Well, unfortunately, unfortunately, he was accused of a disproportionate response to his enemies.
So I'm the UN peacekeeping force that's been inserted instead while he pulls out.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush, trying in vain to be proportionate in a difficult world.
Mark Stein here for the rest of this hour.
And then Walter Williams will be in tomorrow.
And everyone loves Walter when he's filling in for Rush.
I wanted to talk about, first of all, I wanted to say something.
I said I used a word in a period context.
And you know the way it is these days.
You always have to go back and explain these things.
I dusted off a word from the Vietnam era and I referred to the gooks.
And the trouble is, if you're a writer like me, and you write for the Chicago, I write for the Chicago Sun-Times and National Review and all kinds of things.
And when you're typing, you put these words in quote marks.
And when you're on the air, you forget that sometimes people don't see the quote marks.
So I should say that I was using that word with period quote marks around it.
And basically these days, unless you're John McCain and you have that special media immunity, then it's hard to get away with saying those words.
I was writing about the Second World War once, and I used the term Japs.
And again, the newspaper that that piece appeared in received all these complaints and everything.
And I thought I was using it in a kind of archaic, anachronistic context.
But you can't be too careful these days.
So if anyone was offended, I apologize.
And I will try to offend you in a more contemporary sense in the course of the next hour.
Oh, yeah, we Canadians, by the way, we get upset when people say Eskimos, or Eskimos get upset, because they like to be referred to as the Inuit these days.
So when Americans talk about Eskimos, then we get all upset.
And actually, we Canadians, we get upset by Americans anyway, because you think so little of us, you don't even have a derogatory term for us.
It's pathetic.
It's embarrassing.
Even Canucks is kind of benign.
It's not exactly cheese-eating surrender monkeys, is it?
And we've got plenty of those up in Canada, too.
So I'd say anyway, doing my bit for world peace and harmony.
It's a multicultural world and we believe in insulting everybody in it.
It's like this survivor thing that Rush was talking about yesterday, where he was talking about the new racial survivor, racial survivor, where you're going to have white folks and Hispanics and blacks and Asian Americans who are all going to be competing in racial teams.
It's like South African.
It's apartheid survivor.
It's amazing.
But actually listening to people talking about whether we should get out of Iraq, I wonder if we shouldn't replace that with survivor.
Instead, we could have, instead of the jihad, let's have jihad survivor.
Let's all go to the Cook Islands and we'll have a red state team.
We'll have a blue state team.
We'll have a Wahhabist team from Saudi Arabia and we'll have a European team and we can all slug it out on the Cook Islands.
We can have the Europeans and the blue status saying, no, we need to address their root causes.
And we can have the Wahhabists improvising homemade suicide bombs with what they happen to find in the jungles.
And we'll see who wins that one.
But unless, basically, unless you're interested in playing Wahhabist survivor, the war is the only way to win it.
And winning it on that front is going to be tough and is going to be hard.
You know, I make no bones about the fact that I'm a foreigner.
I belong to that very, very, very tiny, almost unmeasurable, scientifically undetectable demographic in America of legal immigrant.
It's the smallest parade down Main Street these days.
You know, when they we when you remember the thing when they were doing all the the undocumented crowd, the members, fine upstanding members of the undocumented American community were having their big demonstrations in the streets a couple of months ago, and there are millions of them in the streets of Los Angeles.
And I said, we legal immigrants need to organize a counter-demonstration to this.
And so we did.
And there were three of us.
And maybe you saw it on the news.
It was a big thing for me.
But one thing you notice: if you are, if you do kind of watch, look at America from a slightly external point of view, if you've come from elsewhere, you do notice that there are differences about it.
One of the things I value about this country is its constitution and in particular the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, which I think are things that the rest of the so-called free world would benefit from.
I love Australia, but there are some crazy stories down there.
There's a court case going on in Victoria, in Melbourne, which is in the state of Victoria in Australia, the Court of Appeal there, in which two Christian pastors are trying to appeal their conviction under Victoria's religious hatred law, which found that they'd vilified Muslims.
And they're now appealing that case.
