RUSH: Dale in Salt Lake City, welcome to the EIB, sir. It’s great to have you.
CALLER: Thank you very much, Rush, and from a former Democrat I really appreciate all you do. I just had a quick question for you.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: You’re well connected.
RUSH: Yup.
CALLER: I think you are, and I think you know what really is happening with the war. I know it’s going to be a topic of conversation here with the Democrats tonight, and just from your perspective, what do we need to do over there? Are things going well? Do we need to add more troops. Do the troops have their hands tied behind their back? What do you feel is really going on in Iraq?
RUSH: I tell you, I think the surge is working. I believe the generals and what they’ve said, that the security measures are really beefing up. There’s all kinds of great news out there today. There’s a story from the Times Online in the UK: ‘Al-Qaeda Faces Rebellion From the Ranks — Sickened by the group’s barbarity, Iraqi insurgents are giving information to coalition forces — Fed up with being part of a group that cuts off a person’s face with piano wire to teach others a lesson, dozens of low-level members of al-Qaeda in Iraq are daring to become informants for the US military in a hostile Baghdad neighbourhood. The ground-breaking move in Doura is part of a wider trend that has started in other al-Qaeda hotspots across the country and in which Sunni insurgent groups and tribal sheikhs have stood together with the coalition against the extremist movement. ‘They are turning. We are talking to people who we believe have worked for al-Qaeda in Iraq and want to reconcile and have peace,’ said Colonel Ricky Gibbs, commander of the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, which oversees the area.’ We’ve also captured the #1 Al-Qaeda in Iraq guy, and he’s talking. He’s admitting that this whole thing of Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a myth. It is a myth that they have created in order to perpetuate the notion that there is a civil war going on in Iraq, where there isn’t. There is no Al-Qaeda in Iraq! It’s just Al-Qaeda. Operatives from Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, other places are pouring into the country.
These are not native Iraqis that have joined Al-Qaeda. They’re having to import these people, and the surge is working. This is how you beat them, is you turn their own people against them, and that apparently is happening. I don’t have any inside information into what’s going on over there. I’m connected, as you say, but I don’t know anything more than what anybody who has access to media and what the generals are saying, and I think one of the indications, incidentally, that things are going better than anybody thought they would, is the Democrats’ desire to kill the surge now rather than wait until September when the final report from General Petraeus comes out. I think they’re desperate to get this done and over with because they cannot withstand good news, politically. They just can’t withstand it. They’ve already told us that we have lost. So I think there’s an uptick. I think things are happening. When you have the bad guys start turning on each other and when you capture bad guys, they start giving up information, you’re obviously on the right track. It’s taken some time. I don’t know how long it will be sustained. But this can be won, and it could be done with the vision that the president has had — and that’s what scares the Democrats, frankly.
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RUSH: Speaking of Iraq, there are a couple other stories here that indicate great news, and this is along the lines of the Al-Qaeda underlings becoming informants, being so outraged at the barbarity they’re seeing. This is in the Washington Times today: ‘Iraqi Tribes Reach Security Accord.’ The thrust of the story is that 25 local tribes have joined the US against Al-Qaeda. This is the first agreement book between the Sunnis and the Shi’a. Twenty-five local tribes. Something is happening over there. ‘Members of the First Cavalry Division based at nearby Camp Taji helped broker the deal Saturday with the tribal leaders who agreed to use members of more than 25 local tribes to protect the area around Taji from both Sunni and Shi’ite extremists.’ You couple this with the other story, and something’s happening. I don’t know enough here to understand it all, but something different, something new is happening. People from the Sunni and Shi’a agreeing with us, uniting with us against Al-Qaeda, tells me that the surge is working, and they’ve reconciled, at least to the extent that they want to defeat Al-Qaeda. They may not have reconciled to get along with each other forever, the Sunnis and Shi’a, but they have reconciled to defeat Al-Qaeda. Also, they’re working and meeting on the oil revenue law over there. ‘Oil Law Stalls in Iraq as Bomb Aims at Sheiks,’ but they’re still meeting about it. What do you bet they get their oil law fixed in Iraq before we fix Social Security?