RUSH: Let’s go to foreign policy now. This is dangerous. I have a series of stories here, we’re forgetting our own security. We’re not even farming it out. We’re just not even going to pay any attention to it. ”Barack Obama Ready to Slash US Nuclear Arsenal’ — Pentagon told to map out radical cuts as president prepares to chair UN talks. Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country’s arsenal, the Guardian can reveal. Obama has rejected the Pentagon’s first draft of the ‘nuclear posture review’ as being too timid.’ This may be the most dangerous development yet, and I hope he fails. Who in their right mind doesn’t hope this dangerous president fails?
Washington Post today: ”Changes Have Obama Rethinking War Strategy’ — Although Obama endorsed a strategy document in March that called for ‘executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy,’ there have been significant changes in Afghanistan and Washington since then.’ You know, keep in mind Obama owns this now. This is his general; this is his strategy, a strategy change in March. He’s now still reviewing his options and asking, ‘Are we doing the right thing?’ First question, are we doing the right thing, are we pursuing the right strategy? That’s what he said on his Sunday appearance on CNN. Then, ‘Obama’s pick for Afghanistan commander warns of rising casualties, a stiff fight ahead and asks for more troops.’ A couple of articles I have here with excerpts from a few months ago about McChrystal’s confirmation. Obama chose McChrystal, the general, Obama chose him. Obama chose to ramp up the fight in Afghanistan and now he’s choosing to play politics instead of behaving as a responsible commander-in-chief.
Now, the general hasn’t changed, McChrystal hasn’t changed, it’s Obama who’s changed. If Obama doesn’t want to win the war in Afghanistan, it wouldn’t come as a surprise because he has said as much. He doesn’t like the word victory. It conjures up embarrassing images of the Japanese surrender in World War II aboard the USS Missouri. Now, if he doesn’t want to win the war in Afghanistan, no surprise, look what he’s done to the deficit. Look what he’s done to the national debt. Look what he’s done to jobs. Look what he’s done to the private sector. GM, Chrysler, insurance companies, doctors and so on. You know, fighting wars are hard things to do. Playing politics, why, that’s easy, comes natural to the community-organizer-in-chief. Playing politics, putting off urgent pleas for additional troops from the general you chose to lead the war effort in Afghanistan because you don’t want to lose your left-wing kook base and that’s what largely this is all about, Obama can’t afford to lose his left-wing kook base. He needs them to get them out there marching. The NEA calls, he needs these people all trumped up and hyped up to pass his health care legislation, and he’s going to lose them if he ramps up the war in Afghanistan, he’s going to lose even some radicals in the House and the Senate.
And then back July 14th: ‘Obama Purges Website Critique of Surge in Iraq.’ Remember, now, the best military leaders told us the surge in Iraq could win the war there and they were right. What did Senator Obama say about the surge? He said the surge in Iraq would fail, and after it succeeded he said it failed. And despite that gross misjudgment Obama was given a promotion, made commander-in-chief. Now, today we have issues in Afghanistan that require the best judgment of our best military leaders. They say more troops are needed immediately if we’re to win in Afghanistan as we did in Iraq. And, by the way, Afghanistan’s not just Afghanistan, the Taliban’s all over the place. They’re in Pakistan, too. If we pull out of there, which is what it looks like Obama’s prepared to do to hold onto his fringe base, if we pull out of there, then Afghanistan goes back to being a terrorist state. We’ll eventually have to go back at some point when there’s somebody responsible running the country. I have to say this, it makes me sad to say it, but there’s even a growing popularity among the elites, and not just the leftist elites, by the way, some even on our side are suggesting, ‘Yeah, you know what? Why don’t we just get out of there? Why, we can’t win there, wasting treasure, why, just get out of there.’
Folks, if we do that all to appease his fringe base, it’s going to be a disaster. What is needed is an all-out effort to destroy the Taliban in Afghanistan and along the border with Pakistan, heavy bombers included, and an all-out effort to build up Afghan military and police force with serious resources. How often did we hear all during the campaign, all during the last three years of the Iraq war, the last four years, how often did we hear that Afghanistan is the place we ought to be, not Iraq, Afghanistan is where Osama is. We haven’t captured Osama. We gotta go to Afghanistan, we gotta win there, just get out of Iraq, we need to reallocate our resources to Afghanistan. So we gradually pull out of Iraq. And now all of a sudden we’re hearing, ‘Ah, let’s get out of Afghanistan, too. We can’t win. Let’s focus on Iran.’ Well, what the hell? The latest on Iran is that Zbigniew Brzezinski is advising the US military to shoot down Israeli jets if they launch an attack. We actually have Americans advising Americans to shoot down Israeli jets, that that would be in the best interests for Obama, the best interests for America. We can’t win in Iraq. You can’t fight wars this way. You cannot set national policy this way.
