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Jan. 18, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:14
January 18, 2006, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Thanks, Johnny Donovan.
Thanks to you, too, for tuning in to this, your favorite radio station for the excellence in broadcasting network, the Rush Limbaugh program.
I too am disappointed that Rush isn't here.
It's one of the worst parts of my day is when I tune in and he's gone.
But the fact of the matter is, he's off having a good time back at the Bob Hope Desert Classic.
He hasn't been there in a while, and he was looking forward to it, and we're happy for him.
You can go to rushlimbaugh.com, rushlimbaugh.com, and you'll be able to see him having some fun out there.
He'll be back this next week.
We're at the East Coast office of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, where there's never a final exam, but we are tested daily.
And by the way, quick note, phone number, 800-282-2882, 800-282-2882.
That line always open to you because we want to hear what you have to say.
But a little unfinished business from the last hour, Roy in Dearborn.
And anybody who's listening in a situation where the signal for AM doesn't come into buildings or have problems in certain areas, of course, the answer is podcasting.
And in fact, this program, podcasts.
You can go to rushlimbaugh.com and it'll all be explained to you there.
But at least for the short term, that's the easy answer for your problem, Roy, and for anybody else who can't hear this fine program inside a building if it's on AM radio.
And I don't know if HD radio or any of that other new stuff is going to change that.
I just don't know.
But I do know that podcasting does work.
Kenneth Timmerman has brought awareness to the threats facing our country to millions of readers around the nation.
In fact, it was in 1998 he tracked renegade Saudi financier Osama bin Laden and his international terrorist network halfway across the globe.
He was doing that, I think, at the time for readers' digest.
Matter of fact, he's written lots of books, too, about that, the death lobby, how the West armed Iraq, et cetera, et cetera.
Most recently, Countdown to Crisis, the coming nuclear showdown with Iran.
Obviously, Kenneth, you have gotten my attention.
My name's Paul W. Smith.
We haven't talked before, but I'm truly interested in hearing what you have to say since Iran is so much in the news and you know so much about him.
Well, I appreciate you having me on, Paul.
And it sure is in the news.
And the story, by the way, is going to be coming to New York next month when Iran's case gets referred to the U.N. Security Council.
Well, as well, it should, as they're playing this deadly nuclear game of chicken with the world.
You start to think, well, I don't want to say that.
When you have a country that is debating whether the Holocaust took place and their president who says the Holocaust didn't take place, but then again, if it did take place, then all the Jews should leave Israel and go to Germany because they're the ones who did it and they should be responsible for taking care of it.
I mean, it's madness.
Add to that nuclear weaponry and a hate for the United States, and it gets our attention.
It sure does.
Now, those statements that you just mentioned about the Holocaust were uttered by the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Mahdi Nijad.
And this is the man who has also said that Israel should be wiped off the map.
You know, the Iranis have been saying that for the past 26 years, ever since the so-called Islamic Revolution in 1979, but it's only been recently that they have gained the technical wherewithal, the weaponry, to be able to carry out that agenda.
You know, they parade their Shahab 3 missiles.
These are missiles that were built with the help from the Russians in the mid-1990s, and the Clinton administration did not stop, and they could have.
They parade those missiles around Tehran with big banners across them that say Israel must be wiped off the map.
So you've got intent, and now you've got capability.
My concern is, as we talk with Kenneth Timmerman, and he's been studying Iran, following them for a long time.
How is it that our intelligence has not had warnings, or as you have said, ignored warnings about Iran's secret to nuclear program?
How could that be?
Well, I think that's a really good question, Paul, and I asked that in Countdown the Crisis.
You know, I'm just a journalist, and yet in 1980-87, as I'm reading the Iranian press and listening to what they're saying in their own broadcasts, they announced publicly that they have signed a deal, 1987, with the infamous Pakistani nuclear scientist, AQ Khan.
This is the man who's the father of the Islamic bomb.
And for some reason, that just didn't seem to get on the radar screen of our intelligence community.
And they missed most of the transfers from the Khan network to Iran until 2003, when they began to track the network anew.
You say that the Mullahs have already enough nuclear material for 20 to 25 bombs.
Are you saying they have those bombs?
