RUSH: It’s time to start with the surreal stuff, time to start with the Twilight Zone. ‘President Bush has avoided repetition of a term that angered Muslims. Responding last week to the foiling of an alleged plot to blow up flights between Britain and the United States, Bush said, ‘This nation is at war with Islamic fascists.’ That triggered immediate objections from the Council of American-Islamic Relations, and another objection today from the government of Saudi Arabia. In a statement after its weekly meeting, the Saudi Cabinet ‘warned against labeling Muslims with accusations of terrorism and fascism.’ Bush didn’t repeat the reference to ‘Islamic fascists’ at the State Department today, referring instead to ‘individuals that would like to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives.”
Then, of course, throughout this interview, Condoleezza Rice — and she has an op-ed in the Washington Post today — praises the agreement, praises the ceasefire; now says ‘the hard part begins, and that’s implementation.’ Well, yeah, that’s always been the hard part, implementation. And then none of these resolutions ever has been implemented. Let me just give you a little excerpt from her interview in USA Today, a little excerpt of the story plus her answer here. ‘The 15,000-member UN force being created for southern Lebanon will keep the peace and enforce an international arms embargo, Secretary Rice said [yesterday], but it won’t be charged with disarming the Hezbollah guerrillas. ‘That political agreement will be the responsibility of the Lebanese,’ Rice said.
Quote: ‘I don’t think there is an expectation that this force, the UN force, is going to physically disarm Hezbollah. I think it’s a little bit of a misreading about how you disarm a militia. You have to have a plan first of all for the disarmament of the militia, and then the hope is that some people lay down their arms voluntarily.’ I just don’t believe that. These are terrorists. There’s already a resolution saying they’ve gotta be disarmed and that Lebanon is supposed to do it, 1559. Of course we’ve ripped that up. Well, haven’t even ripped it up. We just pretend it doesn’t exist. We’ve got this new one now, and we are investing our hope that some people ‘lay down their arms voluntarily.’
She continued: ‘If Hezbollah resists international demands to disarm, one would have to assume that there will be others who are willing to call Hezbollah what we are calling it, which is a terrorist organization.’ Okay. So this is this ‘robust international force’ that we’ve been hearing about. This robust international force, led, of course, by the brave and the courageous French. They’re not going to want any part of Hezbollah — and to say that this is the political job of Lebanon? This is a government that’s said it is too weak to protect its country that Hezbollah is part of. I don’t know what happened. There’s more to this than just the fact that the Israelis weren’t able to complete the mission. I have no doubt now that one of the reasons this ended the way it did is because the Olmert government was simply unprepared and did not prosecute the war as it was hoped it would be by allies such as the United States.
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RUSH: All right, let’s see if I understand this, according to the secretary of state’s interview in USA Today. We have the Hezbos. The Hezbollah people have killed Israelis and Americans for 25 years now. They are an acknowledged, very proud member in good standing of the terrorist club of the world, and it thinks it’s winning now. They’re celebrating; they’re dancing in the streets. There’s no question that the Hezbos, that the Syrians, and the Iranians think they won big here. They won, and so they’re going to lay down their arms voluntarily? And guess what we’re going to do if they don’t? We’re going to call ’em names, yeah!
We’re going to make sure that they are officially referred to around the world as terrorists? A name that they are infinitely proud of. Okay. I’m putting myself in Tehran right now, in the office of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and wondering what the hell he thinks when he reads this, and that little Bashar Assad in Syria, and what he thinks of this, and if bin Laden is still alive, what he thinks. We’re going to call them names if they don’t voluntarily disarm. Folks, I’m telling you, this is very, very difficult. I have so much respect for Condoleezza Rice, but I don’t understand. (Well, I think I do. I’ll get to that just a second.) In addition to this interview in USA Today today, she has an op-ed in the Washington Post.
She’s trying to explain why we pressed for the ceasefire agreement that was unanimously adopted by the UN Security Council, and she says that it ‘delivers a means for a lasting peace, if fully implemented.’ Well, there are those words again: ‘if fully implemented.’ Name for me a United Nations Security Council resolution that is implemented, other than by us taking action somewhere. Here’s a few lines from that op-ed. ‘The agreement we reached last week is a good first step, but it’s only a first step. We hope that it will lead to a permanent ceasefire. No one should expect an immediate stop to all acts of violence, a fragile ceasefire, and all parties must work to strengthen it. Our diplomacy has helped end a war. Now comes the long, hard work to secure the peace.’