If we leave Afghanistan we create a terrorist nation. It’s right on the border with Pakistan and may topple that government, then what happens to India? They’re not going to sit around and let this happen. You know, they’ve nuked up. They’re not going to sit around and just let all this overrun them. But these liberal elites: ‘Oh, man we gotta get into Afghanistan, we gotta really go there, we gotta get Osama, we gotta get out of Iraq.’ And then they take us to war, and then they can’t wait to declare defeat. They take us to war and the last thing they want to do is win. Some phony conservatives are at this, too, becoming more and more populist rather than principled: ‘We need to get out of there.’
So where do we take a stand? We’re not going to take a stand in Iraq under this guy. We’re not going to take a stand in Afghanistan, apparently. We’re not going to make a stand in Iran, not Poland, not Czech Republic, not Latin America. Where are we going to take a stand? We’re under assault everywhere. We’re siding with our enemies. Where are we going to take a stand? We’re not going to take a stand, you know why? We are willingly relinquishing our superpower status. Yeah, that’s old-fashioned. It’s unproductive to global cooperation, because we need to cooperate globally on the climate, on the swine flu, on bank regulations, and executive compensation. And that’s what the agenda of this administration.
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RUSH: Finally on this foreign policy business, and we’ve had this before, Madeleine Albright has said before that it’s not good for the US to be the only superpower that has the world out of kilter, not in proper balance. September 18th article in Pravda, Pravda in Russia, reporting on comments Albright made during the Young Entrepreneurs International Business Forum September 13th through the 17th, organized by the Ministry of Sport, Youth Policy, and Tourism of the Russian Federation. And here’s the headline: ”Madeleine Albright: USA No Longer Intends To Be World’s No.1 State’ — Madeleine Albright said during the meeting that America no longer had the intention of being the first nation of the world.’ And here’s an Albright quote from 1998: ‘We very much don’t want to be out there by ourselves as the organizer and the only superpower. People don’t believe that. They think we just want to be King of the Hill, but we do not.’
Now, folks, knocking down the United States from its position of number one has been a left-wing project for generations. It is an explicit Democrat governing policy whenever they’re in office. They hate a powerful America. They do whatever they can to weaken us by any means necessary. We are the problem in the world, from global warming to executive compensation, to banking and financial regulations. And make no mistake, this is who they are. They don’t like us being supreme. We’re immoral and we are unjust, and this is something Obama believes as well. I think this totally explains the ideology behind what Obama is doing internationally and domestically, for that matter. It’s all purposeful. All of this is purposeful. So Madeleine Albright in Pravda, in Russia, with a reminder of how the mission of Democrats in power is always to weaken — this makes me sick. This makes me sick.
I was at the Redskins game yesterday and I ran into four of the most handsome, young, clean-cut Marines. They were just ready to get their orders, and they’re heading to Afghanistan, some were heading to Camp Lejeune, and these people all volunteered to defend and protect their country and this Constitution. They’re some of the greatest young men. They’re 23 to 24 years old, and they were up there as guests of Coach Zorn in his suite for the Rams-Redskins game. They got me on the phone to one of their buddies who was in Twentynine Palms, California, who was being sent to a hellhole in southern Afghanistan, and here we have the commander-in-chief and his administration doing what they can to knock us off the perch that these guys have signed up, volunteered, and trained for to defend. It’s sickening.
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RUSH: Eric in Tucson, Arizona, I’m glad you waited. You’re up first today, sir. Great to have you here with us.
CALLER: Thank you. Two quick points. One, you touched on that, is that Obama told us during the campaign that he had the plan, it was more troops and now he’s saying he doesn’t know, and I’ll tell you, it’s a little late for that. Number two, he gave away on the stand-down on our defense system, he gave away all his leverage before he even got to the table, got nothing in return. He does this all the time. It shows somebody who doesn’t know how to negotiate because they’ve never been in a business setting where you have to cut a deal. Our biggest chip is gone now, the defense. The Russians gave nothing to us. That’s scary. And, I’ll tell you what, it’s also scary that the commander-in-chief can’t get a top-secret memo from his commander in Afghanistan to the president without it getting leaked, that’s scary.