And the Muslim guys have hired this big shot QC, that means Queen's Council in Commonwealth countries.
It's the sort of equivalent of Johnny Cochrane.
It's as big a big shot as you can get.
And this big shot lawyer says, if one vilifies Islam, his defense is if one vilifies Islam, one is by necessary consequence vilifying people who hold that religious belief.
In other words, you can't say anything about Islam because to criticize Islam means criticizing Muslims, which means you can be prosecuted, which is going on not just in Australia, but in parts of Europe too.
Another big shot case in the United Kingdom, this crazy Imam was on trial for inciting murder.
And his big shot QC, Queen's Counsel, big shot lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, his version, his defense was that it is said my client was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Quran.
So if the Quran allows you to incite murder, then you've got to be allowed to get away with it.
It's like, well, as great Johnny Cochrane would have said, if the Quran permit, you must acquit.
And that's basically what these guys are arguing.
That there is that Muslims, in effect now, are a protected category, not just on religious grounds, but also as their political project is protected too.
So I wish, you know, and I understand America is a very different superpower from previous superpowers, but I wish America did more to export its real values around the world.
You know, President Bush talks in a wonderful way of spreading liberty around the world.
But I wish he could spread a bit more liberty even to parts of the world that are very nearby, like Canada and Australia, the United Kingdom, Western Europe, where people get prosecuted for things they could never be prosecuted for in the United States, where you don't have the First Amendment,
where speech is very constrained, and where governments that have absolutely no idea, no idea what to do about how to constrain their angry, alienated Muslim populations instead find it easier to constrain the non-Muslim population for saying anything about them.
It is a distressing feature of the world we live in.
And I'd like to talk a bit about American values in this hour.
You know, the First Amendment is absolutely critical, I think, to America's sense of itself.
We complain, certainly on this show, about the drive by media.
But the point about the New York Times and the Washington Post and all these guys is they're basically constrained and crippled by this whole pathetic form of groupthink that they get into at America's Useless Journalism School.
So that everyone in the media, you know, you've got diversity of gender, diversity of race, diversity of orientation, diversity, every kind of diversity except the only diversity that matters, which is diversity of thought.
That's their problem.
But if they wanted to say anything, they could.
So I'd like to talk about the importance of promoting real American values around the world, of using America's moment to promote real American values.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein sitting in on the Rush Limbaugh show, and Walter Williams will be here tomorrow.
You know, diversity-wise, the rest of the world is really a very curious place.
I mean, they investigate everything.
You say anything and they investigate it.
But it's interesting to me that they never want to investigate any of the really unpleasant things that are said by some of these crazy guys in their countries.
Over in Sweden, they were investigating the Grand Mosque of Stockholm, which is like the one-stop shop for all your jihad needs.
You can buy cassettes at the mosque encouraging you to become a martyr and to kill the brothers of pigs and apes, by which that's, by the way, in quote marks too.
They mean Jews by that.
That's not.
Please, please, Jewish listeners to the Rush Show, that's in quote marks, that phrase.
I don't want to offend any more minority groups today.
But so somebody filed, a Swedish Jew filed a complaint about being described as a brother of pig and ape.
And Sweden's Chancellor of Justice stepped in to investigate.
But he decided to close down the investigation on the grounds that even though all this brothers of pigs and apes stuff is highly degrading, this kind of talk should be judged differently, he said, quote, and should be regarded as permissible because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict, unquote.
In other words, if you threaten to kill people often enough, it will be seen as part of your vibrant cultural tradition.
And by definition, we're all cool with that, celebrate diversity and so forth.
So what's happening in the rest of the world is that one side is allowed to get away with insulting and in fact threatening to kill and destroy the state.
And the other side is having more and more, as this case in Australia shows, having more and more of its rights taken away.
So I would like this country to promote its real gift to the world, things like the First Amendment and also the Second Amendment, because it's a tragedy that the kind of intimidation that you see in Europe in which people are basically prevented from defending themselves and when they're intimidated by Islamist groups in their neighborhood,
that doesn't happen in the United States because the Muslims in Europe who were celebrating on the night of September 11th, stopping cars in the streets in Yorkshire, England, and demanding that people say Osama bin Laden is a great man.