No, what I do say, and I try to be very careful about exactly what we know and then what we don't know.
Here's what we do know, and we know this because the International Atomic Energy Agency has finally, finally, after 18 years of closing its eyes to what's going on in Iran, demanded that the Iranians come clean on some of their programs.
Their inspectors have seen documents and actual shipments of 2,000 centrifuges sent by, these are to enrich uranium to make potentially nuclear weapons material, shipped to Iran by the Khan network in 1995, 1994, 1995, 1996.
Now, if the Iranians had used those centrifuges, today they could have enough nuclear weapons material for 20 to 25 bombs.
Now, they want us to believe that they kept them in crates in a warehouse all this time.
I sure wouldn't bet my security on that.
Hey, by the way, Kenneth is kind enough to take your calls.
There are probably questions you have.
We want you to participate here on the Rush Limbaugh program at 800-282-2882.
While he's here with us, he will definitely take your calls at 800-282-2882.
There's a lot in your most recent book.
I should point out that this is not new to Kenneth.
He's been following these issues for some time, but he's talking now of the coming nuclear showdown with Iran, not just because Iran's in the news so much lately and we're trying to figure out what to do with him.
But you do talk about a lot of what would have to be considered failures by the CIA along the way regarding many of the issues with Iran.
That's right.
And frankly, I think these are devastating failures that show that our intelligence community may just be broken beyond repair.
I start out the book with a pretty incredible story that was told to me by an Iranian defector, a man who worked really at the highest reaches of Iranian government intelligence.
And he was personally present in January and May of 2001 when Osama bin Laden's son, his eldest son Saad, and his number two, a man who's been in the news recently, Al-Azawafri, the man that we thought the CIA killed with a predator drone just a couple of days ago in Pakistan.
This intelligence officer was present when they were in Iran in May and January and May of 2001 to meet with top Iranian government officials to do what?
To help plan the September 11th attacks.
Now, he came out and went to the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan, next door to Iran, in July of 2001.
And he met with the CIA, and he said, you know, he told them this story, and they essentially brushed him off, gave him a couple hundred dollars, and told him to get lost.
Well, and then your book goes on to say, too, the agency tried to smear and discredit him after.
That little section is called CIA CYA.
They missed the clue, and now they try to smear the source that provided it to them.
You even have a note here, Kenneth Timmerman, that White House counterterrorism advisor at the time and media darling, Richard Clark, steered the intelligence community away from a terrorism investigation of the attack of TWA Flight 800.
Yeah, he was actually critical.
We've now learned because he was in the White House at the time.
He was critical to focusing the investigation on that center fuel tank, which many people still believe was not the cause of the TWA 800 disaster.
Well, there's a lot here, including a story that I hadn't heard before about a congressman who became apparently so frustrated with the CIA and their refusal to act on the intelligence that bin Laden was in Iran that this congressman actually tried to hire a bounty hunter himself.
Yeah, it's a pretty incredible story.
He told this to me about two and a half years ago.
This took place in 2003, late 2003.
And the way he told me the story, it goes like this, Paul.
He goes in to see George Tennett, who's then the director of CIA, and he tells him that they know where bin Laden is in Iran and that he's going to get an invitation to go to Iran as part of a congressional delegation and bring this bounty hunter along with him.
And Tennett, after he gets himself up off of the floor, he looks at the congressman.
He says, you know, Congressman, you really don't want to be involved in this kind of thing.
It's too bad he wasn't.
We've got some folks who want to speak with you.
We appreciate that you're going to stick around.
Kenneth Timmerman is here.
Countdown to Crisis, the coming nuclear showdown with Iran, it's in the headlines, and this guy has some insight that he can share.
And you have some questions to ask, and we look forward to them here at 800-282-2882.
That's 800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
Paul W. Smith, in for Rush Limbaugh.
Hope your day is going well.
Nice to be able to spend a part of it here with you on your favorite radio station.
And talking with interesting guests and interesting callers, also a part of our guest lineup, you at 800-282-2882.
800-282-2882 in the news.
Europeans, the United States, if they can succeed in referring Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council, sanctions or other enforcement actions would be a long way off if imposed at all, but a minimum, at a minimum, the West is counting on a political and diplomatic embarrassment for Tehran.
