel used to go in and fight people that took shots at her. There’s a new paradigm. I was hoping that political correctness and the feminization of cultures had not reached Israel in the way it defended itself — and Ralph Peters, (who I’m going to be interviewing after the program today for the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter), had a piece over the weekend in which he said if Israel keeps fighting like this they’re destined to lose this, and that’s the worst thing that could happen because Israel is fighting this for us.
You know something? Can I give you a phrase? I think this is profound, and I think that it ought to shock you. Right now, the Iraqis are fighting Al-Qaeda in Iraq for our sake. The Israelis are fighting Hezbollah and Iran for our sake. There are a number of skirmishes going on out there that are for our sake that we’re not actually getting involved in, and this is one of them, this thing in Israel is one of them — and of course we don’t dare get involved in it. I’ve got a monolog coming pretty soon, because I was thinking about this over the weekend while I was in my hermit mode. I do some of my best thinking when I’m in hermit mode because
Nobody. Nobody. I didn’t talk to a soul, folks, other than via e-mail now and then. I don’t think I uttered a word all weekend. There was nobody in the house. I went nowhere, didn’t leave — and as a result, I did some of my best thinking. (interruption) What? What do you mean, ‘What did I eat?’ What does that got to do…? Wha…? The food was prepared for me prior to their departure on Friday, enough to last the weekend and then some. I don’t think I said a word to anybody. I really don’t. I might have laughed watching television a couple times but I didn’t say a word to anybody. I had zero contact. But I’m just telling you, I was on the go for 21 days. I needed it. I needed to chill out. I closed all the shades to keep the media on the beach from being able to get pictures because I was running around unshaven and unkempt. (interruption)
Oh, yeah, I was. I didn’t go outside. I did not even go outside. I had the paper delivered inside, but I didn’t see it happen. I just know it happened because the paper there was. You keep interrupting me here. I did some of my best thinking. I always do in these circumstances, and a monolog coming up, I think, on the similarities between Al-Qaeda and the Cold War and the communists and the way we look at both, the threat posed by both. What got me on this is I think people wonder, ‘Rush, what’s happened to Pat Buchanan? What’s happened to Bill Buckley? What’s going on there?’ and I think it’s more complicated than what I’m going to say to explain, but a simple answer is, in the case of Buchanan, when the Cold War was over and we defeated the Soviets, that was it.
The enemy was dead and it’s time to retreat and come home. No other business around the world is ours. In the case of Mr. Buckley… Well, we’ll get to him later because we’ve got the sound bites from his interview with CBS. I don’t know, for example, if he said anything positive about Bush that they left on the cutting room floor when they edited this or whether this was live-to-tape. I have no idea, but I don’t think that people are taking this quite seriously enough, some people aren’t, the full scope of this enemy, militant Islam, Islamofascism — and the call for sustainable peace or sustainable ceasefire and appeasement and containment seeks, it seems to me, to repeat the mistakes of old. I’m very, very troubled by it. Anyway, just a little news before we get to the thoughts of the monolog.
Condoleezza Rice shocked everybody by showing up in Beirut. Everybody thought she was going to be heading to Jerusalem. ‘She met with the prime minister of Lebanon and made clear that any resolution to the conflict had to remove Hezbollah missiles and terrorism from the southern border and that Lebanon’s government had to assume sovereignty over its territory. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with the Lebanese prime minister,’ reading off a news story. ”If there is a cessation of hostilities the government of Lebanon is going to have to be the party,’ she said. ‘Let’s treat government of Lebanon as the sovereign government that it is.” No question. No doubt.
