RUSH: Here it is, Breitbart TV: “Saturday from the White House South Lawn, President Barack Obama blamed ‘intelligence estimates’ for not anticipating the speed in which ISIS would capture large sections of Iraq.” So Obama “badly underestimated ISIS,” but right there he is blaming George W. Bush and the same old easy fallback: Bad intel. The Iraqi government has been begging for help for air strikes at a minimum for a long time because of ISIS. ISIS is in Syria!
This is the point about Syria: ISIS is what we were supporting!
They are the “rebels” in Syria that our side determined were the freedom fighters seeking to oust the bloody dictator Assad. ISIS is who we ended up supporting in Syria when Obama issued that “red line” to old Bashir! It didn’t mean anything ’cause Obama never followed up, ’cause he never does. But when I mentioned this in the first hour you looked at me like you didn’t believe it.
I just wanted to tell you: He blamed intel. Right there at the helicopter before getting on the thing to go to Martha’s Vineyard vacation, he said it was intelligence estimates. (interruption) Oh, yeah, he’s in Martha’s Vineyard. In fact, he took Susan Rice with him to make sure that she’s kept up to speed while he’s on the golf course, so that if he needs to know anything she can be the one to run out and tell him.
He demanded Susan Rice go, they say to keep him up to speed on foreign policy. Susan Rice. She’s the one staying informed. She’s the one with all the monitors on and everything. She’s the one that’s gotta bring Obama up to speed if he’s on the 9th hole or something when ISIS does something. Now, Obama’s also lying about something else. He’s lying about… (sigh) Oh, it was just on the tip of my tongue. It’ll come to me.
I’m again faced in a circumstance where I’m trying to say more than is possible to say in one sentence. Now, about the Status of Forces Agreement. Let me tell you what it is. This is one of these terms that gets bandied about out there, and I guarantee you that there isn’t a single low-information voter who knows what one is, and I think a lot of people may not know. “”Status of forces” is exactly what it is.
We’re gonna get out of Iraq (theoretically), but we’re gonna leave some troops there (theoretically). What’s status of those forces? What are they allowed to do? Are you gonna give ’em immunity from Iraqi law? Because we don’t want our troops prosecuted for war crimes by the Iraqi government even though they’re supposed allied with us. Obama claims that the Iraqis didn’t want one because they didn’t want any troops there; they wanted us all out of there.
That’s why Romney said in the third debate, “Mr. President, you and I both agreed that there should have been a Status of Forces Agreement,” and Obama could not afford for his base to get the idea that he was on board to any troops remaining in Iraq. So he said, “No, no, no! You’re wrong about that! No, no, no, no, no, no. I’m not gonna leave 10,000 troops there with some agreement! No way! I never said that! I never said it!”
He said that for two reasons. He couldn’t afford for his base to hear he was gonna leave some troops. That’s what’s so cockamamie about this lie Saturday, that he had nothing to do with us getting out of Iraq, that it was all Bush or whatever or the Status of Forces Agreement. He was elected to get us out of Iraq, and he ran his “mission accomplished” laps all over this country and world. He was taking full credit for getting us out of Iraq.
He was hell-bent to get us back in? Obviously. And the argument is that had we left a force behind like we always have… When World War II ended, there were troops in Germany. We still have bases there, for example. It’s not uncommon for the US to have a military presence in places we have liberated. They act as a deterrent. Well, we didn’t do this in Iraq. We got clean out because that was what Obama promised and that’s what “the world” wanted.
And that’s what the American people wanted. Bush was so stupid, Cheney was so stupid, Rumsfeld was so stupid, and we didn’t have to go there in the first place. But Obama was gonna get us, and doing all of that was gonna make the world love us and they would never attack us again and there wouldn’t be any more terrorism. Finally the bad guys would see that we’re no threat and they would love us and they would stop all this.
Well, that’s Obama’s fantasy world, Liberal Conflict Resolution 101. The real world is when the good guys take the deterrent out of a place, it’s free rein for the bad guys. The bad guys in this case are the new Al-Qaeda adjunct called ISIS, and do you know what they’re doing? They’re literally shooting people in cold blood in the back of the head if they refuse to convert to Islam. They’re lining ’em up for firing squads.
