RUSH: Alexandria, Louisiana, this is Mike, and you’re first today. Nice to have you with us, sir.
CALLER (garbled): Thanks for having me, Rush. Look, Rush, I love you but you’re wrong on this Iraqi issue.
RUSH: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Could you hold the phone back? Back off on your phone a little bit. Your phone is too close to your mouth.
CALLER: Yeah. I love you, Rush, man but you’re wrong on this Iraqi issue.
RUSH: I’m wrong on this Iraqi issue?
CALLER: Yes. It’s done, Rush. It’s over.
RUSH: But I’m not wrong about it. How do you think I’m wrong about it?
CALLER: Because Americans troops, no matter how good they are, or trained they are, are not going to stop these people from wanting to kill each other. And — and — and Bush is only doing this because he doesn’t want the disaster that’s become Iraq, going on during the ’08 election. It’s all politics now.
RUSH: But it’s going to be going on during the ’08 election.
CALLER: It’s — yeah, but he’s trying to make it — put a smiley face on it, and it’s not going to turn out well.
RUSH: Well, you know, now I know why you disagree with me. You’re from the ‘we can’t win’ crowd, and there’s no hope here. You know, Mike, aside from the phone you’re using, you sound like a pretty intelligent guy, and that’s why it distresses me to hear you talk like this. You’re an American, and you’re saying, ‘We can’t win. We can’t stop these people from killing each other. We can’t do this. We can’t do anything! Why, the American military is not going to be able to succeed.’ This is not about Iraq’s ‘stability.’ We would have never gone to war for stability in Iraq. That’s not what this is. I’m going to repeat this again. Whether you want to listen to it or not, I am. This is about US national security. You have to look at this in context. What is so hard about this, folks? What is so hard about listening to this radio show in context? What is so hard about knowing the history of this issue, when it has been front and center on American television and news networks and all this for four or five years? Go back to 9/11 and go back to the day after and the week after what the president said. He said, ‘Al-Qaeda’s behind this. We know it, and we’re going to find them wherever they are, and we’re going to root them out.’
They are in Iraq, and they are the ones stirring up the mess in Iraq. They’re the ones making this look like a civil war. There are some signs that the Sunnis are getting fed up with the Al-Qaeda people, because the Al-Qaeda people are trying to impose their super-strict Islamofascist version of Islam on them, and I know that may sound a little odd, but Al-Qaeda are the terrorists. They are terrorists wherever they go, and they’re terrorizing people of their own religion. It’s being reported — I mean, you heard Murtha. He said Al-Qaeda’s not even there. Al-Qaeda was in Iraq before 9/11 happened. They had no operational connectivity to 9/11 and nobody ever asserted that they did. Now, the president, for whatever you think about him, Mike — and I’ve said this a couple times in the last week and I’ll repeat it. Long after we’re all dead and gone, when historians who are not yet born begin to write about this era, they’re going to place George Bush in the upper echelon of presidents who had a great vision for America, who looked beyond our shores, who didn’t just restrict himself to domestic policy niceties.
A disaster happened on his watch, a disaster that had happened on previous occasions to thousands of Americans around the world but not on this country’s soil. It happened on this country’s soil. The president of the United States could have easily said, ‘You know, our intelligence says this and says that, but this is just the way of the world. We’ve just got to deal with it,’ as some Democrats are now saying. Some Democrat presidential candidate say, ‘Well, we gotta deal with this.’ Well, columnists are saying it. Rosa Brooks, the LA Times, says you gotta learn to live with it. This is the world today. Well, the president said (paraphrased), ‘No, we’re not going to put up with this; we’re not going to put up with 3,000 innocent Americans being slaughtered by terrorists, wherever they are. We’re going to find them wherever they are. We’re going to root them out.’ Then he further said, ‘We are going to make an attempt to turn down the temperature that is the boiling cauldron of all this hate in the Middle East,’ and Iraq was the place chosen to make this change, and I don’t want to go through all the Saddam Hussein stuff. I probably should because people have probably forgotten that. He was lying about weapons of mass destruction, bragging about how he had them. Every intelligence agency in the world knew that he had them.
