{"id":8419,"date":"2014-09-11T17:18:04","date_gmt":"2014-09-11T17:18:04","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2014-09-11T17:18:04","modified_gmt":"2014-09-11T17:18:04","slug":"the_iraq_war_wasn_t_a_disaster_it_was_necessary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2014\/09\/11\/the_iraq_war_wasn_t_a_disaster_it_was_necessary\/","title":{"rendered":"The Iraq War Wasn\u2019t a Disaster — It Was Necessary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Listen<\/a><\/p>\n

RUSH: Peter Beinart\u2019s now at The Atlantic, Mr. Snerdley. New Republic, then you go to the Atlantic, then you go to The Hill, Salon, you go to CNN, then you go to Slate, Washington Post. Then you start the cycle all over again. You go to New Republic. One place you\u2019re editor. Then you\u2019re executive editor. Then you\u2019re just a slave writer. You try to get a Fox commentary deal or whatever. It\u2019s the cycle. <\/p>\n

So right now Beinart<\/a> and his career is over at The Atlantic. “Obama\u2019s Disastrous Iraq Policy: An Autopsy.” An autopsy. An autopsy, as in, there\u2019s a body. Right. As in, there\u2019s a dead body here. The Obama Iraq policy, and it\u2019s Peter Beinart who is the medical examiner here. The opening paragraph here is just so typical. <\/p>\n

“Yes, the Iraq War was a disaster of historic proportions. Yes, seeing its architects return to prime time to smugly slam President Obama while taking no responsibility for their own, far greater, failures is infuriating.”<\/p>\n

<\/a>Do you know what that\u2019s in reference to? Dick Cheney on TV this week. See, right here it is in the first paragraph. The left believes their own drivel. They manufactured, for political purposes, the idea that the Iraq war was illegitimate from the get-go, should never have happened, was impossible to win, was totally unnecessary, and was administered by a Darth Vader named Dick Cheney who only did it to enrich Halliburton. Everybody involved, Petraeus, liars, cheats. It was a waste of American treasure and American life, they said, and it was a total boondoggle. <\/p>\n

The reason they did this is that\u2019s what got them elected. They did everything they could to secure defeat for their own country in Iraq. And they can\u2019t let go of the lie that they manufactured. So in a piece where he\u2019s gonna rip Obama to shreds, he has to start out by saying, I don\u2019t care how bad Obama is, Bush and Cheney were worse, and it really galls all of us to see \u2019em on TV gloating now. <\/p>\n

Well, Mr. Beinart, I don\u2019t know that Cheney\u2019s gloating. I think Cheney\u2019s genuinely worried that we have people running this country who don\u2019t have the slightest idea how to save it, protect it, defend it, nor do they take it seriously. I think Dick Cheney is seriously worried about the country. I don\u2019t think Dick Cheney\u2019s on TV gloating about anything. There\u2019s nothing to gloat about here. We don\u2019t gloat over US weakness. We don\u2019t seek to disadvantage our own country for our own political advancement like you people do. We never seek defeat in a military conflict so that we can make our political opponents look bad. <\/p>\n

We never want this country to be at risk. Whenever we get involved militarily, we want to kick butt now, take names later and end it and come back with a W. And we certainly do not want the country run by people that don\u2019t want the same things and don\u2019t know how to accomplish it and are not even interested in those things. And that\u2019s what we\u2019ve got. Nobody\u2019s on TV gloating. But this whole idea that Iraq was a disaster really ticks me off \u2019cause it wasn\u2019t. It was necessary. <\/p>\n

Folks, let me go through this one more time before I get back to this column. I want you to try to think about something, and I want you to put yourself in Bush\u2019s place. I know it\u2019s very hard for any of us to really do this, but imagine being president and 9\/11 happens. You\u2019re reading to a class of children as part of an average, ordinary presidential day. One of the stops is a schoolhouse in Florida. And somebody comes to tell you the World Trade Center\u2019s just been knocked down, both towers on the way to plummeting. Nobody knows anything other than that. <\/p>\n

You scramble, you get out of there. The first time the continental United States has ever been hit. Three thousand people are dead, and you don\u2019t know what\u2019s coming next. You don\u2019t know if they\u2019re hitting the White House. You don\u2019t know if they\u2019re gonna go for the Capitol. You don\u2019t know if they\u2019re gonna go for other locations. You don\u2019t know anything. Nobody knows anything. That\u2019s another story. But the point is, you don\u2019t and everything now is different, everything\u2019s changed. Now we can be hit with our own airplanes. Our own airplanes can take out our own targets. <\/p>\n

So you are commander-in-chief. Your oath of office is to defend and protect the Constitution and the people of this country. That\u2019s your first and foremost duty. Something like the twin towers going down, the Pentagon being hit, something like 9\/11 is, I mean, it\u2019s ridiculous to say that it\u2019s unique. It\u2019s far more than that. It\u2019s never happened before. And if around the world other people threaten to do the same thing, how do you not take that seriously? <\/p>\n

It\u2019s like our old French philosopher, Blaise Pascal said — I\u2019m paraphrasing — it\u2019s much easier to believe that something that has happened can happen again, something that has been can be again, than it is to believe that something that\u2019s never been can be. Well, okay. World Trade Center was hit, our own planes. We were attacked. Okay, it can happen. And the world was cheering in certain quarters, and there were people bragging they\u2019re gonna do it again, they\u2019re gonna do more. You have to take that seriously. <\/p>\n

