RUSH: Our previous caller made a point responding here also to David Bell’s piece in the LA Times Sunday, “Was 9/11 Really That bad?” The caller says we could have lost 45,000 if those planes had hit at a later time of day, if those towers had been more populated, had they not been able to extricate as many people from the second tower and the first after the first hit. The death toll could have been much, much higher. Then the Pentagon, had that plane hit in a different location, different angle, the Pentagon could have been a lot more death and damage there than was done, and we don’t know what else was in the works because air traffic control grounded every airplane shortly after the second attack, and it didn’t take them very long to get every airplane in US airspace down, every airplane coming from a foreign destination was diverted, and we shut down the air traffic system for four or five days.
Now, his point here is that Mr. Bell, 3,000, and 6500 total, no big deal. That damage was wrought by probably less than a hundred people that planned it, and it took no soldiers. It took 19 hijackers. Now, the cynical reaction to this would be to say to the caller, “But, sir, you’re missing Mr. Bell’s point. You are looking at what could have happened. We are looking at what did happen, and we are overreacting to it. You can’t say this could have happened or that could have happened, just like we can’t respond to what they say they want to do to us. We have to respond to what they actually can do to us.” And his point is they don’t have the ability to set off a nuke in this country yet, they don’t have the ability to wipe us out. Of course, to me, that is the ultimate sophistry, and we have, if you remember earlier this month, mimicking the hijackers who executed the 9/11 attacks, insurgents in Iraq reportedly tied to Al-Qaeda there considered using student visas to slip terrorists into the US to orchestrate similar but new attacks on American soil.
The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency testified to this because he captured documents, coalition forces captured documents during a raid of a safe house believed to house Iraqi members. So you’ve got the American left now building up the notion that we’re not a threat, we’re not really at great risk, let’s put it that way, we’re not at great risk. Yeah, a lot of people are threatening us and saying they want to wipe us out, but they can’t really do it, so we’re just really overreacting here. So the conclusion, we have to wait until they can pull it off to deal with them? You know, ladies and gentlemen, I was having a conversation over the weekend with a friend of mine about all this, and this friend of mine is really gung-ho. This friend wants to just deal with the enemy right now, not waste any time, thinks that we’re just really botching this in Iraq with the strategy, and by leaving Syria and Iran alone, that we are just totally blowing things sky high. I said to him, “The theory is that we would have to obliterate too many countries to wipe the militant Islamists off the face of the earth because they’re everywhere. They’re all over the place, and we can’t wipe out every country.”
He came back and said, ?Well, would FDR and Truman have thought that way during World War II? Why did they call it a world war? If we aren’t on offense, we’re on defense, and this enemy will not stop.? And I said, ?Yeah, but for all the talk about World War II, there were basically three countries: Japan, Germany, and Italy. Now we’re talking about the whole of the Middle East, Indonesia, parts of the Philippines, Chechnya, Bosnia, Turkey, they’re all over the place.?
He said, ?Okay, so I hear what you’re saying.? He knew I was playing devil’s advocate. ?I hear what you’re saying and that unfortunately is our strategy.? We can’t use our overwhelming firepower. We can’t take out Iraq. We can’t kill civilians. We would have lost World War II had we tied our hands the way we’re tying our hands now.
He says, ?By the way, I’m not saying attack all the countries where Muslims are or even where radical Muslims are. Iran and Syria are regimes that are giving safe haven to the enemy and attacking us, and, by the way, it wasn’t just three countries in World War II. It was scores of countries. I’m not aware of anybody saying that we should attack Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Yemen, all that’s baloney, but we can cut the heart out of the militant Islamist movement as it’s aimed at us by dealing with Iran now rather than waiting.? 
The theory is that if we take Mr. Bell’s approach, too: Just wait! Just wait until they are a threat or wait until they are powerful enough to deal with the threat, and then we’ll have to deal with it. And his point is:
CALLER: Hello, Rush.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Hey, I want to let you know this war is a complete and utter disaster, and I don’t know why you keep pushing — the troops, there’s over 3,000 died, and the Iraqi people are really suffering and losing their lives, too, for these neocon shills that is just absolutely ridiculous, they don’t understand that this is no big deal that these people lost their lives?
