RUSH: I want to thank Vice President Cheney and Liz Cheney for their time mere moments ago. One little addendum to something that Liz was addressing vis-a-vis the status of force agreement. One of the things that Obama was offering as a reason for us skedaddling was that he couldn’t secure any immunity for US troops from prosecution for war crimes and this kind of thing, and he wasn’t gonna put our troops in that kind of circumstance.

He was using that as an excuse to get out of there and to hightail it. Because what Obama wants in Iraq is essentially the same thing that he got with the death of bin Laden. He wanted to be able to say, “Okay, we got Saddam, and so it’s over, and Iraq’s done, and we’re out of there, and I’m coming home for a jobs summit” or whatever. Same thing he did with bin Laden.

“Okay, we got bin Laden, so Al-Qaeda is decimated, on the run,” and of course none of this is true. So the latest is from The Daily Beast: “Obama Flips on Immunity For US Troops in Iraq — Obama will take Iraq’s word for it,” i.e., Nouri al-Maliki is verbally assuring Obama “that US soldiers will not be prosecuted by [Iraq]’s courts as they defend Baghdad.”

Now, “President Obama pulled US forces out of Iraq in 2011 because he couldn’t get Iraq’s parliament to offer US soldiers immunity from Iraqi prosecution,” you know, should they rape and terrorize and this kind of thing and all this stuff that John Kerry readily believed our troops capable of doing. “But now Obama is promising to send in hundreds of special operations forces based on a written promise that these soldiers will not be tried in Iraq’s famously compromised courts for actions they are taking in defense of Baghdad.”

We had that last time, and this is nothing new. It’s just that Obama is deciding to accept it now. The bottom line is that while Obama has said that he’s just sending… What he said here is absolutely ridiculous. We’re gonna send in “advisors.” I had this in the Stack yesterday, but I didn’t get to it. Now, imagine this. He actually said, “We’re going to send in advisors, but both sides have to listen to ’em.”

Now, how asinine is that? Both sides? Meaning, ISIS (i.e., Al-Qaeda) and the Iraqi government have to listen to our advisors! You know, I was joking when Obama announced that we’re gonna send in 300 military advisors but that we’re not gonna do any military action. I said, “Well, that’s not fair. I mean, 300 military advisors for Iraq? What about the bad guys? Shouldn’t we give 150 advisors to them?”

And, lo and behold, in effect it’s what Obama was demanding, that both sides had to listen to our advisors! I think the upshot of this is that US troops are now going to be defending Baghdad. They’re not just gonna be supervising the helicopters leaving the embassy, which was the original purpose. Well, they’re military advisors, but there’s no military action.

Remember we did this whole song and dance last week. He was saying we’re gonna send in 300 military advisors but there’s not gonna be any military action in Iraq. (interruption) Well, yeah, 300 doesn’t sound like it’s enough to do anything. But 300 could become 500. That 300 could grow. (sigh) That’s the way these things work, particularly with somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing or doesn’t care.

So, anyway, upshot is that, for now, these advisors, these units will be protected against potential prosecution based on the promise of the Iraqi government, which may not stay as constituted as it is. It probably will change as they choose a new prime minister and get rid of Nouri al-Maliki. Still, it is thought by people in the know that risks for US soldiers remain potentially high.

So we’ve got — I don’t know — a continued mess, essentially. Now I owe some phone calls here because we haven’t taken any. That’s why I’m gonna start on the phones. We’ll start with Westin in Philadelphia. Westin, I really appreciate your holding, and welcome to the program. Hello.

CALLER: Rush, nice to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Rush, you and I think very much alike. But, you know, it’s apropos that Vice President Cheney was on. We all know that during the Bush-Cheney years we had to hear that the Iraq war was all about oil, about us getting cheap oil. Of course the truth be told, it would have been far cheaper for us to have just worked out a deal to buy the oil than to have sent troops over.

RUSH: Right. We didn’t get any of the it!

CALLER: That’s right. Nothing.

RUSH: We gave it away!

CALLER: But now Iraq is all about oil, because, you know, my belief about the left is that one of their main objectives is population change, changing the demographics of the country.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And part of the way that they do this is by raising the cost of living on the middle class. Education, food, energy, the whole deal. The attack on traditional marriage, abortion? It all changes how many children the middle class are having. Here I believe what Obama and the left are doing is purposely destabilizing the Middle East in order for oil prices to rise higher.

You know, you think about the left. I mean, Stalin had no qualms about starving seven million Ukrainians in order to help “modernize” Russia. I mean, the left, it’s all about the end justifies the means. What are a few hundred thousand slaughtered Iraqis, if we can get gasoline up to $6 a gallon in the United States? I mean, this is how sick I believe these people are. And, you know, I think that’s what we’re gonna see. I mean, if —

RUSH: Let me explain what you’re talking about to people because I understand what you’re saying. We can trace your point, by the way, back to the now famous (because I made it such) Peter Beinart column that ran in The Atlantic in which he basically threw down the gauntlet and said to the middle class, “Hey, look, you know, this is a changing country, and its changing demographics mean that we’re now becoming a country of tolerance.”

