RUSH: Pat in Huntsville, Alabama, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Glad to talk to you, Rush. A longtime listener.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Schumer is a disgrace to America. I’m a Vietnam vet. I served in Korea, served my whole life in the military. I’m sure if he claims he was a Vietnam vet, I bet he was a Vietnam vet in Brooklyn and never left Brooklyn.
RUSH: Well, I don’t know what his military service is but that actually doesn’t matter to me.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: He’s a United States senator. He voted to confirm General Petraeus. He is one of the elected officials who takes an oath to defend and protect the Constitution and the United States. So whether he was a member of the military to me is irrelevant. You don’t have to be a member of the military to have a sense of their contributions and the risks and the devotion, all of it. You don’t have to be a member of the military to know that. I think it’s disgraceful. (sigh) I’m literally amazed. They are committing suicide. By all rights, these kinds of statements and acts are suicidal, if they were widely known, but they are not widely known. They are widely known amongst this audience, which is significantly huge, and of course the remarks may make it beyond the bounds of this audience now. But when they start revving up like they are with the Petraeus report coming out, believe me, we are not alone her, folks. We are not a little cadre or niche of the population who is outraged by this. There are far more than you ever know who are feeling the same kind of outrage. Now, I did a little research here during the break because the substance of Schumer’s comment — and let’s listen to it again. Let’s listen to it again, because I want to try to counter the points that he is making here. I really shouldn’t even have to spend any time on this, this is so outrageous. It’s insulting and it is demeaning, and it is demoralizing. Here’s what he said on the floor of the Senate.
SCHUMER: Let me be clear: the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from Al-Qaeda said to these tribes, ‘We have to fight Al-Qaeda ourselves.’ It wasn’t that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here.
RUSH: Now, wasn’t the objective from the get-go to get the Iraqis to be able to take care of themselves? Wasn’t the objective to see to it that the Iraqis could provide for their own security? The Iraqis were going to ‘stand up,’ and it was time they started dying for their own country looping with our guys and girls, women, that they were supposed to be able to defend themselves, which would enable us to get out of there. It looks like the first vestiges of this are happening, and what’s happening with Senator Schumer? He’s trying to tear it apart and say, well, it’s only because the US military is a bunch of incompetent boobs and fools and we’ve got a lying president and we can’t trust anything they say. Yet the endgame, the result, is actually happening! Senator Schumer and his pals in the Democrat Party cannot permit one aspect of this operation to be seen as successful, and so: demean the men and women in uniform, demean the commander, demean the commander-in-chief. Do whatever it takes to protect your investment in defeat, because it is so total, you can’t pull back from it. They’ve been panicking ever since the first reports of success on this surge started pouring in. Now, how does a counterinsurgency work? This is the operation that is actually underway.
The surge is a counterinsurgency. ‘Surge’ is just a one-name word for it. There’s a man who was well known, Lieutenant Colonel David Galula. He was a RAND consultant and he served as a French commander in Algeria from 1956 to 1958. His recollections of his work have a remarkable and almost timeless resonance nearly 50 years later, striking parallels to our recent experiences in Iraq. Now, there’s an essay here from Lieutenant Colonel David Galula, and it’s drawn for a RAND report that he wrote in 1963. He died in 1967, by the way. He was very young. We were deprived of his guidance at a time when we were becoming more deeply involved in Vietnam, and basically there are a series of laws involving counterinsurgency. ‘The first law: The objective is the population. The population is at the same time the real terrain of the war. Destruction of the rebel forces and occupation of the geographic terrain led us nowhere’ — he’s talking about Algeria — ‘as long as we did not control and get the support of the population.’ Well, hell’s bells! The news the last three to four months has been nothing but how we have gotten the support of the population. Hell’s bells, number two:
Katie Couric went out to a farmers market in Baghdad the other day, and she was stunned! Citizens are trading their little vegetable carts and their beef, and everybody is going in there like it might as well be Gristedes in New York, and she couldn’t believe it. So she said, well, this is what the military wanted me to see, but nevertheless there are signs that the surge is working. So the population is beginning to support us and they probably have for much longer than we know. The second law from Galula: ‘The support from the population is not spontaneous and in any case must be organized. It can be obtained only through the efforts of the minority among the population that favors the counterinsurgent.’ The third law — this is where it gets really interesting. ‘This minority will emerge, and will be followed by the majority, only if the counterinsurgent is seen as the ultimate victor. If his leadership is irresolute and incompetent, he will never find a significant number of supporters.’ Well, Petraeus and the US military are resolute, and they are competent, and that is why, finally, both the majority and the minority are joining us in the counterinsurgency effort. We’re talking about the Sunnis and the Shi’ites. Everybody said they would never work together. Everybody said they couldn’t get along together, and they may ultimately not down the road when we get out of there, but they are coming together, joining us to fight Al-Qaeda because they’re fed up. We’ve had the stories here. They’re fed up with the barbarism of Al-Qaeda. They’re fed up with the extreme, over-the-top Islamofascism that’s coming out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. So this is all working. So Schumer cites these warlords deciding to stand up for themselves, blaming the US inability to kill Al-Qaeda so these warlords said, ‘Okay, fine. If you’re not going to do it, we’re gonna do it.’
