RUSH: I cited Norman Podhoretz. I feel really fortunate to have gotten to know Norman Podhoretz. Norman Podhoretz I put, in the area of foreign policy and general overall intellect, I put him in the same classroom that you would find William Buckley and Milton Friedman and some of the Founders. Yeah, and I’ve been fortunate to meet Mr. Podhoretz. One of the last times I was with Bill Buckley was out at the Buckley home in Stamford, Connecticut, and Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter were there, and Buckley had just gotten out of the hospital. It was emphysema and he was just getting back into form, wasn’t quite there, but it was just a great Saturday afternoon talking about things.

We’ve interviewed him for the Limbaugh Letter. He’s got a piece in Commentary, which I think is a website that he started, and it’s entitled: “Obama’s Right.” He said, “Whenever Barack Obama says, as he often does, that another war in the Middle East is the only alternative to the deal he is making with Iran, his critics immediately accuse him of setting up a straw man, which indeed he also often does. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the sternest and most effective critic of ObamaÂ’s deal, declares that the true alternative to it is not war but ‘a better deal.’ So, too, leading domestic opponents like Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton.

“Now I consider the agreement Obama has negotiated a dishonorable and dangerous product of appeasement, and so it pains me to side with him against political figures I admire and generally support. Nevertheless, I have to confess that I think he is right in arguing that the only alternative to a deal is war.”

Now, where he’s going with this — I often and long-expressed what I think is common sense, the Middle East peace process, which is now its own entity, it’s something that you can aspire to as a career to be and to work at the Middle East peace process, meaning you get a lifetime career there, it never ends. The Middle East peace process, the only thing that changes there are the people, as they die off and are replaced by younger graduates at Ivy League schools who are trained in sustaining the Middle East peace process.

The one noteworthy thing about the Middle East peace process is A, there’s never any peace, and, B, it never ends. It’s an ideal existence for an egg-headed bureaucrat whose primary objective in life is to make sure his bureaucracy never closes. Ergo, the Middle East peace process itself will never deliver Middle East peace.

And to that end, I have — I think with just some common sense — have offered up an opinion that, in conflicts like these, they never end with negotiations, never end with agreed-to words. Well, they do, but they’re not solved with words. They’re not solved with speeches. They’re not solved with agreements. They’re not solved with negotiations or any of that. They’re solved militarily. Germany surrendered, Japan surrendered after suffering a humiliating military defeats, which were so complete, they were unable to even continue to defend themselves.

And that’s when the words and the negotiations really started to matter. Those are the terms of surrender, that’s when the signatures take place. But in any conflict like this, it’s never gonna end until one side defeats the other, and you don’t defeat anybody with words and doctors and nurses and clean water and the Red Cross and the United Nations and the blue helmeted peacekeepers and whatever the hell else that’s part of your process.

Now, Podhoretz is not per se saying that. What he says is, “I do not mean that war is the only alternative to ObamaÂ’s deal alone. What I mean is that war is the only alternative to any deal the Iranians would be willing to sign–if, that is, the purpose is really to prevent them from getting the bomb. Obama keeps insisting that this is what his deal will accomplish. But it seems increasingly clear that he no longer thinks, if he ever did, that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be so dangerous that it must be prevented at all costs from getting them.”

He used to say that he believed that, and as recently as June 2013, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, but he doesn’t believe that anymore. He doesn’t believe that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be so dangerous that they should be prevented from getting them. Ergo, the only real solution here, war. And he’s right. Nobody wants to hear it, nobody wants to contemplate it, nobody wants to consider it.

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RUSH: Anyway, folks, Norman Podhoretz is right. Economic sanctions did not stop Iran from pursuing the bomb. Economic sanctions didn’t stop ’em because, well, the Russians didn’t obey them or participate in them. The Iranians, they are hurt. I mean, there’s no question the sanctions harmed Iran’s economy, but since Iran doesn’t really care about its people the way an American president cares about his people or any Western democracy’s leader cares about his people, that wasn’t a big deal.

The bottom line is sanctions did not stop them, and that’s a form of coercion. Mild warfare, economic warfare didn’t stop ’em. The only thing that will stop them is having their stocks taken out, and that’s the only reason they’re pretending to go along with this deal, because the deal will protect them from being bombed or attacked for the next ten years while they continue to build up their stocks.

