RUSH: Dave in Des Moines. Glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hello. I’d like to mention, first of all, I’m one of those leftists. However, I believe that the war on terror, it’s sort of like a virus that invades a cell. Once it’s invaded and it makes the cell do bad things then, of course, you have to destroy it just like cancer cells. Once it invades the body, of course, wherever cell it’s at, I believe it should be destroyed as such. But the problem is the future cells. How do we prevent the cancerous or viruses from infecting the good cells, and I think that’s the question we should have. The thing of London, I appall, and of course I’ll be the first one to call or, you know, do whatever I can to prevent somebody who’s going to do some bad act. The question I have is the good cells. How do you prevent future terrorist attacks ten years from now by these kids being recruited by such evil movements?
RUSH: Well, now, that is a good question. I’m really happy you asked that question. I’m going to tell you what I think, and I hope you listen to it, David, because it’s an excellent question. You’ve hit a home run with this question because you’re essentially asking: How do you win the war on terror? And before answering this, I know what he’s saying. Okay, we’ve got these young kids that are being bred and raised to literally hate the West, anything not Islamic, and they’re being fed a distorted version of the Koran, and they’re being taught that it’s religious and God-like to engage in these kinds of acts. So how do we stop 
this? Even if we’re to wipe out every terrorist today, how do we stop this? Well, the first honest thing to say in answer to that is: We never will totally wipe it out. There are always going to be, even when we have the greatest success imaginable, there are going to be renegades; there are always going to be insane people, and it only takes one wacko to cause something like this to happen of a smaller or even larger scale. Let a wacko get hold of a suitcase nuke someday. It just takes one. But the answer to your question in the long term is the context in which it needs to be answered and I’m going to say to you, at the risk of causing you to have a reaction that would make you disregard everything that follows, I’m still going to say it. That’s why we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan. The answer is something that the American left cares deeply about in this country, and that’s education. If you’re asking about future generations — how do we raise our kids? How do we raise our future generations? We do it with the age-old guidelines and guardrails that have been handed down to us culturally from our existence: morality, teaching right and wrong, civilized behavior, right and wrong.
Well, the same thing is happening in militant Islamic countries but they’ve got a whole different definition of morality, whole different definition of right and wrong. What’s right to them is killing us. What’s wrong is not killing us. So the purpose of the war on terror and the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan is to establish in that part of the world where that kind of hatred is being bred and raised, societies of free people who are not living under imams and mullahs who are forcing their kids into schools such as they are now, but letting people who are human beings just like we are determine their own fate as free people. The theory behind Iraq, Dave, and Afghanistan is that we Americans are no different in terms of being human beings than anybody else on the planet. We’re not special. We’re not better. We’ve got the same DNA. We’re all human beings. The thing that sets us apart is freedom. We have founding documents that encapsulate the reasons for our freedom, come from our creation, that’s the natural essence of the human spirit is freedom, to not be confined, to not be shackled, to be free, to move about and seek excellence and happiness, pursuit of happiness and contentment to the best of our ability and ambition. Well, most of the people of the world don’t have that. They live under dictatorial, thuggish regimes, and when you get to the militant Islamic countries you’re talking about not just dictatorial, but you’re talking about fourteenth century militant religious dictatorial regimes, and they are breeding this hatred and they are raising kids to think that it is normal. So you go to Iraq, you go to Afghanistan and you show that people there are no different than people here. Once they have freedom, they will seek it. We trust free people in this country. We as human beings trust free people to do the right things.
We trust free people to make decisions of their own self-interest that are good for all, for their families, for their neighbors, what have you. You’re going to have the renegades; you’re going to have criminals everywhere you go. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not trying to be pie-in-the-sky about this, but the United States experience is the model for the world, in my opinion. It’s right under our nose. Yet too many people say, “We can’t impose our way of life on people! It’s not fair. They must choose their own.” Fine. We’re letting them choose their own in Iraq, although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with imposing our way of life on people because I don’t think freedom is an imposition. I think the cure for Africa is to become a United States. Let them learn to trade; let them learn to manufacture; let them learn to create their own wealth, not have it handed to them. Just creating a giant welfare state out of the country with more unending aid. Let them create it themselves. They’re capable of it, they’re human beings, let them be free, get rid of their Robert Mugabes and the Idi Amin Dadas and all the others and watch them take off. The theory holds in Iraq, and it’s already taking root. We’ve had elections. The people there have determined a government. They are establishing it for themselves. They are establishing a police force; they’re getting their schools up and running, and we trust that they’re not going to want any part of militant Islam and we know it because the insurgents are doing everything they can to keep freedom from coming to those people. That’s why Iraq is so crucial.
The insurgents, the terrorists, the militant Islamists sent there by the mullahs and the imams around world to make sure this doesn’t happen because the greatest threat to militant Islamo-fascism is freedom, because people will not choose the kind of bondage that they are being forced to live under in places like Saudi Arabia or Iran or the former Iraq. Iraq is not going to choose another Saddam Hussein to lead it, I guarantee you, if they are free to act on their own. They’re going to get together. They’re going to have democratic arguments
and fights. They’re going to have elections. Some are going to win some are going to lose. They’re doing it over and over and over again, but they’re going to want the best for their kids just like we want the best for ours and they know that the best for their kids is to not have the kid taught how to learn how to fly a Boeing 757 into a building in the United States. Now, this is going to take generations. This is going to take time. This is why people like me continually stress that this is a long-term vision and any impatience here is only going to be a detriment. We’ve tried to do the other way. We’ve tried. We’ve had terrorism like this for, I don’t know, in this form at least 25 years, and terrorism throughout human history, and we’ve tried appeasing it. We’ve tried negotiating. We’ve tried ignoring it. We’ve tried pretending it doesn’t happen, but we’ve never tried to reform it — and it’s the only way. That’s the answer to your question. How do you keep more cancer cells from being produced?
