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July 14, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:23
July 14, 2006, Friday, Hour #2
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Thank you, Johnny Donovan.
And it's a pleasure and a privilege to be with you as a fellow student of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies coming to you today from the Midwest campus in Detroit, Michigan, the motor city still, and the growing life sciences corridor with Google, the latest, to choose Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, for their next Googleplex.
And we're very excited about that here at the Midwest campus of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, where there is never a final exam, but we are tested every day.
I am Paul W. Smith, and it is a pleasure to be with you, and even more so a pleasure to say that after Mark Belling did a great job and Tom Sullivan did a great job, I am happy to announce that actually on Monday, Rush Limbaugh will be in for Rush Limbaugh on this your favorite radio station.
Nice to share this Friday with you, keeping an eye on the breaking news of the day the Middle East has blown up.
We're not watching a part of the world that is close to war.
We're watching a part of the world that is at war.
And of course, frankly, in many ways, they always have been.
Now, here at the Institute in the Midwest, here in specifically Detroit, Michigan, we happen to live in one of the few places in these United States where there are so many people who are at the very least sympathetic to the other side, or the wrong side, in terms of who the United States calls an ally.
One front page of this one, the Friday Oakland Press, local Jews and Lebanese split on Israeli response.
Now, that's not happening a lot of places.
It is happening around here.
There are so many people who live here who still have roots and family and friends still living over there on the quote-unquote wrong side.
Now, I'm not talking about the ones who haven't made the transition to living here and should.
I'm not talking about the ones who don't believe Israel should exist.
I'm talking about fine, proud Americans who are very much here, but still have a connection there.
It's an especially tough time for them.
By the way, Hezbollah TV reporting that the building housing the headquarters of the guerrilla group has been destroyed in an Israeli airstrike.
And that's what the Israelis are trying to do.
President Bush says Israel should try to limit civilian casualties in this escalation of attacks on Lebanon.
But the president is not going to answer Lebanon's plea to call for a ceasefire.
Not going to happen.
Israel has to be able to defend themselves and do what they must do.
Our phone lines open to you on the Rush Limbaugh program at 1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882 or RushLimbaugh.com and talking about some of the other news of the day, which now is completely tied in with the biggest story of the day.
And the energy security was to be the focus of the discussions of the G8 summit, but that's just not going to be the case right now.
Obviously, they're going to be talking about what's happening in our world.
And this is not the first time that external issues, in this case, external crises, are expected to steal the attention away from the stated agenda, issues of global energy security, infectious diseases, and education.
This unfolding crisis in the Middle East between Israel and Hezbollah and Lebanon will be a big part of the conversation.
Now, those standoffs over North Korea's test firing of the missiles and Iran's nuclear ambitions expected to get attention, but not as much attention.
And there are even those who say that Iran did this on purpose.
They fueled this fire to get the attention off of them.
Who knows for sure?
But at least I do know this.
We have an expert here to join us.
Ariel Cohen is Senior Research Fellow of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Heritage Foundation, USA.
We're going to talk about U.S. relations with Russia in light of some of these big issues facing the U.S. Of course, Israel and Lebanon, Iran, North Korea, also the state of democracy in Russia, and recently come into question, most notably with Vice President Cheney's broadside against curbs on the press, political opposition and speech in the former Soviet Union.
They seem to have gone backwards, way back.
And a senior research fellow of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Heritage Foundation, his latest book, Eurasia in the Balance, the U.S. and Regional Power Shift, Ariel Cohen, is on the other end of our line.
Ariel, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
It's a great pleasure.
I'm guessing that tonight, when the President has dinner with Putin before the start of the GH summit with the other world leaders, they're going to be talking an awful lot about this, the Middle East.
I'm also guessing that Putin will not be eating crow.
And I'm also thinking that they're not going to be best bud smoking a fine cigar after dinner.
It depends what happens.
I suppose it does.
But it'll be interesting to see, that's for sure.
What does Ariel Cohen think is going to happen?
First of all, the best laid plans of Meissen Man came up in smoke in Lebanon because while the G8, Bush, Putin, Condy Rice, and others were putting together very carefully, painstakingly, a program to get the Iranian nuclear program under control, the Iranian fully owned subsidiary,
Hezbollah, that was founded by the Iranian intelligence and revolutionary guards in the early 80s, launched an attack that was on purpose, a provocation against Israel.
And now the G8 and the world, instead of looking at Iran, looking elsewhere.
