On the Rules of Engagement

RUSH: Here’s a captain in the Marines on the phone from unknown places. Welcome to the program, sir. It’s nice to have you.

CALLER: Rush, how you doing?

RUSH: Very well, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: Great. I just gotta say: Your show, it is a rock of sanity in a sea where common sense is an uncommon virtue.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: I really appreciate it. Look, in the last hour you had a caller, Kevin, and he said a couple things that really got me upset. He said, first off, that Obama has nothing to do with our rules of engagement, and that is not true. As a general, you have to support the policies of the commander-in-chief, and our rules of engagement are constructed off of that. So his policies that he has out there directly affect our rules of engagement. So that’s the first thing. Second thing he said that we ‘take an oath to Obama.’ That is patently not true. When I got my commission I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same. I take no oath to a president, to a vice president, anybody. My oath is to the Constitution.

RUSH: Nowhere in your oath do you have to express loyalty, fealty to the commander-in-chief?

CALLER: That is correct.

RUSH: Well, I can understand why this caller ticked you off. He ticked me off. But he was totally uninformed. It’s your average, typical left-wing Obama defender — and you heard the guy plain as day. I appreciate the call, captain. That’s a Marine captain calling from parts unknown. Look, this rules of engagement business. The rules of engagement are such — and we’ve recited them specifically to you, but — that essentially overriding concern, overriding concern is that no civilian be killed. Now, I know that people say, ‘What’s wrong with that, Rush? I mean, what the hell is wrong with that? We’re a very, very compassionate country, Rush. What the hell wrong with not wanting to kill civilians?’ I would just like to remind you that the purpose of war and the way they’re won is to kill people and break things.

Do you remember the bombing of Dresden and the bombing of Britain and the bombing of all the other cities. Nagasaki, Hiroshima? Do you think that we were not targeting civilians? In fact, in every one of those bombing raids it was precisely civilians who were targeted. That is how you win wars. Now we’ve got these rules of engagement that say you can’t purposely or even indiscriminately go out and injure or fire on places where there are civilians. Well, all you’re doing… You may as well not go to war if you’re going to do that. You’re doing something else but it isn’t war. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing you say this, Rush. Are you advocating killing civilians?’ No. Look, I’m trying to remind people of the hard, cold truths and reality. War is awful, and not even the experts who plan them like them and want to do them.

But when you’re called into one, there are definite ways you win these things and there are definite ways you prolong a loss, and it’s what it is. You can have rules of engagement. There’s no warrior general who would construct rules of engagement like we face in Afghanistan. There might be a corporate general who would, who is politically correct and worried about image and is trying to grease his advancement to another star or a top spot in the Pentagon, perhaps with the Joint Chiefs. But a warrior general is not going to limit himself. You get your people killed. You get your own people killed with rules of engagement like this. Furthermore, we were not joking. NATO is actually contemplating a courageous medal of restraint, or a medal award courageous restraint, not pulling the trigger.

Now, if they’re going to actually do this they’re going to have to award that medal posthumously in most cases. That’s how you get yourself killed. But how many times is it said we coulda taken out Al-Qaeda leaders until we learned that there were women, children, citizens in the house where the Al-Qaeda leader was then call off attack or what have you? And, of course, that’s for PR, that’s for people who say, ‘The United States killing innocent women and children,’ and so forth. We’re just worried about what people think of us, which is fine. But if you put a country, a group of people or an individual, you put what people think of you ahead of what you have to do and what’s right, then you’re going to be miserable, and you’re going to be confused, and you’re going to be a loser. Because you’re allowing other people to define your success, and you are forever at their whim if you are totally, totally beholden to what people think of you in any endeavor of your life.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Folks, there’s a good book out there. It was somewhat of a best-seller a few years ago that helps people understand how dangerous the rules of engagement are in Afghanistan and Iraq. The book is called Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10. It was written before the current rules of engagement were made even more impossible. Lone Survivor. So many people recommended that book to me. I got it on my Kindle. Now of course it’s on my iPad.