If you tried to do that, even in the wimpiest state in America, even in Vermont, the guy would reach into his glove box, pull out his gun, and blow your head off.
And that right to defense, that right to defend yourself, is an important part.
So I believe America should promote real American values around the world.
Not just vague things like liberty, not just vague fluffy buzzwords, but specific things like the First Amendment and the Second Amendment.
This is Mark Stein, 1-800-282-2882, sitting in for Rush at the Golden EIB microphone, and we will be back momentarily.
The Rush Limbaugh Show on the EIB network, 1-800-282-2882.
This is Mark Stein filling in for Rush, and Walter Williams will be here tomorrow.
Let's go to Susan in Connecticut, ground zero for the epic struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party.
Susan, you're on the air.
Hi, Susan.
Hi, I'm a Republican, and I find it really insulting that if you dispute the president and his Iraq war policy, whether you're a Democrat or whether you're a Republican, that you are unpatriotic.
It's like, so what is being said is that any citizen of any country should just follow the leader, no matter which way the leader is taking them even to self-destruction.
Isn't that a fascist attitude?
We live in a democratic society in the U.S., and it is underwritten by the U.S. Constitution.
We do not bow down to a king, and Congress and the Senate, which I wish they would take more power, can rein in the president if they do not feel that he's doing what's right.
But the whole point is, like when you said that there are foreign countries that suppress their people, they can't say anything.
Well, yes, here in America, we do have freedom of speech, and I don't want to be considered unpatriotic.
My family came over on the Mayflower.
My father's family came over and got off in Ellis Island, and he fought in World War II.
And I lived in the house of a disabled World War II Purple Heart War veteran.
Well, Susan, Susan, let me put it to you like this, because you're right, I may not be getting America.
You said, you know, countries where you have to bow down before a king, I have to bow down before a queen, which is, that's not another, by the way, that's not another minority I'm insulting today, by the way.
That's just a reference to Queen Elizabeth.
But Susan, let me put it to you like this.
The point is this.
It's not the fact that anyone's preventing you from saying what you want to say.
No one is preventing anyone in America from what you're saying.
But the First Amendment doesn't mean that people can just say stuff and not being called on it.
And the question is this.
If you don't agree with the Iraq war, what's your answer to it?
If you ask John Kerry, John Kerry campaigned in public on TV 24-7 for two years, and he couldn't give a straight answer to what his policy on the Iraq war is.
Your guy, this Ned Lamont guy in Connecticut, you can't get a sensible answer for him, what his strategy for the Iraq war is.
So what do you want to happen in the Iraq?
If you disagree with the president on the Iraq war, what do you want to happen in Iraq, Susan?
Well, first of all, I think whether we're there or not, we're still going to have Islam extremists here in America, maybe, hidden in sleeper cells, maybe.
And we're going to have them all over the world who's still going to try to kill us whether we're there or not.
And I think that if we pulled out, it's like General Eisenhower pulled out the U.S. from Korea.
And we didn't win that war.
No, and North Korea is now a nuclear power.
North Korea is now a nuclear power, Susan.
There are consequences to not winning wars.
Oh, I understand that, but I don't even understand whether we're in a war or a police action anymore.
Well, a war becomes a police action.
You topple the government, and you're then there to stabilize the country.
But let's go back to that Korean thing, because the reality of the situation is that America thought it could afford to lose that war.
Not lose that war, but it thought it could afford to end that war inconclusively 50 years ago.
So, half a century on, you now have a nutty guy in what is basically a one-man psycho-state who on July the 4th celebrated July the 4th by firing a missile at Hawaii.
Now, he didn't reach Hawaii.
His missile basically more or less just cleared the perimeter fence and then fell to the ground.
But that's the point.
He's a crazy guy with nuclear weapons, and he's not very good at it.
So, next time he might aim for Hawaii and he might hit New Delhi, or he might hit Athens, or he might hit San Diego.
Nobody knows.