Timmerman, can we embarrass Iran?
Can we embarrass them?
Are they concerned about becoming a pariah like North Korea, for example?
You know, they've been at pariah state since 1979 when they took the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and our diplomats hostage for 444 days.
So I don't think you're going to shame them into good behavior.
I have always said and been arguing for a long time with people in this administration and previously in the Clinton administration that we should be empowering the Iranian people, aiding the pro-democracy forces in Iran to change the regime because they are not going to change their behavior.
And we know that we don't like each other, but I was concerned as much about Russia and China, who are now in this mix in a very big way as well.
Well, that's right.
And the key to the diplomatic piece here is going to be getting the Russians and the Chinese, at the very least, to abstain to some sort of significant sanctions resolution at the U.N. Security Council.
If it's a watered-down sanctions, frankly, it's not going to have any impact whatsoever, and it'll just allow the Iranians to gain time.
We need something with teeth in it.
I believe we should really hit them where it hurts in the pocketbook and, for instance, do some of the things that we did to Libya in retaliation for Pan Am 103.
Well, interestingly enough, as we have Kenneth Timmerman with us, an expert on Iran, that's one of the questions that Steve in Ottawa, Kansas has.
Steve, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Paul, hello.
Hello, Steve.
Paul, it's an honor to speak with you.
I am a first-time caller.
I have been listening for years, and I don't recall hearing you on the program before, but I am thoroughly enjoying your broadcast.
Well, thank you very much, Steve.
Okay.
What I was thinking, Paul, what about a unilateral naval blockade?
You know, as far as hitting them in the pocketbook, just the very thing that Ken was talking about, some economic clouts, some sanctions.
Well, Steve, thanks for that.
I think in the end, we may ratchet up to a naval blockade, and we may get there.
We have to start with something a bit smaller because it's very important that we keep the Europeans on board.
We learned with the Iraq debacle at the UN in 2003, that's an earlier book I did called The French Betrayal of America.
We learned that the French can be great spoilers if they're not along with us.
And we want to keep the French, the Germans, the British with us, and they're going to go with us on a pretty significant economic and diplomatic sanctions package.
They could go along, for instance, with preventing Iranian aircraft from landing anywhere in Europe.
They could go along with preventing Iranian diplomats and intelligence officers from traveling anywhere in the world.
They could embargo Iran's state shipping lines, and they're actually pretty extensive, and they could block certain oil deliveries.
We could, though, get to an oil blockade, a naval blockade.
That could be down the road.
But you have to kind of ratchet this up bit by bit.
Let's get to North Carolina, and Lori joins us on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith, along with our guest, Kenneth R. Timmerman.
Hi, Lori.
Hi, Mr. Timmerman.
This is Lori Bird.
I blog at PolyPundit.com, and I have quoted frequently from a piece you did at Front Page Magazine in 2004 about the findings of the Iraqi survey group.
And my question relating to Iran is, how is our intelligence there different than it was in Iraq?
And from things I've read that you've written before, I think our intelligence in Iraq probably wasn't as bad as most people think it was.
But I wondered how our intelligence in Iran is different than Iraq.
Thanks very much for that, Lori.
And I appreciate you citing that piece from Front Page Mag.
It is not very well known that the extent to which Iraq had become one vast weapons factory.
I mean, they had a missile plant north of Baghdad that was as big as Detroit.
It was just enormous.
And they had hundreds of factories like that all across the country.
They might have taken out some of the stockpiles of weapons, but a lot of the manufacturing equipment in the facilities and the people were still there.
Our intelligence in Iran today is based on defectors that the CIA won't talk to, but you can read their stories in my book.
But it's also based on pretty hard documentary evidence that the IAEA, the international inspectors from Vienna, have been able to gather over the past two and a half years in Iran.
They've been able to go to some of these nuclear facilities, take pictures, get documents of the equipment that's in there.
So we have a pretty good idea of the type of capabilities that they're building up.
Let me just add one thing here.
In November 2004, Colin Powell mentioned new intelligence had come in, a laptop computer from an Iraqi, an Iranian, an Iranian missile scientist, and on that computer they found designs to put a nuclear warhead on top of Iran's missiles that are capable of reaching Israel.