This is not said. There are a lot of Christians being mowed down. In Syria, Iraq, there are some, but they’re just being lined up and shot. Some of them being buried alive, folks, by this ISIS group if they refuse to convert to Islam — the, I think president’s told us, “religion of peace.” Yeah, folks, I’m I really am mad about this.
We are here with a rotten economy, with open borders, with an absolute deteriorating country in part because of all these lies about Iraq. Damn right I’m mad. Where we are is the result of a series of coordinated political strategies that ended up being never-ending lies, and the American people had no choice but to believe it because they were inundated with it five years in a row every day every week every month throughout the year.
Lies that Iraq was wrong and immoral, that Bush was dumb and stupid, that Cheney was a warmongering Darth Vader and all of this just mindless blather. But the American people believed it, and it was one of the reasons why Obama was elected. There were many others, but this was a big one, and it was a really big one in terms of keeping his base on his side.
The Obama base is the biggest anti-war, anti-American military bunch of pacifists you’ve ever run into, and if Obama was caught lying to them, and left even 500 troops there, there would be hell to pay from them fundraising-wise. You know, a bunch of these rich Hollywood leftists, anti-war people? If Obama had lied to them and didn’t get us all the way out of Iraq, he’d have had hell to pay. He didn’t want that.
He made a big deal out of getting everybody out of there. He made a big deal out of the fact that he did it. He continued to make a big deal about how we should have never been there in the first place because Bush was stupid. “We should have never been there because there was no legit reason to go there! It wasn’t part of the War on Terror.” I’ve not forgotten any of it.
All of these lies helped create an election climate where this guy gets elected twice and as a result we’ve got open borders. We’re being invaded on our Southern border. We have an economy that practically does not exist. All new jobs are one of two things: They’re either being grabbed by immigrants or they’re part-time. We’ve got middle class wages plummeting in the last seven years.
More kids are living at home than ever before, and more kids with more student debt than ever before. We’ve got a health care system that’s been taken over by the government, and it’s an absolute mess. None of this needed to happen! I know it’s spilt milk. It did happen. But this is why I said, “I hope he fails.” Oh, by the way, have you noticed how many people are now saying Obama’s a failure?
Hillary’s out saying Obama’s a failure, all kinds of people are now saying it. Oh, yeah. I’ve got it here in the Stack. All kinds of people are now proclaiming Obama a failure. When I said “I hope he fails,” of course, all hell broke loose. But it’s almost too much because a bunch of people who’ve had chips on their shoulders about this country in the first place, who’ve never bought into American exceptionalism, have never bought in fully to the American founding, have never believed that America is the solution in the world, they believe America’s the problem, and none of this need happen.
But it did because of this five years of never ending lies and BS about Iraq. Now, I’m like everybody else; there are certain problems that I had with Iraq, too. I think the mission was a little misstated. The idea of creating a democracy, it’s a lofty goal. Getting rid of Saddam is one thing, which we did. I understand Bush believes that, because of his Christianity, that the natural yearning of every human being is the spirit, the yearning desire to be free, throw off the shackles and be free. And the belief was that if we establish a free Iraq, that it’ll be infectious and it’ll spread throughout the Middle East.
This was the grand plan, and it was admirable a plan. I don’t know how realistic it was. But it certainly was not illegitimate, and it certainly was not based on lies, and it was not based on false premises. Bush just didn’t care to respond to any of the lies being told about him or his agenda or his foreign policy. As a matter of policy, there was no response. All these lies stood unchallenged. The American people had no choice but to believe in it.
The American people were talked into believing that Iraq was one of the biggest mistakes this country’s ever made, bigger than Vietnam, all because that was in the best interests of the Democrat Party. Those daily body counts we got, when the body count was less after five years in Iraq than one day in World War II at D-Day, and yet that sense of perspective was never present, it was always missing, it was always gone, and people ended up being talked into, ’cause it was in the media, it was on TV. I saw it on TV: Iraq’s terrible. I saw it on TV: Cheney’s Darth Vader. I saw it on TV: Cheney never laughs or smiles. I saw it on TV: Rumsfeld, all he does is stand there with that military guy talking about war. I saw it on TV, it’s true. It was all lies.