Here’s Greg in Louisville as we head to the phones, and I’m glad you called, sir. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you today?

RUSH: Very well. Thank you.

CALLER: Always enjoy talking to you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Well, I have to disagree with you. I think the problem that the neocons and the people like Podhoretz who speak for the neocons, is basically what they want… You know, we don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But how far are you willing to go to stop it? Are you willing to start a war with Iran, which apparently is what Lindsey Graham and Norman Podhoretz and people like that want to do? I think that’s an unwise and undesirable thing to do. So that’s where we are.

RUSH: Well, then, where we are is the Iranians get their desired nukes and their desired program.

CALLER: The Soviet Union fell without a war. The Soviet Union collapsed without the military confrontations ’cause we outcompeted them economically, we outproduced them, and the government collapsed.

RUSH: Well, but that’s —

CALLER: There doesn’t have to be a war. There doesn’t have to have a war.

RUSH: That’s not really the sole reason. It wasn’t simply that we beat them economically. That happened every year.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: They were defeated militarily. A shot wasn’t fired, but they were defeated militarily.

CALLER: Well, let’s defeat Iran the same way.

RUSH: But the Soviet Union was never led by religious fanatics who thought the apocalypse was their salvation. The Soviet Union was led by a bunch of Marxists who didn’t believe in religion. They were gods. It’s a dangerous comparison, I think. Now, Podhoretz. I don’t know anybody’s advocating war. I don’t read that in his piece. He’s just saying if you really serious about stopping ’em, this is what it’s gonna take, and you could threaten it. You can do all kinds of things, none of which we are doing. The point is: We’re bending over. That’s the bottom line. Anyway, I appreciate the call, Greg.

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RUSH: I think what Obama is relying on here is that his belief that nobody cares. The low-information crowd doesn’t care whether Iran gets a nuke. Nobody thinks Iran would ever use one. Nobody thinks anybody’s gonna ever use one. So it’s no big deal. That’s my perception.

I really think, just expanding a bit on my salient closing comments that were brief because of the constraints of time, when it comes to the Iranians and a nuclear bomb and the people of this country, I don’t know how many people actually care. It’s a given the low-information crowd doesn’t care about it. It isn’t a big deal. I think most people that are on the fringes — it’s amazing how the young generations change and differ.

As I mentioned earlier this week, back in the seventies and eighties, young people then, particularly the children of Hollywood, were obsessed with nuclear weapons. Let’s focus on the eighties. It coincided with Reagan being president. I mean, it didn’t matter. I’ve used the example of Laura Dern on Donahue, but she was by no means the only one. They were running around in a daily panic, I mean daily. They were scared to death the world was gonna go up in flames ’cause we had the Soviets, we had the United States, and we were the bad guys. Gorbachev was the savior, in their minds, and they lived with this daily fear of nuclear annihilation, and they had all kinds of peace marches, they had die-ins. I mean, they did it all.

And today, every generation is apocalyptic, every generation fears the end. Today they think global warming is gonna be why the world goes up in flames. In the eighties it was nuclear bombs. Today it’s racism, bigotry, homophobia, and global warming that are gonna cause the world to collapse. And the Iranians with a nuke? “Come on. Come on, Mr. Limbaugh, get serious. Besides, there’s no stopping them. Nobody’s willing to go to war. Not even the Mossad, not even the Israelis, not even Netanyahu, all the huffing and puffing, there’s nobody willing to militarily take Iran and the nuclear program out, so it’s a fait accompli.”

I think this is probably most people’s attitude, and I think it happens to be the attitude of a lot of adults. Nothing anybody’s gonna do about it, so why get so exercised? It’s just another day, we have to get up and roll the dice. And then everybody prays, let’s just hope that the mullahs use it for extortion and blackmail and don’t really get caught up in the 12th imam, ’cause if they get caught up in the 12th imam, that could be bad. But if they just extort us and if they just blackmail us, fine, we can deal with that.

