Now, I heard some various things after the speech last night. I just have some comments on it. First off, there was McCaffrey. He was out there talking about how we’ve got 70% of the Army units are deployed. By the way, he was trying to say that we’re too stretched. Well, who do we have to thank for that, Barr? I mean your former boss, maybe, and all the military brass who did not speak out when Clinton was systematically slashing defense. You know, you can’t rebuild what it took eight years to whittle away. You can’t rebuild it certainly in two years. You’ve got to get the budget request and budget authority and these clowns are doing everything they can to fight Bush on the defense budget anyway. So you had eight years of Clinton tearing down the CIA tearing down the defense budget, genuine cuts, and everybody is whining and moaning about how the military is stretched too far. And at the same time before this they were all caterwauling about the fact that we’re trying to do war on the cheap. I mean the president just said that we are committed to spending and doing whatever is necessary, and yet here come the libs all of the sudden complaining we’re spending too much. Again, I ask, what about the sacrifice? 
You people are so contradictory out there demanding all this sacrifice and now the president is asking for too much. And the mainstream media keeps saying there was no connection? They keep saying this, no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, and then the reporter for NBC News last night said that there’s growing concern that terrorists associated with Al-Qaeda, and the group – this al-Ansar, al-Islam or whatever – this bunch is up north in Iraq, is sending its people into Iraq to commit these attacks. So there’s no connection to Al-Qaeda, and yet an Al-Qaeda related group is on the way into Baghdad to do battle with us. I mean sometimes the media doesn’t even know what it is even reporting. And then, of course, we were treated to the wisdom of Wesley Clark. There are still a lot of dreamers out there about Wesley Clark. You know, some Democrats are still saying that all he has to do is announce and change the whole dynamic of the Democratic presidential wannabe crowd. Who are they fooling?
Anyway, he said that this is an elective war. Elective? What the hell does that mean? We were attacked, for crying out loud. And, Wesley, 9-11. I know you were 15,000 feet in the clouds during the Bosnia conflict, but hey, we were attacked on 9-11, and we have to wait to be attacked again before moving in and defending ourselves? It seems to me that Wesley Clark and these other Democrats who use this rhetoric of this being an elective war, they’re saying that we must either be attacked or somehow predict that we’re about to be attacked as a basis for conducting war. We can’t do war otherwise; we cannot take preemptive action; we cannot take defensive action in events. Oh, no, we can’t do elective wars, why, that’s unseemly. There’s nothing elective about this anyway. That’s the point. Our hand was forced. It’s called 9-11. And I’ve been thinking about something else, too. Months and months ago Clinton and Gore and then some others that followed them said that Iraq was detracting our attention and resources from the war on terrorism. I guess that’s what Clinton was doing in Bosnia and Kosovo and Haiti and when he fired missiles in Iraq and the Sudan. And now, you know, more to the point, all these people are actively trying to turn this military success into a failure and a defeat. And that’s the bottom line. That’s what they’re trying to do.
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I just checked the e-mail. “Rush, that’s a serious charge you’re making. What do you mean the Democrats are now actively trying to turn a military success into failure and defeat?” Come on! Are you people not watching? Not a serious charge, it’s the truth. I don’t deal with the seriousness of the charge, I deal with the nature of the evidence, and the nature of the evidence is obvious. I can’t believe I’ve got to go through this. How about the daily drumbeat of defeatism and nay-saying? If you listen to these people, we’ve already lost, we are continuing to lose, we can’t win, it’s hopeless, and the purpose of this is very simple, they’re trying to turn the American people against the effort. And you watch. The next step in that will be to try to use the appropriation process in Congress to slash this $87 billion, that figure, saying, oh, we can’t afford that. After all these motions and years demanding sacrifice, they’ll now say, well, we can’t afford that much sacrifice – we can’t, no, that’s way too much. I mean, we have prescription drug benefits, Social Security, education, all these things that they’ve got people conditioned to thinking will cease to exist if the federal government is not involved in them. They’ll start trying to get people convinced that we can’t spend this $87 billion on this, because little Johnny may not eat tomorrow in school if we do this, and grandma Maude may not get her Paxil tomorrow or what have you. So you watch. It’s going to start this week, my friends. Once again we’ve got the same liberal Democrats who slashed the defense budget themselves all through the nineties – they ignored bin Laden for a decade – I mean the Miniter book is just the latest in a long line of sources about how the Clinton administration totally blew that. They ignored bin Laden for a decade.
You ever stop to think in all this criticism of Bush, and all Bush is trying to do is solve this, all Bush is trying to do is fix this and win this war, did you ever stop to think that the previous administration had been able to keep its pants zipped and accepted the numerous offers of bin Laden, none of this may have happened? You ever stop to think of that? Does anybody go back and honestly assess? Why, no, and in fact let’s go back and do that (that’s unseemly, Rush, that’s a low blow, to go back in the past is pointless now.) It’s not pointless in terms of reminding people when the hearts and minds of American people are being fought over here by a bunch of people who want to secure defeat from the jaws of victory for the singular purpose of reacquiring their own political power. I mean they let bin Laden get away three or four times over ten years, undermine the CIA, and now they’re out there complaining about resources. Well, they did undermine the CIA and not only did they undermine the CIA by cutting the CIA budget and making it tougher to the CIA to do what it does. Let’s not forget how the Clinton administration prosecuted terrorists. They didn’t do it as though they were war combatants, they did it as though they were criminals. So all this evidence that was procured about them came by grand jury testimony which meant it couldn’t be shared with anybody else, so the CIA and alternately the FBI were left out of the loop!
