RUSH: To Louisville and Cliff, glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Thank you, sir. Mega dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: This SUV-driving Dittohead would like to take issue with Mr. Holbrooke on his interpretation of how badly the Bushes have handled this Russian thing.
RUSH: All right, hang on. Let’s go back and let’s get the audio sound bite of that. You mean Richard Holbrooke?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Yeah, Holbrooke, this guy has been panting, salivating, begging to be secretary of state for any Democrat that’s elected. Grab audio sound bite number five. Last night PBS, on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, cohost Margaret Warner talking to Richard Holbrooke, and the question, ‘Do you think there’s been a rush to judgment in the West here about Russia being the bad guy and Georgia being the good-guy victim?’
HOLBROOKE: Quite the contrary. The Russians have succeeded in disseminating confusion about what happened. The Bush administration’s response here has been wholly inadequate until today. Ten years ago there was a similar crisis between Russia and Georgia over the two enclaves. President Clinton dispatched the deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, who was also well known as one of his closest friends, who shuttled back and forth between Moscow and Tbilisi, who calmed it down and resolved it for the time being. This time around, this administration sent no one to Moscow. It was Sarkozy who did the good job today.
RUSH: Okay, Cliff, what is your objection there to what Holbrooke said, other than the fact that he opened his mouth?
CALLER: Well — (laughing) — that’s enough for sure. But, no, while the Russians were under a common command of Bosnia-Herzegovina, they moved out of the Soviet sector through (unintelligibile), down through Serbia, down into Pristina, occupied the airport there. And at this particular point Wesley Clark ordered the British commander — let’s see, his name is — oh, the British commander, Mike Jackson, General Jackson ordered him to attack the Soviets there. And that was a common command. They moved out completely through there, and without notifying their command that that’s what they were going to do. Also Mr. Talbott was also involved in negotiating along with he and Mrs. Albright in negotiating some kind of a common thing to go in for K4 in Kosovo, and that was unsuccessful. But they did assure Algore that they would not unilaterally go into Kosovo, and also assured Madeleine Albright that as well.
RUSH: Well, you know, my memory on this, I’ll have to rely on you, because my memory on this is general, and it’s vague, and it basically can be summed up by saying that Holbrooke and well, Talbott and Madeleine Albright are memorable for doing nothing. I can’t think of any singular State Department diplomatic achievement that they did. They botched North Korea, played for a song by Kim Jong-il, botched Bin Laden, didn’t do anything on terror. I don’t know what that administration did. I think they avoided big things because they didn’t want to threaten Clinton’s high approval numbers and a legacy.
CALLER: Well, one of the things, and this is The Guardian, this is a ’99 report that they said that one of the reasons that Clark ordered the British paratroopers to attack was because he was frustrated that he was conducting that war with his hands tied behind his back. That’s a Guardian report in —
RUSH: Why? Is that because we were fighting the war from 15,000 feet?
CALLER: Yeah. Well, I would assume that’s part of it. I know for sure that they did call the Soviets. They didn’t want to make them mad.
RUSH: That’s another thing, though. Ashley Wilkes had to be replaced.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Nobody distinguished themselves here. That conflict, by the way, is not over. Are there not still peacekeepers there raping the women and children like they do in Africa?
CALLER: Oh, absolutely.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: But, you know, the other aspect of that, too, is also one of the things I felt was interesting about this, I just read this about Solzhenitsyn, he coddled Slobodan Milosevic, and that gives you a mentality of what the Soviets are. This was their country, and they’re going to fall lockstep behind everybody and support that, that’s why they’re having the problem — like Georgia and probably Poland and Ukraine and some of these other countries should be probably be concerned right now. And the other thing —
RUSH: I think they are. I think they’ve been concerned ever since Putin made himself prime minister for life.
CALLER: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And one of the things I’ve noticed with some of the films that I’ve seen there, if you look at the equipment that these Soviets are bringing in there, this is not a ragtag army that you’d expect them to have. You know, we’ve been led to believe that that army is not well maintained. If you look at those vehicles, they’ve got multiple launch relay tubes in there, that BTR-80, T-90s, T-92s and T-80s, that’s all new equipment, and —
RUSH: I noticed those. You’re right.
CALLER: And I think that’s compliments of the price of oil that has given the Soviets —
RUSH: By the way, don’t forget the 618-SAs, you know, those things are not to be trifled with.
CALLER: No, none of them are. But I don’t think that army could have been financed without the help of the Democrats and them not drilling for oil. So those Soviets, looks to me like they’ve got some good equipment there. Now, you know, that’s just one man’s opinion, but —
RUSH: Well, look, we’re all just reacting to what we see on television, but one thing is clear, they’ve got equipment that works, they’ve got a trained army, military that works. They have equipment that’s in good enough shape they can get it over the Caucasus, and everybody makes this point, it’s well served to make it again, this is not something they could have decided to do on the fly simply because getting this stuff in position over the Caucasus was a major undertaking. So this is an eye-opener to us. We don’t know what US intelligence knows about this. We don’t know if they knew they were there. We don’t know if they were discovered. There’s a lot we don’t know about this. There’s always more that we will never know than what we do know. We all get fooled into thinking that what we see on television in newscasts is the sum total of things, and it’s tough not to trust our eyes, because we know that’s a small, percentage of what is actually going on. Cliff, thanks for the call.