And now we’re in Iraq, we’re back in Iraq with worse prospects than before we went in there in 2003. Obama just today said this bombing business could be a long-term project. Oh. See, he doesn’t have to face his base anymore, folks. He’s not up for election anymore, so he doesn’t really worry. The only thing he’s gotta be worried about is fundraising for his upcoming social justice presidential library. Gonna need money for that. But he’s gonna have plenty of foreign donors for that, if you get my drift. He’d still like his Hollywood leftist buddies to chime in.
Now, this use of forces business, the issue on status of forces was always in Obama’s hands. The idea that he couldn’t get one approved by an Iraqi parliament that would not allow US soldiers fighting in Iraq to be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. Not true. Nouri al-Maliki offered him a Status of Forces Agreement. Maliki signed it. Obama rejected it.
It was like Arafat. Clinton, in an act of desperation, back in the nineties, gave Yasser Arafat of Fatah and the PLO everything he wanted as an experiment. Well, actually I don’t think it — (unintelligible) I think Arafat would have taken it. But he didn’t. That’s the point. He rejected it. Everything he was demanding, Arafat rejected it ’cause he didn’t want a solution. Like Jesse Jackson doesn’t want a solution. Sharpton doesn’t want a solution. There’s too much money, there’s too much power in the politics of grievance.
There’s too much money to be paid being a victim. There’s too much power to be had with an ongoing, never-solved original sin kind of grievance. Same thing here. Maliki offered Obama what he wanted. Obama rejected it. It was always in his hands. He later accepted a watered-down version of al-Maliki-only agreement. The Iraqi parliament didn’t sign on to it. He accepted a very watered — Obama did — very watered-down version involving a mission of a very few US soldiers, returning just to protect the embassy.
You’ve heard that trick that these guys play, too, right? In fact, the early days of Iraq, “We’re just sending some troops. They’re just there to guard the embassy. There are not gonna be boots on the ground.” It’s a typical Obama excuse when he does commit forces to deny that that’s what he’s doing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, ladies and gentlemen, even Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington is calling it a “farce” that Obama is blaming bad intel for not knowing how big and bad ISIS had become in Iraq. Even Andrea Mitchell is calling it a farce! Do we have Andrea Mitchell? We do. I want you to play grab sound bite 21 and then we’re gonna go to number 12. This is Obama on Saturday in front of the helicopter just desperate to get on board so he can get to the Vineyard.
OBAMA: I think that there is no doubt that their advance, their movement over the last several months, uh, has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think, uh, the expectations of — of policymakers —
RUSH: Oh, man, do you…?
OBAMA: — both in and out of — uh, both here and out — outside of Iraq. And part of that is, I think, not a full appreciation of the degree to which the Iraqi security forces, when they’re far away from Baghdad, uh, did not have the incentive or the capacity to hold ground against, uh, an aggressive, uh, adversary.
RUSH: Okay. Okay, two things: Trash the Iraqis, which in his mind is trashing Bush for not preparing ’em. That’s trashing Bush. Make no mistake, that’s trashing Bush. But then, “Well, I think there’s no doubt that their advance, ISIS, their movement, was more rapid than the intel estimates.” (Gasp!) We weren’t allowed to say that when explaining why we didn’t find any WMD. They laughed at, they made fun of, they mocked the whole excuse.
Intelligence estimates were wrong? Intelligence failure? That was not permitted. Now Obama’s hanging his hat on it. Here is Andrea Mitchell (NBC News, Washington) on Meet the Press yesterday with David Gregory, who said, “The president didn’t want to be involved in this political influence game. He shied away from doing it in Iraq.
MITCHELL: Tactically, he’s being held hostage to endless negotiations to get Maliki out, and to decide that you’re not going to do anything until you have a government is to wait forever and is to permit ISIS to do what it has done. And to say that he didn’t have intelligence? This is not a hard target. This is Erbil! (snickers) We have people there. The fact is, there was intelligence, and to say that they were shocked by the Peshmerga on Saturday night being routed is a farce. The White House wasn’t listening!
RUSH: We’re not used to hearing this! (summarized) “It’s a farce. They knew! We have our own people there, David. We knew what was going on. We didn’t need any intel. We had people there. To say they were shocked by Peshmerga on Saturday night being routed? That’s a farce. The White House wasn’t listening.” I don’t know if it wasn’t listening or whatever.
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