The Iranians did the usual cartoon trick of they ran that away, and everybody is looking that away instead of looking at the Iranian nuclear program.
And this is something for China and Russia, the two permanent members of the Security Council, to consider.
Over the years, Russia and China were not supportive of Iran, of course not, but at least somewhat protective of Iran and were against the UN sanctions or, God forbid, use of force against the Iranian nuclear program.
Now we all are facing with Iran that is behaving irresponsibly, and Putin Bush could focus on how Russia, U.S., and possibly even China can work together in the UN Security Council and elsewhere to bring this threat under control.
We've already found Iran's fingerprints on the rockets that are being used by Hezbollah, the rockets that are coming out of Lebanon into Israel.
So they're fully involved.
It's no secret.
It's no surprise.
Same with Syria.
I want to get back to that because it is the news of the day.
But since we also have you and your expertise from the Heritage Foundation, I want to talk a little bit more about those relations with Russia.
And what I'd hate to see would be, you know, when we choose sides and we get the international headbutt that it's China and Russia versus the USA and Japan.
I would still think that there are a lot of common interests.
Neither Russia nor China are interested in a global conflagration or a new war in the Middle East.
That will send the oil prices skyrocketing, which is very bad for China.
But later on, if we're moving into a major economic crisis because of high oil prices and because of the war, that will cause a drop in oil prices that is very bad for Russia.
So ideally, in the rational world, people like Putsy and people like President Hu Jintao of China need to coordinate their policies with President Bush, and we need to coordinate our policies with them because in a world that is increasingly interdependent and globalizing, we are all dependent on each other.
And it is the anti-status qual players, the spoilers, if you wish, like Iran and their subsidiary, the Hezbollah terrorist organization, and Hamas, which is increasingly under the Iranian sway.
Those are the spoilers.
Those are the West haters.
Those are the killers of children and women who are trying to destroy our world, to destroy our civilization.
And we need to work with anybody who is willing to cooperate with us to defeat our enemies.
And we need Russia, as we've talked about.
And again, moving toward democracy.
And although he has been criticized for his record on democratic reforms and slipping backwards, actually going into this G8 summit, it was expected they would be treading lightly because they need Russia's help on North Korea and with Iran.
And so we would expect that the President will have a nice dinner and will raise these concerns privately.
But now all of the attention is truly, as Iran wanted it to be, and Syria too, on what's happening in this new Middle East war, in this new fighting.
Absolutely.
And there's another very important dimension to our relationship with the Russians.
What is on the agenda bilaterally with Russia is Russian membership in WTO, in the World Trade Organization.
And the Russians connected that to two major economic transactions.
First, there is a giant natural gas field in the Barents Sea.
The Barents Sea is pretty much in the area of the North Sea.
It's somewhere between and to the north of Norway and Russia and to the east of Great Britain.
And in that sea, there's a huge gas field called Stockman.
Stockman has trillions of cubic feet of gas, and we are interested in buying it in the form of LNG, liquid natural gas, for our dwindling supply.
And the Russians conditioned their membership in WTO on allowing us to access the Stockman deal.
The other deal, which is somewhat smaller, is Russia buying 22 Boeing aircraft from us for their growing airlines, Aeroflot.
So there's a lot on the plates in St. Petersburg besides their steak and their salmon.
One of the business.
One of the other things I want to.
We need to take a break here, but one of the other things I want to ask your expertise about and what you've heard about this plan that might be announced, the beginning of negotiations on an agreement that would allow Russia to take nuclear waste from reactors used for civilian power in the United States.
And this too is big tucks.
This is big tucks for Russia.
Let's come back to that, and let's come back to our callers as well at 1-800-282-2882.
That's 1-800-282-2882.
Ariel Cohen is with us.
He's Senior Research Fellow of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Heritage Foundation USA, right here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Program, and it's Friday.
I'm Paul W. Smith, sitting in for Rush.
Rush is back Monday.
1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882 or RushLimbaugh.com.
Ariel Cohen, Senior Research Fellow of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Heritage Foundation USA, talking about the G-8 and what's going to be discussed, and the President having dinner privately with Putin tonight.
And they'll talk about those 22 Boeing aircraft that Russia is going to buy and some of the other issues that are going to be discussed.
And one of them, too, is about the U.S. and Russia announcing the beginning of negotiations on an agreement that would allow Russia to take nuclear waste from reactors used for civilian power in the United States.
And it's said that such an agreement would represent a policy shift for the United States.
What do you know about that, Ariel?
The Russians were keen to develop the nuclear waste storage industry for a long time.