And when you leave them out of the loop you by definition are undermining them. I mean, it’s totally fair to go back to the previous administration, look at the absolute bungling and now to realize that we are every day faced with advice from those people on what to do! We’ve got Madeleine Albright, we’ve got Bill Clinton, we’ve got Hillary, I don’t care, Sandy Berger, you name it, everybody in that list in the previous administration is more responsible for bungling all this than anything else and we have to sit there because of their close association with the mainstream press and listen to them give us advice on what to do. They haven’t earned it. They didn’t succeed at any of this. They don’t know how to succeed at any of this, and furthermore they are not trying to succeed; they are trying to secure defeat here. What do they also mean when they say (and this is something else that was said in the aftermath of the speech last night) what do they mean when they say that we didn’t properly plan for occupation? Of course not. There was not an occupation plan because we’re not occupying. And that’s not the point. We’re not colonializing, we’re not being imperialists. We’re trying to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure. And most of that’s in decay thanks to Hussein, not us or our military acts. I mean, that infrastructure over there was in bad trouble long before we arrived.
We are trying to set up governing councils of Iraqis, and we have in most of the country but you’re not hearing about that. We are trying to develop local law enforcement authorities. We’re trying to set up schools. We’re probably even trying to set up school lunch programs. I bet you ten to one we are. Not only are we trying to set up schools but I’ll betcha we are trying to set up a really bang up school lunch program. I’ll bet you we are, just so that someday a speech can be given about how we set up a great place. We’ll have pictures of these Iraqi kids eating little popsicles and McDonald’s or what have you, as part of the Iraqi school lunch program that we set up. That’s the kind of stuff we’re doing over there now. We’re also trying to feed the population. We’re trying to rebuild their oil industry. How in the world can any of this be called a failure and how can it be said to be called an occupation? Remember, you know, these same liberal Democrats, if they were consistent 50 years ago would be calling the Marshall Plan a failure six months after it was started in 1948. And that’s my point, folks, about patience. I mean, it took a long time to rebuild Europe and we didn’t face much opposition when we were doing that. It took years. And it took in comparative, real dollars, a hell of a lot more than $87 billion to do the Marshall Plan, and there weren’t people running around in six months, “It’s a failure, it’s a mistake.” Well, there might have been people saying it was a mistake, but there weren’t people that were trying to undercut the national effort on the basis of it because there weren’t people around trying to undercut the war effort as articulated by FDR. It’s just amazing.
So it’s going to require a little patience, and it’s a new day. You know, 9-11 changed everything. You can say we wish it didn’t happen, but it did. We are at war, the first war of its kind in history, war on terrorism, not on Al-Qaeda, not on al-this or that, but on terrorism, at large, extra-national terrorism, terrorists without borders. That’s a nice name, like Doctors Without Borders. Seventh-century fanatics. I mean these people actually think the Seventh century is as modern as they want to get. They are out to destroy us, they’re out to destroy progress, to destroy freedom and modern civilization. You have the Democrats out there saying $87 billion, that’s too much, that’s too much, we can’t have that much sacrifice. The real question is, is it enough. When you get down to brass tacks, the question is, is it enough? Is the cost of the war on terrorism too expensive? I mean how can you place an expense on it, given what’s at stake? And you have to compare these things, too. I mean a Cadillac is expensive too, unless you compare it to a Lamborghini, then it’s cheap. You know, it’s all in how you look at this.
What do the terrorist attacks cost us so far? Where are the bean counters, the people at OMB, the CBO people, the investigative journalists out there trying to get us an accurate cost on 9-11? What’s that total cost compared to how much we have to spend? I mean we spent $20 billion alone in help for New York City. One of the costs of 9:11 is the bankruptcy and near bankruptcy of the airlines. There’s been a loss of tax revenue because of economic slowdown, the loss of businesses, the cost of homeland security has gone sky high. That power failure two or three weeks ago, what did it sayto cost? A range of 5 and $8 billion that power failure cost. I’ll bet the war on terrorism has cost a lot more than that, you know, if you want to put this in economic terms. $87 billion, too much? You ought to look at 87 billion, compared to what we spend, the aggregate total on social programs in this country, I mean it’s ridiculous, the reaction this figure has gotten.
Oh, the farm bill was 80 billion, and don’t forget, the farm bill had this provision in it to handle disasters when they happened, like droughts and this sort of thing. Yeah, the farm bill and everybody was talking about how expensive that was, you had Tom Daschle on Meet the Press defending it, 80 billion for the farm bill. Got an LA Times editorial today, “Well, since Bush has flip-flopped on the UN, he now ought to have the freedom to flip-flop on his tax cut and realize we can’t afford this $87 billion without a tax increase.” I mean the liberals are just beside themselves here, the tax cut survives, they want a tax increase, they don’t want the 87 billion to be spent, they don’t want the war on terror to succeed, they want us out of Iraq. I mean, in all that they’re saying and doing I still don’t see or hear anything inspirational, motivational, can-do, positive. It isn’t there. They offer none of it.
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