He's a nuclear, he's a crazy guy with nukes.
He's not like the Soviet Union.
He's not like China.
He's not like the United States.
He's not like Britain.
He's not like France.
He's a nuclear power who's not very good at it.
And that's one of the consequences from the inconclusive end to the Korean War.
And anyone who thinks that this, that the issues arising from the Iraq war are going to get any easier over the decades by letting it be perceived as yet another American defeat are in for a big shock.
Thanks for your call, Susan.
And good luck making sense of the ballot in Connecticut this November.
I gather Joe Lieberman is way, he's on it, but he's way, way down in the basement.
We'll see whether enough people find him.
Let's go to Mark in Georgetown, South Carolina.
Mark, you're on the air.
Hello, Mark.
Hey, I've long admired your work in National Review.
Thanks very much.
I recollect the Ottomans ruled Iraq as three states, and that Britain had difficulty ruling Iraq as one entity when they were involved.
I wonder if it was a mistake to try the British method, and I wonder if it would have been an easier thing to manage if we had just allowed it to separate into three entities.
Yeah, that's right.
Iraq was basically ruled as three provinces by the Ottoman Empire.
And you're right.
I think there's a lot to be said for that.
But I would say that if you read the Iraqi Constitution, you know, we were talking earlier that Iraq is like a divorce.
It's like a bad marriage and trying to get out of a bad marriage.
In fact, if you read that Iraqi constitution, the ingenious thing about it is that those guys wrote it as a kind of prenup.
In other words, they're going to try and make it work.
They're going to try and make that constitution work.
But that if it doesn't, then it provides for a kind of dissolution.
You'd have a Kurdish state in the north, a Shia state in the south, and then this sort of festering Sunni mess in the middle.
And who knows, it may yet come to that.
But I don't think that would necessarily be something that would not be in America's interest, Mark.
Well, it strikes me that we might be able to focus more on the troublesome Sunni area.
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of trouble in the north, and it appears that the Shias are well in control of the South.
It seems like we might be home if we had started out with that objective.
Yep, that's a good idea, Mark, and it may yet come to that.
This is the EIB network, the Rush Limbaugh show, Mark Stein.
More in a moment.
The Rush Limbaugh program.
This is Mark Stein at the EIB Golden Microphone, 1-800-282-2882, or go to RushLimbor.com.
You know, a couple of people have said I don't sound quite the way they imagined me to sound when they were reading me in print in the Chicago-Sun Times or whatever.
If you go to RushLimbor.com, you'll find a photograph of me, and you'll see I don't look anything like I read or sound either.
I think actually that one, I think it's taken from a TV show.
It seems rather wider.
My face seems rather wider than I think of it.
Perhaps I'm just deluding myself there.
We've been talking about strategy ahead in the war on terror and the wider issues it raises.
Mark from South Carolina was talking about how maybe we should just divide, do what the Ottomans did, and divide Iraq three ways.
The Ottomans had it in three provinces, which they called vilayets.
And when I was talking to Mark, I was trying to find the word for what the Ottomans call their administrative units.
And I knew it, and I just couldn't.
It was on the tip of my tongue, vilayette, vilayette.
You wait 20 years to have the opportunity to bring up the word vilayette in conversation.
And then it happens and you blow it.
It was on the tip of my tongue.
But they ran what is now present-day Iraq as three separate provinces called vilayets.
That's what the Ottomans come.
When we're living in the Islamic states of America, Connecticut will be a vilayette and Delaware will be a villayette.
So you might want to start practicing the lingo now.
Let's go to another mark.
We're only taking calls from Marks today.
It's an all-mark show on the Rush Limbaugh show because this is Mark Stein filling in for Rush.
So we're just taking calls from Mark.
We had Mark from South Carolina.
We've got Mark from Richmond, Virginia.
Mark, you're next on the all-mark hour on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Can we just call everybody Mark to keep it straight?
Well, your name is Mark.
You're not trying to fake getting on the air by pretending to be Mark, are you?
Am I speaking to the Mark that's the one-man global content provider?
That's me.