The Bush administration wants the Lebanese government to assert itself and be in charge of all that happens within its borders, and that is understandable and reasonable to excpect, but are these guys capable of rooting out Hezbollah? Are they capable of keeping them out if they root them out? Don’t forget, Syria’s infiltrated this place. You go up there and try to talk to Syria, I’m just going to tell you right now it’s going to be a waste of time. But, you know, this whole business of making a ceasefire agreement, sustainable or otherwise, with a
‘IDF intelligence believes that Hezbollah has ten days left before diplomatic pressure puts an end to Operation Change of Direction against Hezbollah.’ This is in the Jerusalem Post yesterday. ‘In addition, the IDF military intelligence, reflecting its latest strategic assessment, believes that the Islamist group has already been dealt a severe blow by the IDF operation launched 13 days ago and that within a month it will run out of Katyusha rockets to fire at Israel, and they won’t be able to be resupplied.’ They’re having a problem being resupplied because Israel has taken out the infrastructure, the airports, the ships, there’s a blockade and so forth. Wise move there.
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RUSH: Doesn’t it strike you as sort of scary if I were to say to you, ‘Israel must win for our sake; Iraq must win for our sake’? Does that not send a little bit of a chill up your spine? Maybe you disagree with it. Maybe you don’t think Israel has to win this. Maybe you don’t think Hezbollah has to be vanquished. Maybe you don’t think that it’s that big a deal. ‘It’s just part of the Middle East skirmish, Rush. Come on, Rush, lighten up.’ Nah, this is different. This is different this time. Whereas last week I was optimistic that people are understanding you don’t make ceasefire deals with terrorists; you don’t let ’em hang around. You can’t make ceasefires with them — I know John Bolton is still talking that way, but there’s so much appeasement talk, so much diplospeak going on.
Kofi Annan ought to be
The movie did open. I forget the name of it, too, and it did play in places but I don’t think it did that well, but their thesis was that, hey, the Soviet Union has just been replaced with a new worldwide enemy and it is militant Islam, and the movie drew comparisons. I don’t remember too many of the comparisons the movie made, but it did get me to thinking about this over the weekend. Let’s draw some analogies, shall we? Terrorism is spreading, just as communism did. They’re not spreading exactly the same way, but Islamofascism is on the move just as the communists were, in Africa, in Asia, in Iran (which is a non-Arab state), in the Philippines, and within our own country — and I think, actually, this is a little bit more dangerous in many ways, as it is a
You can’t criticize the fundamental aspects of militant Islam because it’s their religion. Witnesss the cartoon fiasco that the Dutch endured and that inflamed, ostensibly, much of the world. Of course, the world media sides with this. “Oh, yes, we must all have religious freedom and nobody can say that anybody’s religion is extreme, is a faith-based belief system” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but because it’s a religious based ideology it can hole up in churches, mosques or what have you. You know, in the old days when we have arguments about communism, many communists in this country — and they were here — they ran and hid. The worst thing in the world was to be called a communist. It was harmful, and that’s why the McCarthy era was what it was, why it roused so many and ruffled so many feathers. 
But in this case, it’s a religion, and you can’t argue with a religion. You really can’t argue. They’re articles of faith and so forth. What you have here is an ideology that is bent on world domination as best it can, that hides behind a religion in practically every way it can. It’s very smart, by the way, in doing this. I don’t think this is happenstance or coincidental. These guys are also, I think, more dangerous than the old communists were because the communists operated out of nation states. Now, they funded terrorism, and they established little base camps around the world like Cuba and Nicaragua, but their mission there was to always have nuclear weapons pointed at us and to foment disruption and unrest in other parts of the hemisphere.
But these Islamofascists, I think, are even more dangerous because it only takes a handful of them to unleash all kinds of hell, and they don’t have to conquer countries to do it. They just have to move in, just have to move in and establish a neighborhood. Just have to establish a mosque. They don’t have to go in with guns blazing and take over Nicaragua or Cuba or anything of the sort. More reason to fight this wherever it is, is simply because we are fighting through satellites as well directly. Iraq, Israel, Somalia, et cetera. Nobody wants to really call this what it is. It
These clowns are trying to take over Africa as we speak, Indonesia, and they’re making inroads, and of course they do it, as I say, as a religion. It’s not a perfect comparison here, folks, and I’m not trying to say that this is a flawless analogy, but there are similarities which ought not be ignored — and I think it’s important to point this out. I think it might be easier for some people to wrap their brains around what we’re fighting and how we’re fighting it if for example there’s some way to analogize it. It’s not conventional in any way, this war, and it’s not nation states. Look at what we’re having: arguments here over whether terrorists who are no more than enemy combatants have constitutional rights as though they were American citizens! It’s silly.