You get rid of the elements that produce and cause the cancer. You ban the tobacco from the society, speaking metaphorically — and it’s a long process. That’s why, Dave, people like me think Iraq is a profound success, because we look at that as the reason. We don’t look at weapons of mass destruction or any of that, that was something dealt with. But the long-term goal here is to create an outpost in that region where other people in surrounding Arab countries can see, “Wow, look at those Iraqis. Look what they’ve got. They’re making up their own minds. They’re going to work where they want everyday. They’re starting their own businesses. They’ve got an economy that’s functioning,” and that’s what the imams and the mullahs in Iran are deathly afraid of and trying to prevent from happening. But that’s the solution to it. There may be others that I haven’t thought of, but in the context of your question, that’s how I would answer it. You can’t defeat them militarily totally. This generation you can. You can intimidate, and you can take the military action so as to intimidate them from continually thinking they can hit us — and that’s why it’s not helpful when certain people in this country say things that seem to stroke and motivate our opponents, sounding just like them. We don’t need people in this country ripping this country to shreds in terms used by our enemies and yet it’s happening way, way too often.
If we were united in this country, if we all understood what the purpose here was, that it’s all about guarding against another terrorist attack for our kids and grandkids, all about making sure there’s not another 9/11 — or if there is, we’ll know of it in enough time to stop it. That’s what we’re trying to achieve. But as long as we’re not united here and the voices of opposition to this continually misrepresent what our objective is, and continually misrepresent our purpose as just “we want oil, Bush and Cheney want oil, or Halliburton needs more money,” or what have you, as long as it keeps being obfuscated like that, it’s just going to make the task all that much more difficult, as World War II would have been that much more difficult had we not been unified in beating Hitler and Japan and all the others, Mussolini, that we faced. So it’s not easy. It’s very, very hard. But the answer ultimately, the short version is, we have to establish circumstances that we know exist because they work here. Culturally it doesn’t matter; all cultures come to this country and thrive because of freedom. We need to establish the same circumstances where human beings around the world have the same grand, God-given freedom we do to determine their own fate. The vast majority of free people want to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not learning how to fly airplanes into buildings.
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RUSH: This is Randy in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Hello, sir, welcome. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: God, what an honor. God bless you, Rush. I got turned on to you by my uncle years ago when you came to Wait Chapel at Wake Forest, and he said, “You gotta come down and see this Rush guy,” and I said, “Rush? Come on.” But ever since then you’ve just been a blessing to me and my family and I appreciate you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: But I disagree with you on this. It’s probably one of the first things I’ve ever disagreed with you on. We don’t need to waste our time trying to educate these people. We need to kill them before they kill us and that’s pretty much the only solution that I see.
RUSH: Well, I thought I’d been clear. That’s what we’re doing now; we’re trying to kill the adult terrorists now before they kill us. That is what we’re doing. It’s a two-pronged strategy. I totally agree with that. I’m only talking about the long term, future generations. That was the question. He asked me (paraphrasing), “If we wipe out these guys today, how do we stop the future terrorists that are going to be born?” That was my answer. But I’m not talking about finding the equivalent of Mohamed Atta and saying, “Hey, Mohammed, can I give you freedom and maybe you’ll change your life?” I’m not talking about that. Those guys are beyond education. They’re adults. They’re poisoned. You know, their lives have been molded, so don’t misunderstand. The strategy here is exactly what you suggest. That’s exactly what we’re doing, we’re trying to kill as many of them as we can find. Actually, we’re not. We’re capturing as many as we can find. If they’re not shooting at us, we’re capturing them and then we’re bringing them to various prisons where we’re trying to find out what they know about where future attacks are. But we can’t really get what we need from them because we’ve got too much people in this country who are saying you can’t mistreat them or can’t torture them or you can’t — and the definition of torture today is anything that causes any stress to these people who, were they roaming free, would be joining bands of marauding terrorists trying to kill us.
So, you know, we’re allowing certain people to tie our hands in a whole number of ways. Perhaps the answer is don’t capture any of them, just wipe them out, you know, wipe them out and explain that away later. But we’re capturing them. And of course we’ve got people, “They gotta have trials, and we’re going to have to give them lawyers,” and they have access to the US Constitution. Terrorist prisoners of war. It is being said by the ACLU and certain legal groups and certain judges, “Why, they need access to lawyers, and the US legal system.” All right, how many of them are down at Club G’itmo, 530 some — can you imagine 530 trials with the average US lawyer defending these guys? They’ll be out in two weeks. Can you imagine, the US attorney’s offices around the country trying to gear up cases against these guys? You don’t fight wars this way. We’re tying our hands in a whole bunch of ways in terms of dealing with the immediate threat. And this is why just to show you, Randy, that you and I are on the same page, all this talk during the last campaign, Kerry said “Why, we need to beef up the ports, we need to beef up the cargo areas.” Senator, we don’t have the manpower. You’d have to take every citizen away from the job he or she has and put them on permanent watch duty. That’s not the way you deal with it. The way you deal with it is you go over where they are and you wipe them out so that can’t get to the ports, the airports or whatever. And when you go try do that, well, then you can’t do that because Iraq is a mistake, you get Nancy Pelosi out there muttering a bunch of absurdities. Thank goodness we have a president who’s not listening. But Lord knows let one of these people get in charge of this, and a major, major setback will result.
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