But seriously, I shouldn’t be flippant about this. I’m just — (interruption) What’s real? Nuclear bombs in Iran? Or my… (interruption) Who’s real? The people I’m talking about or the fact — (interruption) Oh. Yeah, it is real. They’re not concerned about it. Well, in some cases you can understand why. There’s nothing they think they can do about it, and they clearly see a president who’s not doing anything about it. So if he’s not, why should they?

President after president, candidate after candidate has promised, has sworn that Iran will not go nuke on their watch. But nothing is ever really done about it. We try sanctions, we try words, speeches, the Red Cross, you name it. But I think it’s still noteworthy to chronicle the difference. It’s just the neocans, yeah. (laughing) The Rumsfelds and the Cheneys, the neocons, they just want to go to war everywhere. We gotta stop the neocons. So we’ll see. Same kind of apathy as there was about the Norks getting nuclear weapons.

Isn’t it amazing to chronicle today, young people probably don’t even consider it likely to happen. They’ve lived in a nuclear world now for so many years and nobody’s launched one at us. Nobody’s tried to take us out, so it’s probably something they don’t think about very much. When they listen to people get all exercised over Iran getting nuke, they probably just aren’t able to marshal the emotion about it. But nevertheless, I wanted to tell you where we are on the deal and what’s what.

And I want to remind you, I interviewed Dr. Thomas Sowell for the Limbaugh Letter, the most widely read political newsletter in America, two issues ago. I forget how the subject came up, but he told me that one of his great fears was that Iran would succeed in getting a nuclear weapon and would decide to take out a couple of American cities and that at that point his fear was that Obama would surrender.

I was flat-footed. I was totally taken aback. I had never heard anybody posit that the United States would surrender instead of fighting back, but Dr. Sowell was convinced that there wouldn’t be any fighting back, that that’s who Obama is. So that kind of was a wake-up call for me.

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RUSH: Chris in Oklahoma City. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Welcome, and hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Okay, two questions. First, is Iran’s gonna get the bomb, either way, and they’re gonna get this bomb without this deal. So I think that they set up the deal so that they’ll be protected from being attacked by Israel and other countries in that area that don’t want them to get the bomb either because that will be a threat to the entire region.

RUSH: Right. They do not by agreeing to the 10-year portion of the deal. During the ten years Iran has supposedly has agreed to slow down and pull up short of weaponizing their uranium in exchange for being able to go to town 10, 12, 13 years from now. The purpose of that ten years is there would be no reason to bomb them. They’ve agreed not to do it for ten years, so everybody backs off. So you’re right with that. What’s your second question?

CALLER: Okay, that ties up into the first one. Now, the administration can’t have war break out. Iran oddly is threatening war, conflict. Now, it being election year, if anything happens, any conflict, it will reflect bad upon the United States and especially the liberals. So they have a 15-year window, if this agreement goes through, that they won’t get the blame for anything. They will seem like they’re doing a positive because no one wants war, even though Iran can’t really do anything to us. Just the threat of war, politically, would make them look horrible.

RUSH: Okay. So let me see. You’re not asking questions. You’re actually making point. Let me see if I understand this one. Your point is that one thing that would hurt the Democrats is a war. They don’t want a war. So they get this 10-, 15-year deal where the Iranians promise not to develop a nuke but they keep working on it, and they get closer and closer and closer. There’s no reason to bomb them, no reason to stop them, ’cause they promised they’re not gonna do it. But in the end, they’re gonna get for me, no matter what we do ’cause there isn’t gonna be a war. And because there’s not a war the Democrats are gonna end up looking great because they have made sure that the world remains secure for the next ten years. Is that basically your theory?

CALLER: Yeah. Would you agree that they would save everything diplomatically, but they get —

RUSH: Ah, we’re gonna run out of time here. Finally we got to a question after three minutes and I don’t know what it is.

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RUSH: Mr. Snerdley, you know what the last caller’s question was? Do you have any idea what he was gonna get to? (interruption) All right. Well, so basically his point is that the overarching umbrella is nobody’s gonna bomb Iran. It isn’t gonna happen. We’re not gonna do it. The French aren’t gonna do it. The British aren’t gonna do it. The Russkies aren’t gonna do it. NorComs aren’t gonna do it. The ChiComs aren’t gonna do it. The Israelis are not gonna do it. So it doesn’t matter.

Everything else doesn’t matter.

