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June 24, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:45
June 24, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Greetings and welcome back, I love getting people on record that way.
You don't know what about, but I just love it.
Anyway, folks, greetings and welcome back.
It is a great delight to have you here.
Each and every day with us at the Distinguished Prestigus EIB Network and Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
We'd like to welcome back.
And we have them both at the same time today.
This is the first Vice President Cheney and Liz Cheney, both joining us at the same time.
Welcome to both of you.
Welcome back to the program.
Well, thank you, Rush.
Great to be on with you.
You bet.
Now you guys have formed a um uh a group, a think tank.
Uh I want to know what it is.
It's called the Alliance for a Strong America.
Uh I can pretty much guess why you've decided to do this now, but I want you to tell me why you're doing it.
If there was one particular tipping point or issue that that made you finally throw down the gauntlets that you just had to do this.
Well, I I think uh one of the things that stimulated our thinking rush and and sort of brought it to a head.
We've been thinking a lot of this for some time, but Liz and I took a trip to the Middle East here a couple months ago and visited with a lot of friends out there, people I dealt with twenty-five years ago during Desert Storm.
And uh we came away from that experience thoroughly depressed at the perception they have of the United States, in particular of uh the Obama administration, uh lack of trust, lack of confidence in our leadership, or a willingness to keep our commitments.
Uh uh just a decided uh diminution of the ability of the United States to influence events in a key part of the world for all kinds of reasons.
Um they volunteered this or did you interview them?
Uh I think it'd be fair to say they volunteered it.
Uh say these are people I've known a long time and uh that I've kept up with over the years, and uh they uh all agreed to see us in advance.
Uh Liz worked that part of the world uh extensively when she was uh at the State Department and previous administrations.
And uh you just come away with this sense of of of weakness, of uh lack of trust and confidence in the U.S. Uh that uh the role that we historically have played as sort of the the leading nation in terms of maintaining the peace and stability in the world uh was gone.
And I think also, Rush, we were very much, you know, focused on this notion that we've we've clearly had presidents uh before in our history who've made bad choices and bad decisions, you've had had, you know, uh disastrous policies in some instances.
But what's happening now is different because you've got really for the first time in our history a president who seems to be choosing to take us down that path.
Uh Charles Crowdhammer's talked about, you know, that the fact that the president has chosen decline.
And you look around the world, you know, whether you're talking about what's happening today in Iraq, what's happening today in the Middle East, um, you know, the threat from Al Qaeda uh is a very serious, significant, strategic growing threat to the security of the nation.
And we felt like it was time to do more than just talk about uh, you know, the danger of this president's policies, but but really to begin to to form an organization that could become a center of gravity, that people could join who believe in a strong nation, who believe in returning America to a role of preeminence and power in the world,
and who know that we cannot afford to continue down this path presidents put us on, where he, you know, basically tells lies to the nation about the threat we face, minimizes it, and his policies in the meantime are making it much, much worse.
Well, I was I was happy uh to hear Dr. Cronhumber uh suggest that uh uh Obama is is managing a decline.
I've I've been worried about this uh for three or four years.
And uh and I I'm I'm gonna go a step further.
I don't think he's managing a decline.
Because I think the natural tendency of the United States economy, for example, like an airplane, the the natural tendency is to grow.
You have to sit on this economy if you want to suppress it.
The natural tendency of the American people is to expand, to grow, to uh uh improve themselves and and everybody around them.
Same thing with foreign policy.
Some of this stuff just doesn't seem like it's part of a natural decline.
Uh my fear is that this goes far beyond managing and is in fact purposeful because of uh a distorted view of this country, the president and people like him have about this country being unjust and immoral and we have no business.
We're colonialists, we're imperialists.
And we want people to take us seriously.
It's you know, t some of this stuff is just beyond belief.
So it's good that you're doing this, but what what what is the practical application of your group?
Who's going to join?
What are you going to do?
Well, there's a number of different things.
First of all, it's clear to us that that we've got, you know, the problem that you're laying out, which is absolutely right.
I think the president's actions are very intentional.