It was a fact. It was not a lie. So, Mike, your shortsighted view of this is embarrassing to me. You’re an American citizen, and you don’t think we can win and you don’t even know what’s at stake here. You’re probably the product of the Big Lie being constantly repeated by Democrats and their accomplices in the Drive-By Media. This is not an easy thing to do. The president never said it was going to be easy. He said it was going to be hard; it could take a long time, maybe generations. But everything about it is admirable, and there are people on our side starting to fall off this now. ‘I don’t think we can democratize Iraq. Ehhh, I don’t think…’ Well, they’re not president, and they weren’t elected to be president, and anybody who’s not got accountability and doesn’t have authority can sit here and bellyache and whine and moan and give up and respond to what they think of the will of the people is all day long. George W. Bush as president, doesn’t have that flexibility. He doesn’t have the ability to change his mind every five seconds based on some latest poll or what some nilly-willy critic happens to be saying from wherever. This remains an
The state department even said the number of terrorist attacks, of people killed, increased last year. It is expanding! It hasn’t happened here, so Americans — awash in prosperity and affluence — can ignore it. They don’t have to pay attention to it. There hasn’t been another 9/11. But people are dying all over the world because of these terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups, and right now there are two people in the world that are serious about doing something about it: John Howard in Australia and George W. Bush and their military commanders, and they’re not wavering even when people in this country awash in affluence and prosperity don’t take the time to remember what they knew and don’t take the time to fully understand what’s going on. They live in a sound bite world, the sound bite world they’re treated to in 20 minutes every night on so-called newscasts. But this is an amazing objective, and if it works, it’s going to be one of the most redefining and important periods in American history. This is something that can’t stand. The world, the free world, cannot just sit around and be targets every day for terrorist attacks here or there under the assumption, ‘This is the way the world is and we just have to learn to live with it. We’ve gotta learn to accept that 3,000 Americans are going to die at a clip from now on.’
If that ever became the operative procedure of the leaders of this country, we’re cooked, and there’s nothing in our history as a nation that suggests that that’s the way we operate or think. Not just in the way we defend ourselves, but the way we defend our allies, the way we seek freedom and prosperity for as many people around the world who are willing to work for it and want it. So what’s happening here is not as you characterize it, a bunch of people killing each other that’s been going on for 1400 years and our military can’t stop it. This is about your freedom, Mike. It is about the freedom of members of your family that are going to be extended that are not even conceived and born yet. It’s time a little maturity swept over this country and they started looking at the future as people used to do. We’re so fat and lazy and happy, we’ve got all the time to focus on our own pleasure, our own hedonism, our own sybaritic pursuits. Each and every day we can make life about what we want, without any regard for those Americans who have not yet been born or even conceived. That’s not the way this country has always operated! In the past, every generation has tried to make the next generation a better one than it had, and that’s what this is all about.
That’s what George Bush is attempting to do: preserve the United States as it has been known, not leave it a random victim of daily or monthly or yearly terrorist attacks, ‘because that’s just the way the world is.’ Yeah, he’s got some American people against him, and he’s got the whole Democrat Party against him. He’s got some cowardly Republicans who don’t have the guts to stick with him on this against him as well. But it hasn’t stopped him, has it? Thirty percent approval numbers haven’t stopped him. If Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter had gotten down to 30%, what do you think they would do to reverse it? Whatever it took to reverse it, even if it meant changing their policies on a dime, even if it meant giving up on core convictions, whatever they might have been.
When I hear calls like this from people who are so damn sure, so damn confident we can’t win, I ask myself, ‘Where did this start? Who was it? Where did it happen, this creeping, increasing number of people becoming fatalists and defeatists about their own country?’ I know we’ve always had liberals who have that attitude. We’ve always had socialists in our midst who’ve had that attitude, who don’t like the country for whatever reason. But it has never been the majority of the population of this country, and it isn’t now, despite the Democrats talking about it as though it is the ‘will of the people.’ It is not the will of the people when you gotta bribe the representatives of the people with pork to get them to vote for this bill. It is not the will of the people when you’re going to fail to come up with a two-thirds majority in both houses to override the president’s veto. This is a serious undertaking. It is valorous, and in time, it will be so recorded as American history.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To Sarasota, Florida. This is John. Great to have you, sir. Nice to welcome you to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s a pleasure to speak with you.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I wanted to respond to the gentleman who called earlier who was saying the war is unwinnable and all these people just want to kill each other. What I want to say is, I grew up in the Middle East. I spent four years in the United Arab Emirates, four years in Qatar, couple years in Bahrain, actually lived in Saudi Arabia for a year. I was actually there on September 11, 2001, and it’s just not true that all these people are at each other’s throats. The people almost espouse something different in public than in private. I mean, one of the worst things for a Muslim is to be deemed a bad Muslim. So, you know, often they will say, you know, ‘Down with the West,’ or they will, you know, espouse the party line in public. But when they’re in private, they want what everybody else wants. They want freedom. They want opportunities for their family.