We’re never gonna know the terms of the deal, anyway.

Bottom line: Nobody’s gonna know if Iran’s cheating.

We aren’t going to know what the terms of the deal are so we won’t even know if they are cheating. But his point is that the last thing Obama wants is any kind of military activity going into an election year. Now, that requires us to believe that Obama cares about the Democrat Party going forward. And I would think that he does, because he’s gonna be hell-bent on making sure whatever he’s done and accomplished when he finishes is not rolled back.

So they don’t want a war.

I mean, the popular conception is Israel isn’t gonna do it, and the Mossad’s not gonna do it because they’re not gonna risk losing every dollar of aid that we give them. (interruption) You don’t think Obama would cut ’em off? Sure he would. They’re not gonna risk it. That’s… (interruption) I don’t know. I have no clue. I’m telling you what the popular consensus, the conventional wisdom is, is that Israel is not going to do it. Hasn’t there been news…? (sigh)

Haven’t we seen stories that Obama threatened the Israelis that if they try this, we will not offer them permission to go over various airspace, for refueling. There’s some question whether Israeli bombers can get to Tehran and back without being refueled. That may be moot, anyway. So the point is, Obama and the Democrats don’t want a war over anything, much less this, at any time, but going into an election. The Iranians know it. So the Iranians agree to this deal that says they won’t do anything for ten years.

They sign it; we sign it.

Well, there may not be a signature. There may not even be a piece of paper. We may get anything more than what we’ve got. But the point is everybody will stand down. Okay, Iran said they’re not gonna do anything on weaponizing anything for ten years, 12 years, so everybody’s cool. In ten years, 12 years, the current crop of leaders aren’t even gonna be here. They wash their hands of it. It’s somebody else’s problem ten years, 12 years from now. So nobody does anything.

The Iranians in the meantime, take this 10 years where they’re promising to do nothing and they just keep building and building and building. And the reason that’s gonna happen is because at the top of everything, nobody is going to launch a military assault on them. Back to Norman Podhoretz’s point: The only way of stopping them is that. Now, you may not want to hear that, but there’s no… I don’t know of any other alternative. They’re not gonna agree to stop.

We have withdrawn every other measure designed to harm them economically, politically. We’ve withdrawn all of those measures, so there is no harm. The Iranians are running around fat, dumb, and happy. They’re smiling ear to ear over all of this. So people don’t want to hear it, but it’s been the case in humanity since the beginning of time. Every major conflict between nations or people is solved — one way or the other — by who kills the most of the enemy and who tears up most of the enemy’s stuff, forcing the enemy to say, “I quit.”

That’s how it happens. Nobody volunteers to lose on a piece of paper. Nobody negotiates defeat. And that’s why this never works. And you don’t negotiate victory, either, until you actually have achieved it. And you don’t achieve victory on paper. It’s just… That’s common sense. People don’t want to hear it. They think it’s radical and it’s extreme to say it. It happens to be the truth.

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RUSH: Here’s Bruce in Muskegon, Michigan. Bruce, I’m glad you waited. Great to have you on the program. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush, I’ll get right to my comment.

RUSH: Thank you. Thank you.

CALLER: Referring to the Obama interview that you talked about earlier on your show, I’d like you to comment on what I think was a subtle, but very revealing statement, that he made which I think really shows his colors. He went on and on about how great this deal was and this was our only chance and there are all sorts of guarantees, and then he made this statement. And before I repeat his statement, let me state what he did not say. He did not say: “I guarantee you that this will prevent Iran from getting a bomb.” What he did say, and I quote: “I guarantee you that this agreement will prevent Iran from getting a bomb on my watch.”

RUSH: That’s a good catch. That’s a good catch, because that’s exactly right. Everybody, for the most part, is gonna be gone in ten years, all the central figures. Kerry is certainly gonna be back in Sun Valley skiing or snow surfing, whatever he does. They’re all gonna be gone, and none of what is scheduled to happen in ten years is probably gonna be attributed to them. That’s another reason for the ten years, which then becomes 13. “It won’t happen on my watch.” Pretty safe bet to be able to factually say that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon in a year and a half by the time Obama’s term expires. Good catch, Bruce. I appreciate that.