RUSH: I think you’re looking at this from the wrong perspective and the wrong context. I’m going to be blunt with you. See, you are expressing the outrage of anybody who would look at the contents, the context, and the substance of what Obama is saying, and you’re doing so on the basis of the benefit of the doubt that he actually wants to win in Afghanistan. He doesn’t. That he actually wants to do something about the Iranian nuclear program. He doesn’t. He does want to make nice with the Russians. He wants to make nice with Chavez. Remember, the enemies of America are friends of Obama’s. Anybody who thinks this country has been wrong, immoral, unjust, imperialistic, a superpower, they’re right! So this business of owning Afghanistan, sending more troops, that’s a campaign thing. BS. That’s something to try to grab some people for his domestic agenda from the right. ‘Oh, wow, Obama is doing the right thing, he’s doing the right thing in Afghanistan.’ We heard ’em say all during the campaign, we’re in the wrong place, Iraq’s the wrong place, gotta go to Afghanistan, gotta get Osama. He didn’t care about any of that.
The leak, who do you think leaked it? Who do you think leaked the request for troops? And why do you think Obama is putting more stock in the desires of his fringe base than the commander he appointed? All that matters to him is his domestic agenda and he’s gonna do whatever he has to do to get that. This Afghanistan business, it’s really sad but it’s not just Afghanistan. You’ve got, as I pointed out, Madeleine Albright running around I’m sure echoing this administrations sentiments when she says that we don’t want to be the superpower anymore, it’s not productive, it doesn’t provide balance in the world, we don’t want to be the big guy anymore. And he’s seeing to it that we’re not going to be. In the meantime what’s at risk is our own security.
CALLER: I mean I think he’s putting our troops at risk, too, by —
RUSH: Yeah, of course.
CALLER: — a morale issue of the enemy that’s giving the enemy the impression that we possibly are going to lose and we need to do this and that’s the next step we need to take.
RUSH: This is one thing I can’t get into Obama’s head on. I can’t get my arms around the fact that we might have president who wants us to become dominated by all these foreign policies that don’t like us. I may be naive, it may be just who he is, but I can’t get my arms around that, but I don’t know how to conclude anything else. We’re going to slash the nuclear arsenal all to hell. Nobody else is going to have to do all that. There’s no agreement where they get rid of some, we get rid of some. We’re just going to do it. We pull down the missile shield protecting Poland and the Czech Republic, and we do it on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland. That’s no coincidence. And now we’ve got administration officials saying, ‘Look, if the Israelis want to run an attack on Iran and their nuclear arsenal over there they’ve gotta fly over Iraq, and they’ve got to ask us for permission to fly over Iraqi airspace, we run the show. And if they don’t ask us, if they just fly over, what do we do?’ This is the question they’re debating in the administration, ‘What do we do?’
And Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor for Carter, saying, (paraphrasing) ‘We need to shoot down the Israeli jets. We cannot allow an attack on Iran from Israel. That would be the worst thing that could happen to us. We can’t allow that to happen. We gotta go up there, we gotta engage them. We gotta send our jets up and we gotta try to convince the Israeli jets to turn around if this all happens. If they don’t, we gotta be prepared to shoot ’em down.’ The actual advisor to Jimmy Carter suggesting that this is what we do. Now, you take all this, the commander in Afghanistan says he needs more troops, Obama said, (paraphrasing) ‘I’m not going to send more troops ’til we come up with the right strategy.’ Well, hell, the strategery is yours already, it’s the so-called surge. We’re going into the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, we’re going to root out the Taliban, I thought we had the strategy? Oh, no, apparently not working if the commander needs more troops. Well, we’re not going to send more troops. The only reason we’re not going to send more troops is he doesn’t want to make John Kerry mad, he doesn’t want to make Pelosi mad and he doesn’t want to make the fringe kooks on the blogs mad. He needs them for his domestic agenda. Pure and simple.
You know, and dangling over there unprotected now is US national security. And all these wacko Carterite Democrats running around saying, ‘We can’t let anybody attack Iran, why, that would be the worst thing that could happen to us.’ Folks, I don’t know how to interpret it ’cause I haven’t gotten to the point yet that we’ve elected a president who actually wants us to lose major conflicts, that wants our national security to be compromised and nonexistent. (interruption) I know Democrats will not allow a loss on their watch. That’s in Iraq, I said. I did say Iraq. I specified it to Iraq but when you look at what else they’re destroying here, they’re destroying the US economy, they’re gobbling up the private sector as fast as they can. It’s tough to see it any other way. You know, it’s just like Eric here, by the way, it’s not his fault. Everybody, you take Obama, you look at the specifics, you look at what he says about the issues, you look at what he’s done and you analyze it that way. You miss the point when you do it that way.
You have to understand the starting point with Obama. He’s told us he’s uncomfortable with victory in Afghanistan. I’m not making this up. He’s uncomfortable with victory because it embarrassed him to see pictures of the Japanese surrendering in World War II as humiliating. If he’s not talking about victory what the hell are we doing, stalemate for the rest of time?