So we know as well, that's a pretty sure indicator that the Iranians are trying to get nuclear weapons.
And we found their fingerprints, Iran's and Syria's for that matter, on EFPs.
That was classified information at one point isn't any longer.
Those explosively formed penetrators, the EF projectiles that are doing so much damage to our armored vehicles there, with parts from Iran, clearly and with, as I say, their fingerprints on them.
I don't know what more proof we need.
Let's go to Claire in Encinitas, California, here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Claire.
Hi, Paul.
I'm sorry to tell you I'm looking over the Pacific Ocean and watching some Pelican.
It's a beautiful sunny day.
Well, I'm looking over Manhattan and seeing gloopy conditions at best.
Although, it's not, it doesn't look, is it still raining out?
It is still raining.
Okay.
I love Manhattan.
I love New York City, but it's a tough place to be in the rain.
Okay, so you've held that over us now.
In fact, you've helped us because we're picturing the beautiful weather that Russia's enjoying over there at the Bob Hope Desert Classic.
That's right.
Well, my question to Mr. Timmerman is, just from a basic psychological standpoint, Iran's not poor.
They're not like North Korea that desperately needs money and food.
What do they really want to achieve at the end?
Do they really want to just bluster and look famous?
Are they waiting for us to leave Iraq to join up with the Cali?
What would make them at the table?
It's a good question.
It's a very good question, Claire.
Yes, it is.
Thank you for that, Claire.
Yes.
What is our leverage?
What is it that they really care about?
How do we really hit them?
I lay some of this out in Countdown to Crisis, but I can really sum it up in one single phrase.
They want to preserve their power.
They want to stay in power.
That's what dictators do.
They want to retain this so-called Islamic government that they have, where the supreme leader takes his cue from God, and no elected official can countermand what he says.
And they want at all costs to preserve that.
So that's why I have always argued that our greatest weapon is to try to undermine the regime from within, to help the pro-democracy forces in Iran to overthrow the regime.
In the meantime, we need to isolate them as much as we possibly can.
We need to delegitimize them in the international community and expose them, as we did with the apartheid regime in South Africa, to international sanctions and opprobrium.
You know what?
I'll tell you what I'd like to do when we come back.
I'd like to get your opinion, Kenneth Timmerman, as an expert, on what you think the biggest mistake we've made in Iraq, what we need to avoid in Iran, and in fact, what you think, if you had the president's ear right now, and you very well may, what we should do in Iran, how we should deal with them.
Will you help us with that when we come back?
It would be a pleasure.
We'll continue here in the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
It's the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
Thanks, Johnny Donovan.
And we continue with Kenneth Timmerman, who's written a number of books, The Death Lobby, How the West Armed Iraq, The French Betrayal of America, and his latest countdown to crisis, the coming nuclear showdown with Iran.
This is not a book that was rushed into print because of everything that's going on with Iran.
This guy's been following these problems in this part of the world for a very long time.
And I asked you, as we took our break here on the Rush Limbaugh program, Kenneth, the biggest mistake you think we've made in Iraq, if you would.
Well, frankly, I think in Iraq the problem was that we had a plan when we went in, and in mid-course, we essentially ditched it and went with another plan.
There was sabotage from within the Bush administration, from people in the CIA and the State Department.
They did not want to see an Iraqi government stood up right after the invasion, and they turned the liberation of Iraq into an occupation.
And that was a huge mistake, created the insurgency, led to 2,000 American dead, and it didn't have to be that way.
If in fact that is true, what's been done with the saboteurs within the administration and the CIA?
Well, you know, as generally happens in Washington, Paul, they tend to get promoted.
Oh, no.
I was afraid you were going to say that.
Oh, boy.
All right.
And now what should we do?
And we are getting back to you, callers, that are calling in at 800-282-2882, 800-282-2882.
But what should we do, in your opinion, if you were to sit down with the President of the United States right now, Dr. Rice, et cetera, with Iran?
Well, Iran obviously presents a very serious challenge, but also a great opportunity.
The first thing we absolutely have to recognize is that the Islamic Republic of Iran declared war on us.