RUSH: Well, you say that, and I know that there are some people even in this audience, particularly if they are on the left — and this happened when the Soviet Union fell — who say, ‘Well, freedom is not for everybody,’ and, ‘These people have never had freedom,’ they’re saying out there. ‘Why, what do you mean, freedom? These are nomads! Why, these people are savages. They don’t want freedom.’ The operative theory here is that we’re all created by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and one of them is this yearning spirit to be free. Now, if they’ve never known it, if they’ve been oppressed for generation after generation after generation either by an oppressive religion or governments or whatever, yeah, it’s going to take awhile to surface because they’re scared to express freedom or the desire for it.
CALLER: That’s absolutely it. I mean, if you look at the places where it’s had a foothold — you look at Dubai, you look at Bahrain. You look at those places, and everywhere where it’s been tried, it’s succeeded. Sharjah, which is one of the smaller emirates, it’s a great success story. When they came out of British rule in the early seventies, the seed was planted. Now, those countries are Muslim countries, but they live with freedom. I mean, yes, it’s a different thing in different places than we have in the States. I mean, women are allowed to drive somewhere, and alcohol is restricted.
RUSH: But the point that you’re making is, let’s look at Dubai. Dubai’s got Islamofascists running around, but Dubai as a nation is peaceful. I’ve been there. There’s not sectarian violence in Dubai.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: There’s not.
CALLER: No, there’s not.
RUSH: There is not sectarian violence in Jordan. There is not sectarian violence in Saudi Arabia. (That’s a pretty oppressed place.) Qatar, you mentioned. But there are extremists among the Islamists who are trying to foment all of this fear and tumult and chaos, and it’s aimed at anybody who will not swallow their rigid interpretation of their religion. They could be other Muslims. It could be Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, it doesn’t matter — and they’re broadcasting to the world what their intentions are. The idea that all of these Arabs and all these Islamists are shooting each other and that we can’t stop it, it’s been going on 1400 years. Maybe, in the case of Iraq, it has been a long history of the Sunnis and the Shi’ites being at each other’s throats. One of the reasons is that one of them is such a huge majority that they’re oppressing the others. The Kurds are up in the north biding their time, waiting for them to wipe each other out and move in, and take over. The situation with Saddam was, Saddam kept all these people in their houses and quiet because he was butchering anybody that got out of line. He was raping. He had rape rooms, mass murders, all these things.
Well, that’s gone. Okay, so now they’re resuming the fight. There’s a historical thing here. What is maddening to all of us who know the history and look at this contextually is that the big lie is the American presence, the American military presence in George Bush’s policies are causing this sectarian violence. It’s American presence causing all this, and it isn’t, and it may be something that has to play itself out, but it is not typical, and every civilization’s gone through it. We had our civil war. Every subdivision goes through these things, especially when they’re emerging from what these people are emerging from, which is a pure tyranny under Saddam Hussein. It’s only natural that people are asserting themselves for power. People have already forgotten: there have been free elections; there is a constitution. There is a government in place, faster than anybody thought possible. That’s pooh-poohed! Every achievement that’s taken place over there, has been pooh-poohed. Every achievement by the military is unrecorded. In fact, in many cases it’s mocked and made fun of. Now, the Drive-Bys are trying to say on cable TV last night that this is putting the pressure on Maliki. Maliki has to go. They want tumult and chaos. The Drive-Bys want it for two reasons: A, it disrupts Bush policy. B, it makes great news. They love tumult and chaos. They’re trying to makes us feel tumultuous and chaotic in our daily lives each and every day, but the idea that there’s a certain group of savages over there that’s going to spend the rest of creation killing themselves? You can say that’s going to happen in every part of the world. It has since it began. But it doesn’t mean that if they start trying to kill us, we don’t try to stop them.