Don't forget, since the beginning of the Cold War, the Russian nuclear complex, nuclear industrial complex, is as sophisticated and probably even larger than the American one because the Hestin's bigger country with a lot of uranium supply.
And by the way, since the end of the Cold War, they were selling us diluted nuclear fuel, the old enriched uranium from the nuclear warheads that were aimed to destroy us.
They blended it down to the nuclear power station fuel and were selling it to us.
So some of the electrons you and I are using now for this radio program or just for light and electricity may have come from the Russian nuclear warheads, Soviet nuclear warheads from the Cold War.
Beyond that, in the midst of far away lands in Siberia where they have whole cities of nuclear physicists and engineers, they want to develop the storage industry.
And because a lot of reactors around the world are American-built, they needed U.S. approval and signature to take in nuclear waste from places like East Asia, for example, Japan and Taiwan, and now the United States.
So we are going ahead with that.
Russia is about to earn something like $15 or $20 billion with a B dollars over the next five years from that storage industry.
And of course, everybody says, NIMBY, not in my backyard.
We don't want to store it down.
Look at Yucca Mountain in Utah.
So they're going to develop that.
They're going to make money.
And everybody else is going to get rid of the nuclear waste.
And so this is a win-win with Russia.
I wonder if they'll take our garbage.
We've had a big problem with that in Michigan, getting Canadian garbage.
That's another problem another time, I guess, we'll discuss.
A lot of people want to talk with you, so let's give them that opportunity.
Ariel Cohen here from the Heritage Foundation at 1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882.
And Ralph from British Columbia is on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith.
Say hi to Ariel Cohen.
Ralph?
Good morning, Mr. Smith.
Good morning, Mr. Cohen.
Hello, Ralph.
My comment, sir, Mr. Cohen, was that I would undoubtedly admit that you are correct.
We are in a global community, and we do need to work with China and Russia financially.
However, I don't think we should ignore the elephant sitting in the room, which is basically the fact that China is supporting North Korea, and they've done so since the Korean War.
And that's something that, you know, while dealing with them economically, it's certainly a fact that they are funding our enemy.
That's my point.
I think you're absolutely right in terms of supporting the regime.
Although, in the longer term, if I was a Chinese foreign policy expert or even Chinese leader, if I possibly can put myself in their shoes, which is quite a stretch for me, I would ask myself: do we Chinese need a nuclear-armed neighbor right on our doorstep for that matter?
If I'm a Russian, do I need nuclear-armed North Korea with missiles right at our doorstep?
I think we did not have enough cooperation from Beijing on disarming Kim Chong-il.
And I also am kind of disappointed because I'm looking at the example of Germany.
And Germans, after the collapse of the wall, really wanted to reunify and be one people.
And it costs them a lot.
It cost them a trillion Deutsche Mark.
It's close to what, probably $750 billion.
It was like several GDPs of Germany.
But they wanted to reunify.
It looks like South Korea is looking at the bill, a potential cost of reunification with the North that is falling behind in development, and they don't really want to reunify with their brothers.
Dr. Cohen, we're going to run out of time, and I'll tell our callers they will get a chance to come on because with our next guest in the next half hour, we'll continue talking about Israel and Hezbollah.
But I know you have some strong feelings about this, and I want you to be able to express them in the very little time we have left, though, but that you believe Iran is behind the Hezbollah attacks and wants a new Middle East war.
Absolutely, because Iran founded Hezbollah.
Hezbollah, which is a terrorist organization, is a fully owned Iranian subsidiary.
The remote control for Hezbollah is in Tehran, and Iran wants to shift the world's attention away from the discussion of its nuclear military program, the Iranian bomb program, and focus on Arab-Israeli conflict.
Iran wants to lead the Muslim world, to be the leader and to upstage the radical Sunni Muslim wannabe leaders like Osama bin Laden.
And Israel obviously can't sit still while Hezbollah rains rockets on their cities, killing civilians, threatening power stations, refineries, Haifa Bay, all of that.
Appreciate your help on this very much, Ariel Cohen.
It's my pleasure.
Senior Research Fellow of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Heritage Foundation, Ariel Cohen.
That conversation will continue with George Friedman, CEO of Stratford.com, coming up next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thank you, Johnny.
1-800-282-2882, our line's always open to you, and we'll get into this open line Friday, a little bit of a kind of an adjusted version of it in the final hour here with breaking news we want to stay on top of, as always, on the Rush Limbaugh program.