They declared war in 1979 when they took our embassy, and they've never given up.
They blew up our embassy in Beirut in 83.
They killed our Marines, 241 in 83, and on and on and on.
Is there ever a chance, before I forget to ask you this question, of us ever coming to an understanding and actually getting along with an Iran?
If we listen to them and they listen to us, or is that impossible?
Well, you know, there are people in this country who believe that all we need to do is sit down at a table like reasonable people and thrash out our differences.
That was the Clinton philosophy.
It's what the Council on Foreign Relations believe, and it's what some people in the State Department believe.
I happen to believe that if you look at 26 years of behavior by this regime, it's incredibly delusional to believe that they would want to seek any kind of arrangement with us that wouldn't keep them in power, keep them killing Americans, and keep their missiles pointed at Israel.
Well, then it sounds as if there's only one thing for us to do, but you tell me what it is.
Well, here's point number two.
We need to name the enemy.
And I would tell the President, the enemy is this regime.
It's this clerical regime in Iran.
Number three, we need to use all the tools at our disposal to get rid of the regime, to help the Iranian people to achieve their freedom and to have a different regime.
We need to use economic tools, diplomatic sanctions.
We need to use political subversion.
We need to help the pro-democracy forces inside Iran.
We need to use the Iranian intelligence agencies against themselves.
Everything is for sale in Iran.
You can buy just about anybody in Iranian intelligence, and we're not doing it.
We can sow panic throughout this regime by taking some covert measures that would be pretty extraordinary, not just in the intel take, but also in upsetting and subverting the regime.
Not that it should have any bearing, but do we have, as Americans, the fire in the belly to go through and do what we need to do with Iran after post-Iraq?
Well, you know, after 9-11, we thought that we had the fire in our belly to fight the war on Iran.
Short memories.
We have the shortest memories.
And we have short memories.
And my fear is that it's going to take an Iranian mushroom cloud over an American city or over Israel for people to recognize that we are indeed at war.
It's this regime that's declared war and that we need to fight it and to counter them.
And with all you know from all of your experience and all the time you've been studying this, how likely are we to see a mushroom cloud over the United States or over Israel from Iran?
Well, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is the test in 1998 that the Iranians carried out in the Caspian Sea of a sea-launched ballistic missile.
They launched it off a barge in the Caspian.
They could today, if they had the nuclear warhead, and we just don't know for sure whether they've got it or not, they could hand off a nuclear warhead to a terrorist group, put it on board a cargo ship off the coasts of the United States,
off the coast of New York or Baltimore or Los Angeles, Miami, and detonate and send a nuclear warhead over a U.S. city or launch an EMP weapon over high up in 300 kilometers overhead and shut down our telecommunications system and basically our entire defenses.
I want to get back to our callers, and I promise our callers that's what we'll do.
Do you agree with what the President has been doing, what's been called domestic spying, whatever you want to call it, eavesdropping?
Do you agree that he needs to do this sort of thing to protect us?
Well, duh.
I mean, if he's not going to, if the intelligence agencies are not going to be able to pursue the communications of suspected terrorists, and remember, these calls initiate with somebody who is known to have ties to al-Qaeda overseas.
Of course they want to know.
So then it's okay for all of us from this point on to quote you as an expert.
And when someone asks us that question, we will just all say, let's do it all together.
Duh.
Let's get to Levi in Los Angeles, California on a cell phone call.
Levi?
Hi, how are you doing?
Thanks for having me.
It's our pleasure.
The question I have is to what extent is Iran honoring their signatory status in their treaty for non-proliferation of nuclear weapons?
And how ready is the Pentagon to use our own bunker-busting mini-nous if we were to engage in armed conflicts with Iran?
Two very good questions, Levi.
Let me see if I can answer them succinctly.
Iran is in violation of Article 2 of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which it ratified in 1970, which requires that any nation that seeks to get peaceful nuclear energy or nuclear technology must have an entirely transparent program and must provide confidence that they are not pursuing a secret nuclear weapons program.
So Iran has violated that very clearly by a number of different actions that they've taken.
Have the Democrats asked us to sign another treaty again?
Yeah, I think probably they have.
Yeah, that's their next step.
Go ahead, Nada.