I’m sorry, but I don’t think the diplomacy has ended this war, and even now, the Israelis say, ‘Hey, we’re not leaving until this international force gets here, and until the Lebanese army moves in to south Lebanon.’ Well, hell, the Lebanese government is just now having a meeting to figure out how to get their army down into south Lebanon. Meanwhile, the people who live there are streaming back home to their rubbled apartment buildings and being provided aid and assistance by Hezbollah. Who are they going to be loyal to? Who are they loyal to anyway. ‘Looking ahead,’ Ms. Rice writes, ‘our most pressing challenge is to help the hundreds of thousands of displaced people within Lebanon to return to their homes and rebuild their lives.’
‘Hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes. Houses and infrastructure destroyed, hundreds of innocent lives lost, the blame of the world for causing this war.’ All of this and the Hezbos are out there proclaiming victory. The people of Lebanon are reportedly supporting the Hezbos — and we’re going to call ’em names if they don’t voluntarily disarm. You want to hear another surreal story? ‘Muslim leaders on Tuesday called Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger disrespectful and insulting for ignoring their request to meet about the war in Lebanon so he could explain his appearance at a rally supporting Israel that was attended by thousands.
“Schwarzenegger and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke at the July 23 event in front of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles building on Wilshire Boulevard. On Aug. 6, two days after Muslim leaders held a news conference to complain that the mayor and governor had ignored several requests to talk, Villaraigosa met privately with 10 Muslim leaders and apologized for initially disregarding their invitation. Schwarzenegger and his aides have not returned repeated phone calls asking him to explain his appearance and get the ‘other, equally important side’ of the Lebanon-Israeli conflict, said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California.”
So again, politicians have to account to the Muslim lobby for their support of Israel out in California — and then there’s this story in the Wall Street Journal. This was from Monday. “The U.S. has spent millions of dollars in Yemen to help the government crack down on Islamic extremists who want to wage violent jihad against nonbelievers. There is just one problem with the strategy: It is not clear that jihad is illegal in Yemen. Last month a Yemeni judge, sitting on the state’s special terrorism court, ruled that 19 defendants who had traveled to Iraq to kill American soldiers and fight alongside al Qaeda there had done nothing wrong. The defendants ? 14 Yemenis and five Saudis who had been caught with guns and fake Iraqi passports ? made no attempt to deny their connection to al Qaeda in Iraq.
“They openly praised Osama bin Laden, and bore wounds from fighting American and Iraqi troops. Yet Judge Mohammed al-Baadani, a 40-year-old jurist with family in the U.S. and a history of handing out prison sentences to al Qaeda fighters plotting attacks in Yemen, acquitted the defendants. His argument: ‘Islamic Sharia law permits jihad against occupiers’ of Muslim lands.” Oookay. “The judge’s ruling prompted an immediate appeal from Yemeni prosecutors, and it outraged senior officials at the U.S. Embassy here. ‘I personally raised the issue with the President of the Republic and the Ministry of the Interior,’ says Nabeel Khoury, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy.”
So jihad is legal. Yemen couldn’t convict these guys for acts of terrorism because it’s legal — and keep in mind here, folks, that the state department, when preparing the constitutions that they helped draft for Afghanistan and Iraq, preserved Islamic law in those constitutions. It is just hard to comprehend all this today. But I will, folks. I’ll make sense of it.
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RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, it seems to me my problem here is that I took everybody seriously when we declared war on terrorism. I remembered the Bush Doctrine. We were going to go after states and areas that harbored and promoted terrorists, and the question now is: What has become of the Bush Doctrine? It’s obviously changed. It’s become something else, and I don’t know why, but it seems to me that there are just an increasing number of voices who offer nothing but defeatism and refuse to make the intellectual and political case for winning this war. In fact, I’m becoming concerned that there are more and more people who don’t even want to think of this as a war. I understand that. I mention it quite frequently, but these people who offer nothing but defeatism — and I mean the media, Democrats and so forth.