I'm an authentic Mark, and I hope you are too, Mark.
Excellent.
Okay.
It was great speaking with you.
I enjoyed my copy of Face of the Tiger very much.
Okay, that's a great book if I do say so myself, which I do mainly because not many other people do.
But of course, like everybody else, I enjoy reading your writings in all the different publications and was following your tour in Australia and your interview on the Australian ABC.
Right.
That's not like the Rush Limbaugh show.
The ABC makes PBS look very stiff-spined, I think.
Well, I was very interested in not only the interview you did on one of those shows, but you were talking about the whole things that the left are concerned about that really mean nothing at this point, like global warming, when they really should be looking at the population demographics in places like Europe and what things are going to look like in 20 years.
And I'm wondering if you might want to expound on that.
Well, I would actually, Mark, because I find the amazing thing is that even if you believe a lot of this global warming thing, if you look at the so-called level of sea water rise that threatens the Maldive Islands, at the present level of sea level increase, that means the Maldives will be underwater in the year 2500.
2500.
So if you come out of Al Gore's movie, Anxious to Save the Planet, you're talking about putting in a plan for something that's going to kick in around the year 2500.
And the Maldive Islands is like a fantastic tourist destination.
I would recommend it to anyone.
Lovely place in the Indian Ocean.
It has a population of 350,000 people.
And if it's true that they're all going to be underwater in the year 2500, then we should just really move them.
I think we should have a plan to move them in the year 2500 to the south of France, because those 350,000 people are Sunni Muslims.
And being Sunni Muslims, by that stage, they'll fit right in in the south of France because everybody in the south of France is going to be Sunni Muslims.
And the left has this way of basically focusing, it would rather focus on theoretical issues like global warming that offer opportunities for self-loathing.
Because much of the Western world is invested in the idea that we're the problem, we're the problem.
You know, why do people go on about global warming?
In the old days, nobody went on about global warming.
If you were living in Poland in the 1930s, you weren't bothered about global warming.
Because you were living between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich.
You were living between serious powers that wanted to take over your country.
And the reason people go on about global warming now is precisely because America is the most benign superpower in history.
It doesn't want to take over anybody.
The minute it lands in Iraq, it can't wait to devise an exit.
Oh, no, we've been there 20 minutes.
We need an exit strategy.
America is the most benign superpower in history.
It doesn't want to take over anywhere.
And so they've had to, in a sense, they've had to invent this idea that because American armies aren't a threat to the planet, they've had to invent this idea that the American consumer is a threat to the planet.
That simply, that simply by drinking too many Cokes and eating too many cheeseburgers, he's producing this great kind of cheeseburger CO2 emissions that have burst a hole in the ozone layer and now threaten it's.
It's in the old days.
In the old days, it was countries superpowers, armies that threatened the planet.
But because America is such a benign superpower we've had to invent this thing that it's just American Beverages, American automobiles that are a threat to the planet, and that in itself tells you what a lot of phony baloney rubbish this is.
Let's go to Frank in Tampa, Florida.
Frank, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
What do you got to say?
I want to know how we can possibly expect to win in Iraq when we have a president that does not know the difference between a strategy and an objective.
When he in his press conference the other day, he was asked what, what is our strategy?
And he said, strategy is to stand up a democratic government that can defend itself.
Well, that's not a strategy, that's an objective.
The strategy going in there was was to was to topple the Saddam Hussein government through a massive British creek movement up into Baghdad.
We achieved that objective.
Okay, now the objective is to build a stable, peaceful government which has never existed in that in that region, and and and our strategy has not changed in order to achieve that objective.
When we went into Kuwait, we went in with half a million troops and that was just to kick Saddam out of Kuwait.
Now we're occupying an entire nation and trying to build a government with 150,000.
Tell me how that math works.
Well, you've got to well you, to add to that math.
You've got to add the, the quarter million strong uh Iraqi forces that are on the ground now.
But you're right, you're right to uh, you're right to this extent uh, that you have to know what your objectives say are and what your and what your strategy is.
But they are related to to this degree.