He wants to to take America down a notch.
Um he doesn't believe in American exceptionalism.
And so what what we're doing uh initially is we're going to be a place where people can c can come to get ammunition, frankly, to make the arguments to be able to say, wait a second, this is why American power matters.
We want to be a place that can help to to s you know back people up to lay out the policy discussions, to lay out this side of the policy debate so that that people's voices can be heard.
People can sign up on our website, which is strongeramerica.com, in order to get information about all of the important national security issues of the day.
Um we also are very focused on what's happening in our own party.
And you've got um uh a concerning isolationist trend, and we want to fight back against that as well.
And so we're we're gonna be a group that is uh about educating uh people, about advocating for the right policies.
We hope to be able to turn some of these bad policies around in the next two years.
Um then we're gonna be focused on uh twenty sixteen and helping to make sure that we get a nominee in our party who understands the importance of restoring American strength and and uh power around the world.
That is an interesting observation you just made about the rising isolationist tendencies in uh in the Republican Party.
Um not uh uh the the Republican Party has is almost become dormant uh in this area and and in some areas as well as economically and domestically.
Uh uh do you all have any thoughts on why or how this happened, when it began and what it is that's fueling this this uh I it looks like fear to me.
I don't know how you would characterize it, but I don't know.
As I look at it, Rush, I um I'm very concerned about it.
Uh part of it I think is is sort of a natural result after the years that uh since nine eleven, and when we had to put in place some very tough policies in order to keep the key uh country safe from uh another mass casualty attack, long involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The uh the key to being able to sustain that kind of effort over time in part is leadership, and you need a a president who will stand up and explain why it's necessary for us to to continue to be on guard and uh work uh uh uh at all of these various efforts in terms of keeping the nation safe.
And of course you're not gonna get that out of Barack Obama.
What you get from him uh is somebody uh well I remember when they first went into office, one of the first things they announced was they were gonna investigate and potentially prosecute the personnel out at the CIA had been running our counterterrorism program for us and our enhanced interrogation techniques.
Um I really think uh part of the problem is that you've got a president who doesn't share the consensus that both parties have had to some extent in the past, uh since certainly since World War II, that the the U.S. has to be strong militarily, it has to operate uh as the leader of the free world in effect, and and uh we've had different levels of commitment to that, obviously, some have been better than others, but I don't think uh Barack Obama believes any of that.
I think he's got a whole different uh perception of the world and the role in it for the United States.
And um without uh strong leadership at the top, we end up in a situation where in fact he's taking us backwards, as you say.
Well, you know, it's it's it's it's not just foreign policy and and uh uh geopolitics, it's also economics.
When you when you withdraw from the with the United States withdraws from the world, you remember back in the the desert storm days.
You remember all of the catcalls you got about uh blood for oil.
Well, one of the responsibilities going into Kuwait was to maintain the free flow of oil at market prices, an economic issue.
Only the U.S. can do that.
The more we withdraw from the world and become isolationist like some of the Republican Party are doing, the greater the economic damage, not just to us, but uh but the rest of the world as well.
This seems to be forgotten or missed by a lot of people as well.
It does.
And and I think that, you know, the other piece of it that people miss is uh, you know, there's a tendency sometimes to hear people say, Well, look, we we've got enough economic challenges here at home.
We need to just come home and focus on those.
And that completely ignores the threat to the economy and the potential devastation to the economy of another terrorist attack.
And they the idea that you've now got this group ISIS that is basically creating, you know, Al Qaeda stand.
Uh they're creating uh uh a terrorist safe haven, which will be basically, you know, a country of its own.
They don't respect the borders that exist now, from which they can train people, from which they can provide safe havens from which they can launch attacks.
And it is the wealthiest terrorist organization that's ever existed.
They now control more territory than any terrorist organization has.
Um it is a a very significant and serious threat to our freedoms, to uh our security and to our economy.
Well, it's very it's very possible had Obama had his way in Syria that this same group would have been running it.
He was blaming Basher Assad for whatever transgressions are being made and drew this red line.
And had he succeeded in getting Assad out of power, guess who would be in power?