They clutter the truth with idiotic arguments and theories, and they’re all aimed at defeat. They’re all aimed at blaming America — and they think defeat is inevitable, and some of them even think it’s something we deserve — and I don’t buy any of that, which is why all of this
They didn’t think there was anything you can do about that except appease and hopefully find some way of getting along — and along came Ronald Reagan. He said, ‘To hell with that, we can defeat the Soviet Union and stop the advance of communism that occurred under Jimmy Carter,’ and he set out to do it and accomplished it. Now, sometimes defeating an enemy like this can be accomplished through economic and technological advancements as in the Cold War, although even there we didn’t shy away from a fight, but I don’t think sanctions against Mahmoud or any of these other terrorist nations are going to have much of an impact on anything. When you’re dealing with the likes of the Nazis or these Islamofascists, the only option is the military option, and this is where liberals and some pseudo-conservatives miss the boat.
You know, the old Clinton administration argument: ‘Well, we can only do this with law enforcement,’ and that really worked in the nineties, didn’t it, dealing with terrorism? Some people are pointing to this London business. They say, ‘See? There wasn’t a military operation there. This was just good old-fashioned police work. This was police work at its best! This was law enforcement at its best.’ Yeah, well, we needed some changes from the nineties to make this possible, right? We needed something like the Patriot Act, and we needed something like the foreign surveillance of terrorists from the National Security Agency, none of which we were allowed to do in the nineties and none of which we did. The nineties weren’t even allowed to share information agency to agency.
But if we think that we’re going to stop every act of terrorism before it occurs, especially with so much of the world aligned for the terrorists because of Bush hatred or whatever, we have another thing coming. I don’t know what kind of police work is going to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and I don’t know what kind of police work is going to defeat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranians and I don’t know what kind of police work and law enforcement is going to deal with the Hezbos. We’re just going to call ’em names if they don’t disarm voluntarily. Yeah. We’re going to make sure the world knows that they’re terrorists. Contain ’em, whatever.
No, we’re not even going to contain ’em. We don’t have a policy of containment, even. That’s the crazy thing. The Islamofascists are not going away. They’re not going to shrink back into their little enclaves and caves and just hang out and pray every day. They’re on the march. They’re on the attack. They’re attacking India. They’re attacking in the Philippines against the Russians, against the Israelis, the Spaniards, the Somalians. They really are on the march, and when people say we can’t win the war, what are they saying? If we can’t win the war, are they saying that we are doomed, that our way of life is over? If we can’t win it, then all you can do is deny there is one, unless you’re prepared to admit that at some point all that is in the United States is finished, it’s just a matter of time.
Look, folks, here’s the bottom line. The Hezbos are not going to disarm, and we are now even acknowledging it with the secretary of state’s statement. There aren’t enough international forces to send in there fast enough to stop the Hezbos from back-filling into the area. There isn’t enough counterweight to all the money from Iran and aid from Iran that’s going in. This ceasefire is shaping up to be a disaster, as we said it would be, and now the Israelis, the Israeli people left and right — it’s so wonderful to see unity in a country — they are all livid over the way this war was prosecuted by their government. You got a bunch of libs running the Israeli government right now, and they’re going to have meetings. The Israeli government’s going to put together a commission to study what went wrong.
Well, that’s cool. You don’t need a commission to find out what went wrong. It’s very simple. The generals were not listened to; the prime minister didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger and go all the way. I’m convinced he had the full pledge of support from this administration and this country to do what he had to do. Just wouldn’t pull the trigger and do it. I mean, when you start dropping leaflets and warning people and so forth, that’s an indication of change. We might go, how sweet, how nice, how compassionate and so forth. But you don’t waste time and jet fuel and everything else launching leaflets, ladies and gentlemen, in a war. So, you know, when the libs get themselves in a position of power, you get nothing but political correctness, wringing of hands, touchy-feely.
‘Gee, I hope they understand. I hope they don’t blame us (muttering),’ and you lose sight of the objective. Now, people who read these ceasefire terms and then, say, ‘Hey, if this is enforced it’s not so bad,’ my gosh, fundamentally don’t understand this enemy, and it’s sad
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Great honor to speak with you. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: I’m scratching my head over why we would support this UN resolution, too, and there’s only two things that come to mind of why we would do this. The first is either, A, yes, it’s a complete blunder and we just blew it completely, and B — and hopefully this is the one, and I hope I’m just not being too optimistic and naïve on this one, but I think that this was a potential setup, a prerequisite to enable moral support or like you said change, the world for the American people, where we can eventually — we know they’re not going to uphold it; we know Hezbollah is going to break it. We knew they would at the start. But we agree to the resolution; when they break it, then maybe we could go after the heads of Syria and Iran. As it sits right now, it was an Israel-Hezbollah war, we couldn’t get involved and even if they took them out it was still just a Band-Aid, it still left Iran and Syria. So it’s like the last two resolutions before the Iraq war. They weren’t necessary, but we had to do them in order to just get the couple prerequisites out of the way.