1-800-282-2882 or RushLimbaugh.com.
We have George Friedman with us, Dr. George Friedman, Middle East expert and author of America's Secret War.
He is a part of Stratfor, the world's leading private intelligence firm.
And he is on the other end of our line and willing to talk with you as well if you have questions or comments about what is happening right now in the Middle East.
Senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meyer has told reporters that Israel has, quote, concrete evidence that Hezbollah plans to transfer the kidnapped soldiers to Iran.
No specifics or source of the claim.
Says, as a result, Israel views Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran as the main players in the axis of terror and hate that endangers not only Israel, but the entire world.
And I'm sure you have a thought or two on that as well.
Dr. George Friedman, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thank you for having me.
Some of your thoughts on what's been happening over the last 24 hours, and I'm dying to ask this question.
I guess I'll ask it first.
You're a private intelligence firm.
Do you have a great advantage over our own government intelligence since it was gutted during the Clinton years?
Well, only because we're smaller, poorer, and more desperate.
You know, the U.S. intelligence is a huge entity.
It knows a great deal.
It operates extremely well.
We're more focused.
We're much, much, much smaller.
And we leverage our resources better.
So we've been paying attention to Hezbollah for a while while CIA has had to diffuse its attention on other things.
Well, and as we noted with our guest last half hour, Ariel Cohen, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards founded the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah, Party of God, so-called, after the Ayatollah, his Islamic Revolution.
They've been behind the murder of U.S. civilians in Lebanon, attacks on Israel since they began, since 1982.
And now they're just thought of as a subcontractor for Iran.
They're a complicated group.
They occupy the Beka Valley, which is one of the great heroin-producing and transporting areas of the world.
So they're more than just a terrorist group, like the FARC down in Colombia.
These guys make their money in drugs, and they invest it in Beirut land and banks and around the world.
And that makes them even more dangerous because they have resources that al-Qaeda, which is a lot simpler group, just doesn't have.
What has happened here is by capturing Israeli soldiers, Hamas and Hezbollah have struck the core Israeli nerve.
Israel can't ignore it, obviously.
And part of that has to do with a little background you can share with us.
George Friedman is the CEO of Stratford.com, a company he began in 1996, which leads the field in private intelligence.
His most recent book, America's Secret War, detailing America's overt and covert efforts in the war on terror.
But there are some backgrounds.
And one of them is that Israel lives with three realities.
And if you could share kind of some of your thoughts on that that you have in the past.
Sure.
First, geographically.
It's a small country.
It doesn't have a lot of strategic depth.
Israel can't do anything about that.
Demographically, it's vastly outnumbered by the Arabs.
Israel can't do anything about that.
The one advantage it has is what I'll call cultural.
Its soldiers are better.
They're better equipped.
They're better trained.
They're better motivated.
Or so it has been through the entire history of Israel.
Now, the capture of these Israeli soldiers strikes a nerve because this is the kind of stuff that Israel used to do against the Palestinians and the Arabs.
They would carry out brilliant commando raids.
They would capture Arab guards who are asleep at the switch.
Now the Arabs have turned the tables on them.
So deep inside the Israeli psyche, they're asking the question: how did the Arabs get the jump on three Israeli soldiers on duty?
That hits so deep in that country because in that country, everybody serves in the military.
Sure, and this hardly, as you've said, hardly represents a fundamental shift in the balance of power, but for a country that depends on its cultural superiority, this reverberates.
This tremor reverberates dramatically.
And it reverberates at the kitchen table.
You know, we have slackers in this country.
And the older generation always thinks the younger generation are slackers.
Well, the fathers fought in 1967 and 73 and 1982 and did pretty well.
And they've got their doubts about these kids.
And these kids have to prove themselves.
And they're all in the army.
So right now, this has posed a crisis of confidence.
And Israel's going to solve that crisis of confidence.
I mean, I don't think by any means they've lost the edge.
But they need to demonstrate to themselves and also to the Arabs that they are still capable of waging war and waging it overwhelmingly.
We have folks who want to speak with our guest, the CEO of Stratford.com, George Friedman, with us.
You can be a part of the Rush Limbaugh program at 1-800-282-2882.
That's 1-800-282-2882.
I'm Paul W. Smith, in for Rush.
And we're going right to Houston, where we find Cody.
Cody, say hi to George Friedman.
Hello, sir.
Just got a quick question.
The last guest had said that Iran was pulling the strings to divert attention away from its nuclear goals.