Uh, Go Chok tong, the prime minister, Singapore.
He was in Washington last year and he said that the key issue, the key issue in all this uh, you know the Iraq war.
If you live in Iraq, the outcome of the Iraq war is a matter of concern for uh Iraqis.
It's what happens to Iraq that uh, that matters.
But if you live anywhere in the rest of the world, it's what happens.
The, the global interest in Iraq is what happens to America.
In other words, if you live in Iraq, Iraq's the issue, but if you live anywhere else on the planet, America is the issue.
Does America emerge from this stronger, or does America emerge from this looking like a weakened, pathetic?
Uh, effete pampered little.
Not a sleeping giant, but uh, as admiral Yamamoto said, but a sort of fleshy, Corpulent giant that can no longer rouse himself.
Now, I have no problems with Iraq.
I think the Iraqi people are doing fine.
They're doing just great given all the things they've had to endure.
And they'll be okay.
They won't be like New Hampshire.
They won't be even like Vermont.
But they will be in a good enough condition and better than what they were.
And although I take your point about the effectiveness of the strategy, and I take the criticism too that this idea of building a free society in a part of the world where no one's ever known one is at the very best a long shot.
But sometimes history calls upon you to have a go at the long shots.
You look at the map of the world.
You look at the map of the world.
The great European powers in the heyday of imperialism, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, they sailed out all over the world.
They basically colonized Africa.
They colonized the Indian subcontinent.
They colonized out to the Pacific and Australia.
They colonized the Americas.
And the one place those European powers avoided was the Middle East because they knew then that it was a hard nut to crack, a hard nut to crack.
But sometimes you don't have any choice in the matter because it's a dysfunctional part of the world that exports its dysfunctions.
And in an age when anyone with a couple of hundred dollars and a coach-class air ticket, the dysfunctional parts of the world can be standing outside your front door in just nine hours.
And that's basically what happened on September 11th.
So just because it's tough is no reason not to do it.
But I agree, Frank, that, you know, in a sense, we have to be realistic about our aims.
We have to have a bottom-line solution.
We have to say, okay, it may not work out.
It may not work out building liberty, a free society in a part of the world that's never known it.
But even if it doesn't work out, it's still the right thing to do because it is in accord with American values.
If you go in there and just say, we're going to put up another Mubarak or another Hausa Saud, that's not in accord with American values.
And the fact of the matter is that America gives billions of dollars a year to Mubarak in Egypt.
And what does it get for that?
It gets Mohamed Atta flying through your office window on a Tuesday morning.
So that wasn't such a grand strategy either.
This is Mark Stein on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
More of your calls up and coming.
1-800-282-2882.
Stay tuned.
Back for more in just a moment.
The Rush Limbaugh program, Mark Stein sitting in for Rush, 1-800-282-2882.
I mentioned at the top of the hour that Canada had such a pitiful standing in the United States that Americans hadn't even bothered to invent a derogatory term for Canadians.
Mark McSwain emailed me from Texas to say I was wrong.
And in fact, the derogatory term for a Canadian is a Canadian.
Well, there we are.
Don from Virginia Beach is on the line.
Don, you're on the air on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thank you.
I wanted to respond to that last caller who accused George Bush of not knowing the difference between a strategy and an objective.
The problem here is that most Americans don't understand what the objectives are.
Most Americans don't know how to read a map, don't bother to look at a map, and they don't try to figure out for themselves what's really going on.
If you look at a map of the Middle East, Iraq, and the area around it, Iraq touches a lot of countries that we have problems with.
Now, the real country we need to deal with is Iran.
But we don't want to attack Iran because there's all mountains.
It would be a huge casualty cost.
We don't want to fight them on the ground.
And I don't see us bombing them into oblivion.
So we need to do something about Iran.
So the question is, what do you do?
Well, there's a large young population in Iran, and they are the future of that country.
And they're Shia.
There's a large Shia Muslim population in Iraq.
So what we do is we set up in Iraq a government that is Muslim, but also pro-Western.
And we showed these people, you know, you can have movies and mullets.
You can have Ara, and you can have all of the nice things we have in the West.