Going into Iraq was not to avenge an assassination attempt on George H. W. Bush, and it wasn\u2019t about Halliburton. It was about somebody taking a threat seriously and taking preventive action and not waiting to be hit again. Saddam was bragging all over the place about all the weapons of mass destruction he had, and they were toying around with creating a nuke, and everybody knew he had and tried to. Now, at the time this is happening, you can\u2019t afford to sit around and say, “Nah, he can\u2019t do it. Nah, he doesn\u2019t mean it. Nah, he\u2019s just bragging.” You don\u2019t have that luxury. <\/p>\n

So the decision was made to take him out along with whatever we did in Afghanistan. The Democrats supported it for a couple of weeks, but that\u2019s as long as they could go and then they turned it political and that was the end. They spent the next five years trying to delegitimize the whole thing. In my mind it had a valid purpose. Now, the details of the mission, democratizing the place and turning it into a mini-America, that was a stretch. But I don\u2019t have one problem with taking out people threatening to do exactly what happened to us on 9\/11 before they can do it. If they\u2019re gonna brag about doing it they may as well paint a bull\u2019s-eye on their target. <\/line><\/p>\n

Everything changes after 9\/11. You don\u2019t sit around and wait for it to happen again and then go get \u2019em and try to find out who did it. Anyway, the idea that Iraq was entirely illegitimate, made up and unnecessary is something the Democrats fed off of for five years. They went to every election on it. It just it sickened me when it happened. They were ripping the military, accusing them being rapists and terrorists and terrorizing women and children.<\/p>\n

You had John Kerry, John Murtha, Democrat after Democrat on television every day, every week criticizing their own country, criticizing their own military, accepting any allegation about our military as truth, all for the purposes of discrediting the whole operation so that we would lose, so that the Democrats could win the White House in 2004 and 2008. So that\u2019s why, when I read this opening from Beinart, I just get steamed again. “Yes, the Iraq war was a disaster of historic proportions.” No, it was not a disaster! <\/p>\n

This is a disaster of historic proportions. The Obama presidency, Mr. Beinart, is a disaster of historic proportions. And not just the Obama military. The Obama health care. The Obama economy. The Obama infrastructure. The Obama immigration. The Obama open borders. <\/p>\n

We are living the disaster of historic proportions. Iraq was not one. We\u2019re living it. We are in the middle of a disaster of historic proportions. “Yes, the Iraq War was a disaster of historic proportions. Yes, seeing its architects return to prime time to smugly slam President Obama while taking no responsibility for their own, far greater, failures is infuriating.”<\/p>\n

Okay, so he had to get that out of the way to be true to the Democrat liberal reader base.<\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: By the way, I should have mentioned that this Beinart piece is from June. It\u2019s not from this week. It makes it even more poignant. The Peter Beinart piece is from June 23rd of 2014. I\u2019m sorry I forgot to mention that. I got so revved up to get into the substance that I forgot to mention it. But it\u2019s June 23rd, 2014, not written after last night\u2019s speech. So let me just read the rest of the first paragraph. It\u2019s really all you need to hear. <\/p>\n

“But sooner or later,” he writes, after ripping Bush and saying it\u2019s embarrassing to see him on TV, “honest liberals will have to admit that Obama\u00c2\u2019s Iraq policy has been a disaster. Since the president took office, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has grown ever more tyrannical and ever more sectarian, driving his country\u00c2\u2019s Sunnis toward revolt. Since Obama took office, Iraq watchers — including those within his own administration — have warned that unless the United States pushed hard for inclusive government, the country would slide back into civil war. Yet the White House has been so eager to put Iraq in America\u00c2\u2019s rearview mirror that, publicly at least, it has given Maliki an almost-free pass.”<\/p>\n

So even back in June the libs were writing about what a disaster Obama\u2019s policy is, and it\u2019s only gotten worse. But here\u2019s this word “inclusive.” Obama talks about the Iraqi government must be inclusive. That\u2019s a crock of a word when we\u2019re talking about things like that. Inclusive? Whatever happened to doing what you have to do? These are serious matters. This is not social architecture. This is not a social liberal experimentation laboratory. Inclusive? <\/p>\n

“Well, that\u2019s right, Mr. Limbaugh, because if the Iraqi government had been inclusive and allowed the Sunnis and the Kurds and the Shi\u2019ites to all participate equally –” It\u2019s a crock. Inclusive? That\u2019s not how things like this work. I\u2019ll tell you, we\u2019re veering so far. There are just hard, cold truths and realities about things of grave consequence and you cannot deal with them with political correctness and so forth. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUSH: Peter Beinart\u2019s now at The Atlantic, Mr. Snerdley. New Republic, then you go to the Atlantic, then you go to The Hill, Salon, you go to CNN, then you go to Slate, Washington Post. Then you start the cycle all over again. You go to New Republic. One place you\u2019re editor. Then you\u2019re executive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Iraq War Wasn't a Disaster - It Was Necessary - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2014\/09\/11\/the_iraq_war_wasn_t_a_disaster_it_was_necessary\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"The Iraq War Wasn't a Disaster - It Was Necessary - The Rush Limbaugh Show\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"RUSH: Peter Beinart\u2019s now at The Atlantic, Mr. Snerdley. 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