Because of demographics, we were becoming a country of “tolerance” and “social justice,” and what he meant was that all of these disparate minority groups — whatever it is that makes ’em a minority, their gender, their gender orientation, their race, their whatever. These people have been stepped on for so long — they’ve been maligned, impugned, disregarded — but they are rising to power now. And if you don’t realize it, you better, because it’s coming.

And you are the one that’s gonna have to give up some power in order for them to have it, and that’s gonna require you to be tolerant. He was speaking to the middle class and the Republican base, and his basic point was that those in the Republican base (in his view, they are the Tea Party), the more you oppose this, the more you’re going to fuel the rapidity with which this happens.

He wasn’t essentially saying that you guys had better accept this, i.e., become Democrats. You had better sign on to this changing America or you’re going to be left out. So what Westin is saying here is that in order to effect that, you need to destabilize the middle class, and the best way to do that is economically, by raising their cost of living.

It dispirits them. It depresses them. They will start having fewer children; they will raise them in different ways. His theory is that what’s going on in Iraq is gonna cause so much instability that the price of oil is gonna rise, and this is gonna lead to gasoline prices soaring, and that has a profound impact on everybody, but particularly the middle class.

It’s not gonna have an impact on people who don’t buy it anyway. The poor who have no cars don’t buy gasoline. Immigrants that have no place to live don’t pay utility bills; we do. We’re paying for all of that, and Westin thinks that the pressure of paying for everybody else plus yourselves is part of the destabilization effort that Obama is attempting to effect. Now, Iraq is the fourth largest oil supply in the world, or exporter, let’s put it that way, and we never have taken the oil.

He’s exactly right. The critics call this a blood-for-oil war and that we were simply engaging in this for cheap oil for Halliburton and so forth. Of course Halliburton, they’re not an oil company. But none of that mattered. The truth was a distant stranger to the left and all of these allegations that they were making. Anything they could do to delegitimize American activity in Iraq, they did, and just simply reduce it to it was a bunch of greedy capitalists trying to get cheap oil for themselves so they could raise prices and screw you. That was their theory.

But we never did. We let the Iraqis keep some oil; we let them sell some oil. We should have been paid back for everything that we did by virtue of getting that oil. It should have become ours as a thank-you if nothing else for what we had done for Iraq. But we never took a barrel.

Now, the battle in Iraq is indeed in part about that oil. Terrorists need it to be able to sell it to finance their operations. It’s more legitimate than opium, heroin, which is one of their primary funding tools out of Afghanistan. So I’m drawn back to a point that I made earlier, and that is what is never talked about, very seldom mentioned in talking about the projection of American military strength and power is the impact it has on global trade. We keep shipping lanes open, we keep prices down. We keep oil flowing at market prices rather than exorbitant, high prices that are punitive and not related to market forces. We’re the only nation that can do this. The point is that there are far more benefits than just military, to military success, and we have a president who is not interested in military success for any reason. And that’s what the Cheneys are finally speaking up about and are admitting.

So many people — I have to tell you — I don’t mean to beat a dead horse here, but I really was alone on an island in January of 2009 when I said, “I hope he fails.” And I’ll let you in on something else. I thought I’d have a lot of people joining me once I broke the ice. I thought a lot of people would join me, and particularly elected Republicans. I thought there would be push-back because of who Obama is. He’s a strident leftist and everything that entails vis-a-vis his view of this country.

It was no mystery to me what Obama was gonna do. I had listened to interviews that he had given throughout the 2000s on health care and the Supreme Court, any number of things. I listened to Reverend Wright. I listened to what these people say. They told us what they were gonna do. They told us what they thought. I thought that I would have some people join me in this, and instead, everybody was frightened away by the historical aspect of Obama’s election, first black president, therefore we can’t be critical. I’m saying, “For crying out loud, it’s the president of the United States. It’s not an African-American. It’s the president of the United States! Policies matter, ideas matter. Where’s the opposition?” And there wasn’t any.

Eric Holder’s nominated, same thing happened, “Oh, what a great nominee.” It was a disaster for the premise of justice. Well, now in six years, now some people are finally seeing that this is not accidental or the result of incompetence or inexperience. This is not managing a decline. This is shepherding it, in essence.

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RUSH: Gibbon, Nebraska. This is Jeff. Thank you for calling, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, I just wanted to make a point that Liz Cheney made, just a little different. Regarding the SOFA agreement, we weren’t exactly invited into Iraq. So generally what you do in a situation like that is you dictate the terms to your defeated enemy and then tell the public that you’ve negotiated a situation, amicable end to the war.

RUSH: We weren’t exactly invited into Iraq?

CALLER: Yeah, if they told us to leave we could say, “Well, no, we’re not leaving until you sign this agreement,” or, you know, “We’re gonna leave troops behind. What are you gonna do about it?”

RUSH: Oh, I see. Okay. So what was the point you —

CALLER: Well, the point is, behind the scenes, you dictate to the Iraqi government, “This is how it’s going to be” and tell them to accept it and in public you say, “Well, we negotiated an agreement on the status of forces.”

RUSH: Are you talking about the Bush administration or Obama?

CALLER: Obama.