That Hamdan decision from the US Supreme Court was an absolute mistake. It may be a cloud with a silver lining given the congressional action, hopefully, that will follow it. You know, Mr. Buckley is opposed to the Iraq war. He doesn’t think we should have gone. He doesn’t think it’s been a success. In fact, it’s a huge failure. But he supported the Vietnam War, and he supported the Vietnam War not because it would defeat the Soviets or the Chinese, but because it was part of the war against the Soviets — and to the old cold warriors, the Soviet Union was enemy #1, and it was. I mean, they were not wrong. But the failure to see what has
The North Vietnamese never had weapons of mass destruction. They never sought to assassinate an American president. But it was a righteous effort by us to stop the spread of communism. That was our objective. We might have goofed up in not understanding the vagaries of nationalism and pride on the part of Vietnamese people, the north Vietnamese people. We might have made some mistakes in that area, but the intentions were honorable. We were trying to stop the spread of communism which tortured its people, set up political internment camps, slaughtered millions. Again, don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that the old commies and the current terrorists are exactly the same, but I’m saying that there are strong similarities which have to be understood and distinctions that make them more and not less dangerous.
The communists killed tens of millions. They conquered large areas. They had large standing armies. The terrorists don’t have large standing armies, obviously, and they don’t need them. We’re in the era now where they can get hold of weapons of mass destruction and they don’t need large standing armies. They don’t need nation states behind them, although they do. My only point here, folks, is that we have to fight this enemy directly and through allies: Israel, Iraq, tribal leaders in Somalia. Their fight is our fight. I don’t want to be confusing to anybody. I’m drawing this parallel in a
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RUSH: I have just a couple more thoughts on this. I’ll get to your phone calls. We got a lot of audio sound bites today, lot of stuff in the stacks of stuff. I’m going to try to pare this down and get as much in today as I can. This enemy, the Islamofascists, like the communists attack where they can. They attack in different ways. They’re more nimble. In many ways they’re more dangerous, because it doesn’t take much anymore to blow up cities with millions of people, not nearly as much as it did back when the Cold War was at its peak. But let’s not forget — and I don’t want you to think I have — Stalin and Mao did in fact kill tens of millions of their own citizens. They were dangerous guys. The Cambodian communists killed around three million — and the list goes on.
There’s no question in my mind that if this enemy could do that, they would, and when they can, they will. What worries me more than anything: I’m hearing all these critics and all these diplomats and they’re out there doing the same-old same-old that’s led to failure after failure after failure and that is requesting all these ceasefires and new resolutions, and now this idiocy, this sustainable ceasefire! What is than at that an admission of? The whole term ‘sustainable ceasefire’ means the previous ones have bombed out. (Poor choice of words but pretty accurate.) So now we need a
The problem is the opponents of us fighting this war — the US opponents, the opponents of Israel — they have no
That is as lame and intellectually bankrupt as anything anybody of supposed stature could say. Come on, senator. Tell us what your plan is!
‘Well, I don’t know a plan ’til I get in the White House! I don’t know what’s been hidden from me in terms of strategy and so forth! You know how this administration is, Limbaugh. Go have a doughnut!’
(Laughing.) Really. I don’t hear any alternative. I hear no suggestions. I hear no answers. I hear no answers from Pat Buchanan. I hear no answers from Mr. Buckley. I hear no answers from John Kerry. I hear no answers from answers from Howard Dean. I hear no answers from Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, or whoever, name it, whoever it is that opposes all this. I yet to have heard a solution, or have yet to hear a solution or an answer on how to pursue this enemy.