Even if he’s right about that — which is insultingly wrong, but even if he was right — it’s the objective! The objective is to get these people to stand up and defend themselves, and they’re doing it. So he’s gotta make sure that that’s not seen as anything successful. Here’s the fourth law from Lieutenant Colonel David Galula. The fourth law: ‘Seldom is the material superiority of the counterinsurgent so great that he can literally saturate the entire territory. The means required to destroy or expel the main guerrilla forces, to control the population, and to win its support are such that, in most cases, the counterinsurgent will be obliged to concentrate his efforts area by area,’ province by province! You can’t go countrywide. You have to go province by province and this is why it’s going to take another year-and-a-half, perhaps, and it’s succeeding. Anbar you used to not be able to go to. Now the president can fly in there, bring his war team, his war cabinet. Maliki can go up there, and they can have a peaceful meeting. It was Anbar, by the way, that Democrats are saying six months ago was proof we lost! I’m telling you, folks, if any of you ever vote for Democrats with national security on the table, you deserve whatever lack of protection you get. These people are demonstrating they cannot be trusted, that they have no interest in US national security, and that they do not take this enemy seriously in any way, shape, manner, or form.
There are other enemies we face out there other than Islamofascists, by the way. We have to keep this in mind, too. Our only enemy these days is not a bunch of terrorists. We have a lunatic down in Venezuela. We’ve got instability all over Central America. Who knows when the ChiComs might ever do something. So you never know about these things. The Iranians are a whole different matter. Who knows? Russians are flying their Bear bombers all over the place. We are a great nation at risk in a dangerous world, and we need the right kind of people with proper temperament and understanding and willingness to face this threat, leading the country. Right now, there’s not one Democrat presidential candidate who inspires any confidence whatsoever in me, that that threat or these series of threats will even be taken seriously. Finally, in the fourth law, from Lieutenant Colonel Galula: ‘Destruction of the rebel forces,’ the destruction of Al-Qaeda, ‘and occupation of the geographic terrain led us nowhere,’ he’s talking about in Algeria, ‘as long as we did not control and get the support of the population.’ Well, play sound bite 15 again. Play cut 15. You tell me if it sounds like we’ve gotten the support of the population.
SCHUMER: The violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from Al-Qaeda said to these tribes, ‘We have to fight Al-Qaeda ourselves.’ It wasn’t that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here.
RUSH: It’s not even going to last. It’s so fragile, it’s not even going to last. The warlords are no good. They’re just a bunch of incompetents along with the US military. It sounds to me like if the ‘warlords,’ as he wants to refer to them, are standing up and defeating Al-Qaeda. I wonder how they were able to do this, by the way. Somebody ask Senator Schumer, ‘How the hell were they able to do this?’ If they’ve been able to do it all along, why didn’t they do it first? Could it be, Senator Schumer, they couldn’t do it until we got there? (Gasp!) I wonder if that’s possible, Senator Schumer. Let me ask you another question, folks. This sound bite from Senator Schumer, on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate it as better or worse or more harmful and damaging than George Allen’s ‘macaca’ comment? George Allen’s macaca comment, for which he lost a Senate seat and for which the Drive-By Media led by the Washington Post hounded him out of office, was zilch, zero, nada on the meter, compared to the outrage, the damage, the danger, and the treasonous comments here of Senator Schumer, compared to macaca, and yet a Republican who utters the word macaca gets roasted, tarred and feathered out of the US Senate! The Drive-By Media ignores Senator Schumer’s words, proving that media bias is not just what they cover, but also what they ignore.