RUSH: Obama. Okay.

CALLER: Obama. Yeah.

RUSH: I thought you might have been saying we weren’t invited in there in 2003, and I’m trying to figure out —

CALLER: Well, no, that’s the big point, we weren’t invited. It’s not as though we negotiated an invasion, nor should we negotiate status of forces. I don’t think we negotiated with the Japanese or the Germans on how many forces we’re gonna leave behind.

RUSH: No, that’s true, absolutely.

CALLER: The other point I’d like to make is I don’t know how the soldiers are continuing to fight in Afghanistan. I can’t imagine what their morale must feel like at this point, watching the situation unravel in Iraq.

RUSH: Well, since you bring that up, I forget the year, but I did a troop visit, part of a State Department tour in Afghanistan, and was during a period of time where success was profound in Afghanistan. There was a lot of success and none of it was being reported because all the attention in the media, which our troops in Afghanistan had access to and all the commissaries who got all the cable networks brought in by satellite, were watching the American media trash our effort in Iraq while they were having success.

I can’t tell you the number of guys in Afghanistan, “What about us? Why don’t they talk about the great success we’re having here?” There was already some related morale problem like you’re describing there, but just look at one of his speeches at West Point if you want to question morale. You’re absolutely right. Even the cadets at West Point at their own commencement didn’t know what they were hearing. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

So, no, that’s an extremely valid point. Plus the troops in Afghanistan know there’s a date certain they’re getting out of there anyway. We’ve already signaled that we’re out of there and whatever happens afterwards we really don’t have any concern about. It’s a mess, big time. Jeff, I appreciate the call.

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RUSH: The point was that we had all the cards. Nouri al-Maliki was not in a position to tell us what we could or couldn’t do at all. We had gone in and defeated that government. That’s what Rumsfeld said. Even a trained ape could have gotten a status of force agreement. Meaning, you can’t sue us!

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RUSH: One thing about Iraq. I just want to close the loop on this. Nouri al-Maliki, who is the soon-to-be-gone, apparently, prime minister, did not want us out of Iraq. In fact, he wanted more US troops to stay and longer at the time Obama withdrew. It was Obama who wanted to complete bug out. And Obama probably knew what that would mean and that is that we’re seeing what would happen now. We pull out of there and Iraq becomes defenseless, essentially, to an Al-Qaeda overrun.

My tendency is still to pull up short in saying that that’s what Obama wanted, but I still maintain that the Democrats’ primary objective where Iraq is concerned is to continue to call it a stupid exercise and a never-ending Bush failure. And for that to be the case, you can’t have anything work there. The Democrats simply have too much invested in Iraq as a failure, a Bush-Cheney failure. And I think that desire overrides any instinct or desire they might have to defend the country and to keep ISIS from overrunning it.

Everything these people do is politicized. They had so much success, so much success, they drove Bush’s approval numbers down into the thirties because of Iraq. That is an ongoing victory for them. That’s a victory that just keeps on feeding them. And if they do anything that turns Iraq into a success, I mean, what does Obama gain by that? He doesn’t gain very much. His base doesn’t want any success in Iraq. They want a continuing Bush failure.

This is why I go back and forth on whatever Obama’s real desires in Iraq are. But at some point what is happening there nevertheless resulted in pressures being brought to bear on Obama to at least send in 300 military advisors. But I’m sorry, folks. I mean, I’m guided by my intelligence and experience here with Obama. And I think the idea that Iraq was a total Bush failure is far more important to Obama than a stable Democracy in the Middle East. I just do.

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RUSH: To Detroit, where the United Nations might be called in to help pay water bills for customers. Here is John. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush, for taking my phone call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: I want to jump back to your discussion on Iraq and the free flow of oil. In reality you’ve got ISIS fighting for the oil and you’ve got the Iraqi’s teaming up with the Iranians fighting for the oil, and oil wells. Either way, one of those two is gonna control the oil fields, which means they’re gonna control the money and the money that’s used for that will probably go to instigating terrorist attacks against us. So my question is, is it gonna be in our best interests in the future to send some Tomahawk missiles in and take out all of that oil and refineries in order so it’s not gonna be used against us?

RUSH: No, we don’t want to set the precedent of doing that. That’s just not something we would do. That’s something Saddam Hussein does, is light all his oil wells on fire as he’s being kicked out of Kuwait or the Kuwaiti oil wells. But your circumstances here, your possibilities, you basically have said that no matter who wins the conflict, the bad guys are gonna control the oil. Either the Iraqis, in partnership with the Iranians, brokered by John Kerry, are gonna have control of the oil, or ISIS is going to have control of the oil.

And there again, folks, another argument for having a relationship with the country that Obama doesn’t seem interested in because Obama is busy as the conductor of decline. It’s a symphony that he wrote. He’s the conductor, his orchestra is playing and they’re orchestrating a decline of the United States. More and more people are now finally again starting to see this and say it. And I’m happy about that. I don’t mind being the first, but, you know, sometimes it’s lonely being the only, when it’s just right in front of everybody. So I’m glad others are now seeing what’s going on and saying so. John, I appreciate the call.

We’ll close it out after this.