But I think you and I, folks, agree at a minimum that we should support those allies who
‘But, Rush! But, Rush! They’re such a small band of just misguided little people. You know, they’re so old-fashioned. They just come from Middle Ages. We can understand how they feel, Rush, given the Jewish aggression against them all these years. They’ve been displaced from their homes. It just isn’t fair to them and as such, they’re entitled to address their grievances.’
That’s the common way that ‘victims’ are accorded their latitude in responding or replying. That propaganda has been extremely effective over the decades. There’s no historical context to any of it, no historical truth to any of it, and in all of the reporting, all we hear is how rotten the Israelis are. We’re now starting to get video of wounded Lebanese children (gasping) with burns over massive amounts of their poor bodies (gasping), and the Israelis are responsible for that.
We don’t get
We also get no context whatsoever on all the peace deals that have been made and bombed out. We have no reporting. I have yet to see any network just put up a graph describing all the ceasefires, all the peace agreements, the Oslo Accords, whatever they were. I don’t see any of this on television demonstrating how every damned one of them has failed. All we get is, ‘There must be a ceasefire! There has to be a ceasefire! We must have a cessation of hostilities! We’ve got to stop the fighting we have to stop the violence! We have to stop killing.’ No, only until we kill the bad guys to the point that they
CALLER: Rush, you do have the answer right there. Just go ahead and let the Israelis do their job: kill the terrorists.
RUSH: Well, I’m not sure the Israelis are willing to do it. The Israelis have now signaled their agreement to allow another international force to come in and act as a ‘buffer.’ They don’t want a UN force but they’ll accept a NATO force. This is not the old Israel.
CALLER: What did we do in Tora Bora? In Tora Bora, we were accused of getting the terrorists up in Tora Bora and then letting them slip out. Now we’re doing the same thing here. We’re doing the same thing here. The Israelis know where the terrorists are; they know where they’re at they, can go in and kill them, and what are we doing? We’re talking about negotiating a peace treaty.! Now, the Democrats told us that we ‘let Osama bin Laden escape.’ Now, why are we turning around on the other hand and saying let the Israelis — telling the Israelis to let the terrorists escape? That doesn’t make sense to me.
RUSH: Well, look, there’s a possibility here. I’m reminded of the old days of Ronaldus Magnus. I have to laugh, by the way. ‘Thirteenth Day of Fighting,’ is the graphic. Thirteenth day? Try 40th year. What is this Thirteenth Day of Fighting? That’s another thing that’s missing is the historical context and the historical perspective. It’s not the Thirteenth day of fighting. This is just one skirmish in this war that’s been going ever since the UN resolution in ’48
We do know that Condoleezza Rice and President Bush are not putting the brakes on Israel. They’re not even putting the pressure on them. But they are moving in asking for a ceasefire, and one can only hope that this is just for public consumption and that under the table they are doing what Reagan did and goosing the Israelis and saying, ‘You go, guys,’ but the Israelis in the old days they would have sent tremendous ground troops in and they would have — I know there’s some hidden weapons in tunnels and this sort of thing, but you have to understand why I’m saying this. Hezbollah can win this thing even if they lose it. All they have to do is survive.
All they have to do is survive, and all that has to happen is for there to have been a perception that the world did not really take these guys out. Look, we’re talking about perception. You know in politics perception is often reality. You’ve got the terrormasters in Iran. You’ve got old Mahmoud, and Mahmoud has got three or four different strategies going here at the same time, based on what happens here. You’ve got what’s-his-face up there, Bashar Assad in Syria, and these guys and the Chinese are watching as well. So here’s what happens. If Hezbollah survives in any way, shape, manner or form, then it is going to be perceived by terrormasters in Iran that there really isn’t the stomach for dealing with them and dealing seriously with them.
You have to understand. Since Saddam is off the table, there’s a thing going on in the Arab world:
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