And so the Shias in Iraq realize that, you know, the Americans aren't such bad people.
They got Saddam off our neck.
They made the water run and the electricity flow.
And then they left, and they're not such bad people.
And the young Iranian Shia Muslims interact with the Shia Muslims in Iraq, and eventually the Muslims, the young people in Iran, get what they want, which is more freedom, more democracy, the nice things that we have in the West, but they can also keep being Muslims.
And hopefully that will take care of the Iranian government without us having to go in there and millions of people.
I think you're right that that was the strategy, that the entire region was dysfunctional.
Where do you prick the bubble in the Middle East and make something happen?
And as you say, if you look at Iraq, it's absolutely central.
It's the great demonstration to have of what you can do to other problematic states, not just Iran, as you talked about there, but also to Saudi Arabia and Syria and even Jordan, which has been learning from Iraq.
I would say that in a sense, that is still a great strategy.
But the fact of the matter is that there has been subversion of Iraq's borders by the Iranians and the Syrians, and we need to return a little of that to them.
We need to.
If Syria doesn't respect Iraq's borders, there's no reason why coalition forces in Iraq should respect Syria's borders.
But you're absolutely right, that that is the point at which you prick the Middle East bubble and make something happen.
Dan from Almond Beach in Florida.
Dan, you're on the air on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Yes, sir.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
I just wanted to maybe get your perspective regarding my opinion with the situation in Iraq.
It seems to me that I wonder, I often wonder to myself how ultimately we're going to be successful in our endeavor there when we have a political system that is divided as such.
We've got a Democratic Party and the media that actively seeks to undermine our endeavor in any way possible.
And ultimately, you know, that's part of the reason I listen to Rush often is because of his optimism.
And to be quite frank, you know, I feel like that, you know, it's hard to find things that are optimistic regarding that.
It goes back to the, you know, a house that is divided as we are, it seems hard to ultimately be successful in our endeavor there.
I think that's right, Dan.
I think there's a difference between previous wars, that if you, there's always been an element that wants to demoralize and wants to talk down a nation.
The difference now is that it's amplified hugely throughout the drive-by media, by Hollywood, by all these pop stars, taking a defeatist position.
But I do not believe that the American people are on the side of defeatism.
And I do believe that Russia is right, that the optimistic way is the right way.
This country is the most powerful country on the face of the planet.
All it needs to win is to muster a kind of psychological attitude that matches that power.
And I think it should be no surprise that the president's numbers are down.
Wars are always unpopular, and especially if you have the constant drumbeat that we can't do it, we can't do it, we can't do it.
America is responsible for 40% of all military spending on the planet.
So whatever is going on in Iraq, has less to do with the capabilities of the U.S. military than with the broader kind of cultural force behind it.
You have to wage total war, which means you have to enlist on the informational front, on the media front, and fight the battles there too.
That's absolutely critical.
Thanks very much for your call, Dan.
We will be back with more on the Rush Limbaugh Show in just a moment.
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The Rush Limbaugh program, and this is Mark Stein at the Golden EIB microphone.
Do you see that thing a few months ago, this fellow that stopped at the Mexican border trying to get back into America?
He'd been working as a gardener at the White House, and they said, no, no way, there was no security risk.
He had all these photographs in his pocket of him with his arm around Dick Cheney holding severe sharp garden implements in one hand and around Bill Clinton holding more severe implements in his hand.
But so, it's no security risk.
And I thought that was great.
You can slip across the border and be working at the White House.
But to be able to slip across the border and to find yourself hosting the Rush Limbaugh program, what a terrific country.
There is nothing that America you can't do in America.
You know that old line, how do you get to Carnegie Hall practice?
I didn't even have to practice.
It's amazing.
Been a great opportunity for me, great thrill for me.
And I must say, I've been a huge fan of Rush's for years.
He's been the indispensable man in American conservatism for these last 18 years now.
And it's terrific to be here sitting in for him.
But all good things, sadly, all good things must come to an end.
And evidently somebody called in a tip and the Border Patrol's waiting at the door and so I got a run.