Number two, as far as the nuclear bunker-busting bombs, we don't have them, unfortunately.
It failed in the Senate by one vote.
The Democrats opposed it.
Research was planned to go ahead, and it was canned by the arms control crowd.
We have conventional bunker-busting bombs, and we transferred quite publicly in February of last year 500 of them to the Israelis.
And the Israelis have been practicing ever since then long-range strikes that if push comes to shove and the international community does not take necessary action against Iran, that the Israelis will, in fact, go after 50, 60, 70 buried targets in Iran.
Levi, nice questions, appreciated.
Bob is in Mountain View, California with Kenneth R. Timmerman on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Bob.
Hi, thanks for taking my call.
Kenneth, you do great work.
Thank you.
Drawing a distinction between the people and the regime, similar to what happened in Iraq, it appears Jacques Chirac really did have Saddam Hussein's back.
Who's got Mr. Adimajan's back?
Ah, now that's a very good question.
I would look to the Russians, frankly.
And the Russians have been, in fact, in the appendix of my book, there's a strategic study that was given to President Yeltsin in 1995 that now you can see has been carried out almost step by step.
It was done by his chief of staff, and they said we in Russia need to have a strategic relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
We should transfer nuclear weapons capabilities, technologies, and ballistic missile technologies.
Why?
To counter the United States and challenge U.S. power in the Persian Gulf.
So I think Russia is the one who's got Mahdi Nijad's back.
But are they losing control?
Is Iran becoming Russia's unruly child that's striking out on their own?
I don't think so because what the Russians have asked in exchange are a couple of things, and they're getting them all.
One is a great deal of business.
Two is no Iranian aid to the Chechen rebels.
And the Iranians have gone along with that, just as they went along with no aid to the Afghan rebels in the 1980s in exchange for Russian weapons.
And three, that Iran basically tie America's hands in the Persian Gulf, and they're more than happy to do that.
Tim is in Sarasota, Florida on the Rush Limbaugh program with Kenneth Timmerman.
Tim?
Paul, good afternoon.
You're doing a great job as a substitute at the Limbaugh Institute.
Thanks, Tim.
And if I may, a quick thanks to my dad for the Limbaugh letter subscription for Christmas.
Thank you.
Oh, that's a nice gift.
It's a fine gift.
You can go to rushlimbaugh.com, get more information about that.
And Kenneth, a question for you.
You seem to be quite the wealth of knowledge, and I'm going to end up debating some unread loon, and I will have you as my arsenal of information.
Well, then, wait a minute.
Get ready.
Duh!
I think, duh, if I could suffice for all my arguments with these loons with duh, I would really be happy.
They're going to go on like they did with the Iraq thing and say, look, we can do this with a system of containment.
And you're talking about economic sanctions and political sanctions.
But can we contain them?
And they have a broader terror network than people were aware of and bigger terror supporters.
Can we contain this country?
That's a good question.
We'll get a good answer, I'm sure, up next.
I'm Paul W. Smith in for Rush Limbaugh.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton saying Iran's nuclear weapons program is a classic threat to international peace and security.
Iran's saying there are no restrictions for nuclear research activities under the non-proliferation treaty protocol, and Iran has not accepted any obligation not to carry out research.
And they say, how is it possible to prevent the scientific development of a nation?
What's wrong with you guys, they say?
Tim in Sarasota asks the question, will containment succeed?
Can containment happen there in Iran?
Kenneth Timmerman, the author of Countdown to Crisis, the coming nuclear showdown with Iran.
The answer to that, and by the way, is a great question, Tim, and I thank you for it.
The answer is very simple.
No, we can't contain them.
We have been trying to contain them for 26 years, and they keep on poking their heads out and poking the missiles out and poking the nuclear programs out.
Freedom is the answer.
And the Iranian people, I think, have overwhelmingly chosen freedom by their boycotts of recent elections.
The mainstream press, or I guess what we should call really the formerly mainstream press, has called the new president, Ahmadi Nijad, someone who was elected by a landslide.
Well, if he was elected by a landslide, it was a landslide of absentee voters who never showed up at the polls.
I was looking at watching some of the polls.
You know, Iran has become a lot more modern in recent years.