And I was just wondering why would Israel aid in that, seeing that they could probably come to that conclusion themselves, especially given that the events that led up to Israel's response are really nothing new to Israel.
Why would they not hold out if they're going to do any kind of major incursion?
Why would they not have to do it?
When has Israel ever held back after repeated rocket incursions into Israel, killing civilians?
I don't remember that happening.
No, they would large-scale offenses.
That would be really distracting, I guess, to what would be taking place in the J8 summit.
Whenever there would be any kind of rockets, it would seem as though Israel would pick and they would hit a car or they'd hit a Hamas leader in a building.
There wouldn't be this large-scale kind of incursion.
I was wondering why would they not approach it from that, which is what they had been doing.
Why would it seem like why would they do it if it is distracting from Iran?
Why would they do it or aid that?
Well, I'm not sure I completely agree with Dr. Cohen that that's the only motive.
Iran wants to become the leader of radical Islam, take that mantle away from al-Qaeda.
And that's another of their motives.
But it comes down to something very simple.
They fired a rocket at Haifa, Israel's third largest city, and it hit.
Israel withdrew from Lebanon because it didn't want to fight a war of attrition against an insurgency.
But if Hezbollah is going to impose an insurgency on them, they'd much rather it take place inside of Lebanon than in northern Israel.
Hitting the third largest city with a missile is just too scary for the Israelis.
They've got to go up there.
They've got to take out the launchers.
They've got to push Hezbollah back.
Now, if they do that, they're going to be condemned by the entire world.
So if they're going to be condemned by the entire world, in for a penny, in for a pound, they are going to go and take apart Hezbollah, capture their ammunition dumps, take out their headquarters, disrupt their training camps.
They're going to put them in a position that's going to take several years for them to recover.
The interesting thing about all the criticism of Israel in the world is in a way it's now become counterproductive.
Given the fact that Israel is going to be criticized no matter what it does, it may as well take the most extreme steps for the same cost rather than let it rest.
But it basically comes down to this.
You shoot a rocket at the third largest city in Israel.
Israel is going to come back at you hard.
Hezbollah knew that.
They did it anyway.
They have another game plan.
They expect to be defeated.
But you've got a lot of Westerners in Beirut.
And Hezbollah pioneered hostage-taking.
And my worry right now is I think the Israeli invasion is hardwired.
That's going in.
Sunday, Monday, sometime timeframe.
The thing to worry about right now is Hezbollah held hostages in Lebanon for years.
Yeah, well, we've got 25,000 or so Americans right now that we're talking about, as we did at the start of the show.
How are we going to get them out of there?
And there's talk, obviously, of American soldiers going in and getting the Americans out of Lebanon, which opens...
25,000 people is a lot of people to get out of Lebanon.
The thing that can be done is to move into the Christian areas in the Shouf Mountains in the center, in the Christian areas of Beirut, get some of those people out.
But I think right now, in London, in Washington, in Tel Aviv, one of the things that's being discussed between now and then is what to do about those people.
And it may be that Hezbollah is betting that Washington is going to hold the Israelis off out of fear of a hostage situation.
But I don't think that's going to happen.
I think they've miscalculated.
Washington wants Israel to go.
We want to continue the conversation, and we shall.
George Friedman is here and our callers at 1-800-282-2882.
This is the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith in for Rush.
We continue the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith, a fellow student of the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, coming to you today from the Midwest campus in Detroit, Michigan, the Motor City, the Growing Life Sciences Corridor, with Google choosing Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, for their next Google Plex.
We're geeked about that.
And of course, here at the Institute, there is never a final exam, but we are tested every day.
Latest coming in from Lebanon, from Beirut, in fact.
In fact, Hezbollah has their own television station, Hezbollah TV, reporting that the building housing the headquarters of the Hezbollah group has been destroyed in an Israeli airstrike.
No big surprise there.
Iran's president warning Israel against extending its offensive in Lebanon to neighboring Syria, saying such a move would be regarded as an attack on the whole Islamic world and be met with, quote, a crushing response.
We continue with an expert in this area, the nation's largest private intelligence firm.
George Friedman is with us, CEO of Stratford.com, company he began in 1996, which leads the field in private intelligence.
His most recent book, America's Secret War, details America's overt and covert efforts in the war on terror, but you don't give away any secrets.
You're not like New York Times or anything, are you, George?
No, I've got two kids in the military.
I prefer to avoid that.
All right, good for you.
1-800-282-2882.
1-800-282-2882.
And let's go back to our callers.