RUSH: We sat through 14 or 16 ignored resolutions about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. I’ve heard this argument advanced. I really don’t think it’s that complicated. It may end up working out that way by accident, but I don’t think this is by design. I think at the root of this really is the fact that the Olmert government didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger and go all the way and do what was necessary to defeat Hezbollah, and I think we saw that. The United States saw it, and stepped in with this resolution to stop the bleeding, so to speak, which is all fine and good up to that point. I mean, if you’re dealing with reality, you’re dealing with reality. If the Olmert government is not going to go all the way when they’ve got the green light, then disaster awaits, unless you just pull back and marshal your forces for another day. But at that point, you don’t have to go into this resolution and word it in such a way as it has been worded. It just doesn’t make sense, and the idea that we’re setting them up to violate the resolution to give us the worldwide support and backing to go in and finally take care of it, my gosh, how many resolutions from the United Nations Security Council have there been in this region and so forth? We don’t need to wait for another one, and the third part of this is this whole notion of waiting for world opinion… I’m really getting tired of it. I’m really getting tired of it. We have to go to United Nations to ask permission to defend ourselves? Or we have to go to the world to get permission to defend ourselves? It’s absurd.
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We hoped that they will voluntarily disarm. You see what I mean about this being in the Twilight Zone today? Now we’ve got a major stumbling block? We were just celebrating this thing last week, ‘All right, we stopped the sufferin’ and we stopped the killing’ and we stopped the bombin’. We are good people. We have stopped the war. Uh-oh, we got a stumbling block: What about disarming Hezbollah?’ Yeah, what about disarming the Nazis? (Laughing.) Sorry. You just have to laugh. Yesterday we had a caller, a great caller, Jason from Fargo, North Dakota. I got a lot of feedback on Jason. Jason, people loved you out there, and we highlighted your call at RushLimbaugh.com.
During the conversation with Jason I told him that I had this piece in the LA Times by a Council on Foreign Relations babe by the name of Julia Sweig, and she was commenting in an essay on why they hate us, and Jason said, ‘I don’t care why they hate us,’ and I said, ‘I don’t, either,’ but you’ve got to hear this. Do you want to know why terrorists hate us? I just want to read you one little excerpt. ‘Bush is wrong to say that foreigners hate us because of our values and freedoms. No, quite the contrary. US credibility abroad used to be reinforced by the perception that our laws and government programs gave most Americans a fair chance to participate in the middle class meritocracy. But the appeal of the US model overseas is eroding as the gap between rich and poor widens, public education deteriorates, health care costs soar, and pensions disappear.’
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why they hate us, because our government programs aren’t taking care of enough people anymore. The Hezbos, they know how to do it. Hezbollah’s really got the great roads and the great schools and the great hospitals and so forth. But we don’t, and the middle class of this country is getting the royal screwed shaft. They don’t have a chance. Public education? Yeah, who runs that? The American left. Pension costs? Pension are disappearing? Yeah, why? Because of the unions. And health care costs are soaring? Well, we were supposed to fix that in 1993, weren’t we? But do you believe this? They look at us. You know, Robert Mugabe down in Zimbabwe looks at America and says, ‘I hate that country. Why, their middle class doesn’t have a chance anymore. They had spiraling, out-of-control health care costs.’
This is right out of central casting. This is absurd — and yet this is an elitist and brainy organization, the Council on Foreign Relations. By the way, the Hezbos are now balking at withdrawing from southern Lebanon. Get this. This is in the Washington Post today: ‘Hezbollah indicated that it would be willing to pull back its fighters and weapons in exchange for a promise from the [Lebanese] army, not to probe too carefully for underground bunkers and weapons caches.’ I mean, another stumbling block in the Twilight Zone! The Hezbos say, ‘Yep, we’ll pull back. We’ll move out of the south — as long as they don’t find our weapons and bunkers!’ (Laughing) And of course the great thinkers of our time at Harvard, hmm, start rubbing their chin. ‘There is a stumbling block, an unfortunate occurrence. How can we meet this problem?’ as though we’re dealing with a rational, reasonable human beings. Sometimes, folks, I think you and I are all that remains of that group of people.
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