They have video cams at major intersections in Tehran, and I was watching that on the internet during the elections.
And all of the polling places that you could find, a dozen of them, were empty almost the entire day.
They claim they have video cameras on their nuclear facilities as well, proving that they're not doing anything wrong.
Right.
Well, those video cameras are tampered with by the Iranians, and they just took the seals off and deactivated the cameras last week.
So so much for that type of control.
If the regime doesn't agree to it, it doesn't happen.
We cannot contain them.
That is the short answer.
Mark is in Bristol, Connecticut with a question here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Paul W. Smith in for Rush.
Kenneth Timmerman taking the call.
Mark.
Hi, guys.
How are you?
Good.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
I have a real serious question.
This is something that's been bothering me ever since I've really gotten into politics, is the fact that you hear some of these people who are just so anti-Bush.
I mean, do they seriously understand what's going on?
Or are they just so hateful of Bush that they don't see that this is a threat, that they don't see that we actually are in a war, that we need to protect our citizens, and that we need to do stuff to get our enemy?
Do they not see it, or do they just so consumed by hate?
That, too, is a very good question.
In fact, Russia's brought up a number of times many of these issues.
Is it just that some people are just so consumed with being anti-Bush?
It's a good question, and I'd love to hear, Kenneth, how you handle that.
Well, Mark, thanks for that.
I'm afraid that there is a segment of the U.S. population and the U.S. Congress that is so consumed with hatred for the President that they would not see a threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran until a nuclear weapon exploded over one of our cities.
But I don't think that's the case of the majority of our population.
I think most Americans have a great deal of good common sense.
And I think it's going to be incumbent upon the President in the coming weeks to lay out the evidence and lay out make a factual presentation, which I'm told he will do during the State of the Union address, of what the Iranians are doing in their nuclear programs and why this poses a clear and present danger to the United States and to world peace.
In Chino Hills, California, it's Dana's turn.
Dana?
Good morning, Mr. Smith.
Hi.
My question is for Mr. Zimmerman with regard to the Israelis' capability in making the strike on Iran.
I understand he was referring to the bunker buster bombs that we apparently have given the Israelis for practice purposes.
Do they have the launch capabilities, the missile distance, to actually make contact in Iran with those sites?
And do they have the numbers necessary?
Would they be using MRFs or would it be single warheads against each target?
Dana, thanks for that.
It's Ken Timmerman with the T.
And the Israelis have been practicing airstrikes with their Air Force against potential Iranian targets.
But let me just be very clear about this.
This is the last option.
It is the worst option.
You're talking about a major regional conflict and things spiraling out of control should we get to this point.
The Israelis don't want to do it, but neither do they want to commit suicide.
And they're not going to do that.
Quick last thought from Saeed in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Saeed.
Yes, Mr. Timmerman, again, I honor to speak with you now for a second time.
You are a real friend of the Iranian people, and your analysis is so undermined here.
To those who think that the Iranian regime can be bargained with and can be contained, all they have to do is look at the history of the last 30 years of how these Ayatollahs since 1979 have dealt with their own internal opposition.
They lured the leaders of the Kurdish minority in Iran into a restaurant in Germany and killed them, opened machine gun and killed them.
Any contract or negotiation or concession that they have made to any of their own opposition has in due time been discarded and disbanded.
And they have no record of compliance with any treaty or any agreement that they signed.
Said, your question turned into a comment and a good one, and we appreciate it, but we're out of time.
Kenneth, thanks for spending time with us.
We do appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate that, Paul.
And amen to Saeed's comment.
Latest book, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran by our guest, Kenneth R. Timmerman.
As we continue on the Rush Limbaugh Program, I'm Paul W. Smith.
Well, I'm looking forward to this next and final hour of the Rush Limbaugh program for today, and that is because we'll be taking a look at Iraq through Paul Bremer's rearview mirror, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
As you know, he is out and about talking about his new book, My Year in Iraq.
You've probably seen and heard him making the rounds today.
You'll get a chance to talk with him, and we're looking forward to giving you that opportunity at 800-282-2882.
800-282-2882 as we continue sharing some time together here on your favorite radio station.
It's the Rush Limbaugh Program.
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