RUSH: No, wait a second. I am not saying that. One of your buddies is saying that in the LA Times, ?Was 9/11 really that bad?? He’s the one that’s now saying 3,000 soldiers not a big deal, 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, is not a big deal. You ought to be heralding this piece. He’s saying it’s no big deal now, after all of you guys and your clown buddies have been running around talking about how 3,000, it’s unacceptable and so forth. By the way, if any more of you liberals call here and start whining and moaning about Iraqi deaths I’m going to get really mad because you don’t care a whit about Iraqi deaths. You didn’t care when they were dying by the hundreds of thousands when Saddam ran the place, you don’t care about them now. You just want your country defeated. You want your country taught a lesson. You have this silly idealistic, pansy little notion in your head that war is bad and that somehow everything associated with it is bad, and you think it’s being done in your name. You personalize everything. You haven’t the slightest understanding of history. You have no concept of what peace really is and how it is achieved, and that is why this country dare not put people like you in real positions of power. If we ever do, and this threat hasn’t been dealt with, we’re cooked. Ed in Havelock, North Carolina. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: I’m fine and dandy.
CALLER: Sea turtles dittos, first thing. I’m a long-time listener and a first-time caller, but this morning I was surfing the news, and I heard Chuck — Chuckle Schumer, you know Chuckles for brains, Schumer for brains rather say the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard the liberal politician say.
RUSH: No, it can’t be, I don’t care what it was, it can’t be. That has not been officially recorded yet.
CALLER: Well, it was totally dumb, in any case. By what degree, somebody else will have to decide, but he was talking about the surge, he described it and said that we had no business patrolling the streets to prevent the Sunnis and Shi’as who have been hating themselves for centuries from fighting with each other and that we ought to be fighting terrorists, not Islamofascists. Well, excuse me, who does he think those terrorists are? Wow.
RUSH: Well, you have to put this in the context in which Senator Schumer meant it, and that see, you know, the left is pounding this. This is a sectarian civil war, this is neighborhood violence, and this is not terrorism, these are not the people that attack us. They’re trying to discredit the whole operation with that by drawing analogies to Vietnam, the civil war aspects and characteristics of that. But every time they open their mouths on things like this they do illustrate just as Sylvestre Reyes, the new chairman of the House intelligence committee has no clue whether Al-Qaeda is Sunni or whether it’s Shi’a. They don’t know who these people are. They think they can draw a distinction between people committing terrorist acts in Iraq and people like Al-Qaeda who commit terrorist acts against us and so forth. But terrorism is terrorism. And the insurgents are terrorists as well. I agree with you, it is apparent ignorance, but he’s not ignorant. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
Look it, folks, when you hear these Democrats and Hillary now talking about this, there’s something that you can never forget, and that is, they cannot afford now for the US to be victorious in Iraq. They politically cannot afford it. Take yourself forward to 2008. Let’s speak hypothetically. Let’s say in the next 18 months that there is an overwhelming success in Iraq, that the insurgents and the terrorists are quelled, and that there is peace and so forth, imagine the books and the articles that will be written about this dramatic come back, the great valor of the US troops, the stick-to-itiveness and toughness of President Bush, do you think any Democrat wants that kind of stuff being written in a presidential election year? They cannot, cannot permit it. The new commander, General Petraeus says we’ll know by May whether or not the new surge, reinforcements are working. Isn’t it interesting that Democrats are now beginning to say we need to start pulling troops out in May, and if they chose that month coincidentally or at random?
They cannot afford for us to win this. They are so politically exposed on the impossibility of victory, they have already concluded that we’ve lost, there’s no way that they can claim credit for victory, if it happens, not with — well, they could try, but I mean they’re not going to be able to do it with any credibility. Then you’ve got Pelosi traveling in the Middle East this weekend, which we’ll have more on that as the program unfolds. But never forget that, when you listen to these people talk about we shouldn’t be there fighting an insurgency and so forth, you understand, they’re trying to get inside your head and cause you to have doubts about this so that you will eventually support them when they de-fund this, because they will have to do that at some point. They will do that. They will make every effort to de-fund the troops, if it takes that to prevent victory. Because victory is the one thing politically that would ruin them.
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