Did we leave you with, were you going to make one point or another, or can we go right back to our callers here?
Let's go to our callers.
Did you finish?
Okay, you finished your thought.
Let's go to Jeff in Kearney, Nebraska.
Jeff, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith, and you're talking too with George Friedman.
Hey, Paul.
Love Michigan.
It's kind of a little secret for us, but love that state.
It's a great question.
Professor, I've got a question.
I could understand when Iran was attempting to provoke the United States with their nuclear program so that we might fail in Iraq and our foreign policy in the area would fail.
But why in the world are they trying to provoke Israel?
They're not particularly concerned about Israel, and they're not particularly concerned about Lebanon.
They're concerned about two things.
One, they're really concerned about what's happening in Iraq.
Very frankly, the United States is doing a little too well from their point of view.
They want to dominate Iraq, and they're trying to negotiate with the United States on that subject.
They use their nuclear program as a lever to threaten the United States with and to try to get concessions there.
Now, in doing this in Israel, they get another lever.
Because right now, the U.S. has pretty much dismantled al-Qaeda on a global basis.
We haven't been hit five years.
Hezbollah is a global organization, and what the Iranians are really doing here is signaling the United States that there's a new sheriff in town, or rather, an old sheriff has woken up, and that now the Iranians are coming at us with instability in Iraq, a nuclear program that may or may not be there, and finally, a very potent terrorist force, Hezbollah.
And what they're trying to get the United States to do is say, there are just too many things coming at me, Iran.
What do you guys want for a settlement on Iraq?
And that's one of the reasons why the United States is very happy to see the Israelis take apart Hezbollah.
Now, from the Iranian point of view, if Hezbollah operates globally, they can claim the leadership of the Islamic world.
If Israel invades Lebanon and takes apart Hezbollah, Iran can say, you know, Al-Qaeda was yesterday's news.
We have reclaimed our position as the leader of the Islamic Revolution.
Forget the Saudis, forget the Wahhabis, forget al-Qaeda.
We're back.
We provoked the Israelis, and we're going to take them on.
Either way, it breaks.
Iran figures it's got the advantage.
Let's hear from Saeed in Green Bay, Wisconsin on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Paul W. Smith, along with George Friedman.
Welcome, Saeed.
Yes, good morning, and thank you very much for taking my call.
I wanted to reiterate that this is a very pivotal point in the history of the Middle East.
At balance, the resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, stability and democracy in Iraq, and the solution to worldwide radical Islamic terrorism lies in the West's recognition of the Islamic Republic of Iran as the greatest enemy of the three things that I outlined.
Also, it is important for people to know that the people of Iran have no inherent conflict with Israel.
They are not even a party to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The Iran that I grew up in was Jews and Muslims who lived side by side in peace for thousands of years.
So, this is a creation of just the mullahs that are keeping the Iranian people in bondage, basically.
And that's how the people of Lebanon feel, Saeed.
They don't have a at this point, the people of Lebanon and the people of Israel don't have a problem with each other necessarily, but it's Hezbollah dragging them into it.
My question is: does this also not represent an opportunity here?
That instead of much has been said about the lack of a military option against Iran, engaging Iranian surrogate Hezbollah in Lebanon puts Iran in a position where it has to fight a war outside of its borders.
Very difficult for Iran to do, to project power outside of its border against an organized military action from Israel.
You've asked a good question.
We're going to have to put you on hold, and your phone's making some funny noises, too.
But let's talk about that when we come back, because then we're going to have to wrap it up with George Friedman.
Does this, in fact, create an opportunity?
We'll get George's answer in just a moment here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
The Rush Limbaugh program, I'm Paul W. Smith.
Final question, George Friedman.
Is there an opportunity for the United States in this Middle East crisis, in your opinion?
Yeah, the United States and Israel can crush Hezbollah and make it an operative.
And it can also show that Iran is impotent.
Because the fact is, Las Cornel put it, there's nothing Iran can do.
But at the same time, this is going to be tough.
I think there are going to be hostages taken.
There's certainly going to be casualties.
Israeli troops will murder people accidentally, kill people accidentally.
There will be CNN reports showing crying children, all of which are tragic.
So the real contest here is between the ability of these operations to be carried out and the ability of the American public to stand with it as it goes on.
George Friedman, thanks very much from Strat4STRATFOR.com in his book, America's Secret War, detailing America's overt and covert efforts in the war on terror.
When we come back, is the American Dream Dead?
That and more on the Rush Limbaugh program.
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