This same group, ISIS in Syria.
And I g I just can't believe he's unaware of that, is just naive and ignorant.
It's got to be more than that.
Anyway, can you guys hang on?
I got to take a quick break.
We'll come back and we'll continue.
Yeah, Dick Cheney, Vice President uh Cheney, and his daughter Liz are with us, and we will be right back.
Welcome back, folks.
And we are joined today by Vice President Cheney and Liz Chaney, both of them on the phone.
Mr. Vice President, I have a uh a question that this this personally bothers me.
The last three years, and maybe you could say the last the the whole second term of the Bush administration, the uh the Democrat Party w and willing accomplices in the media every day did their best to secure negative opinion about our uh uh involvement in Iraq, tried to saddle the country with defeat, called General Petrayus a liar before he'd even testified.
I mean, you remember it that and not once did any of you in the Bush administration respond to any of it.
You just kept your your heads down and kept trying to execute the policy and secure victory, came up with the surge, and it it it proved successful.
But for four years, the body count, every potential negative was just hammered in the American people to the point that they began to think the whole thing was illegitimate, not worth it, and a waste of time.
Now we move forward to just the past couple of months, and it's all falling apart.
President Bush has not said a word, and I know he thinks that it it sullies the office to do so, but does it frustrate you at all that there hasn't been any as Obama trashes what you did, I mean, he's the one who decimated the military, not Al Qaeda.
He claims he decimated Al Qaeda.
They're not decimated.
He didn't cause them to run to the hills and and and uh uh disband.
It's outrageous.
And never once has there been any pushback on any of this now for multiple number of years.
Well, I uh you know the president obviously uh uh has made his own decision with respect to how much he wants to get involved.
Um that's his call.
That that's uh I don't mean to be critical of it.
He basically uh decided to follow the same path his dad had with uh respect to the Clinton administration.
I'm not bound by those limits, Rush.
I don't uh I don't accept it.
Uh I do want to get out there and mix it up, and uh that's part of the reason with uh what we're operating with here.
And um I think the you know there's sort of a uh a natural uh tendency there, obviously.
We've got uh critics on the other side.
We had Harry Reid, I can remember, announcing at the very beginning of the uh of the surge into Iraq, this would have been in an early oh seven, taking the Senate floor to announce that it was a failure, complete defeat wasn't gonna work.
Well, obviously he didn't know what he was talking about.
Um there's a you know you a lot to overcome there if you in fact are gonna push well things like uh the programs that I was closely associated with enhanced interrogation and so forth.
So you've got to get out there and and uh be uh honest and forthright with the American people in terms of lots of times you're also dealing in classified areas and you can't really talk about the success stories that came from some of those programs.
Well, Harry Reid and the like exactly what I'm talking about.
All they were doing was trying to push public opinion down.
Right uh and poison poison the minds of American people.
Now now that now that this has happened, now that now that Iraq I mean what it is outrageous to anybody that has paid any attention to this, it is outrageous what is happening.
All I mean, d you talk to people that uh the family members and troops that were there who are watching this, they're asking themselves why.
What what what did we risk everything for?
And then to add insult to injury, you've got people trying to say uh that that you are responsible for this.
I mean, you and then the and the Bush administration because there was never any legitimate reason to go in there in the first place.
Uh and people make that allegation, I think, willfully ignore what the justification for going in was.
But how does how how do you react to that criticism that this is ultimately your responsibility or fault?
Well, I think uh uh the point that needs to be made, Rush.
We've got the current dust up over Iraq.
The problem's much bigger than just Iraq.
One of the things that was of major concern in the aftermath of nine eleven, especially when we got involved with Iraq, was uh the possibility of a further follow-on terrorist attack with with something far deadlier than airline tickets and box cutters.
And uh that concern is even greater today.
We've just had, for example, uh major attack on the Karachi airport by the Taliban inside Pakistan.
Why worry about that?
Well, the Pakistan has somewhere between fifty and a hundred nuclear weapons.
The the point at which the terrorists get their hands on that kind of deadly technology, um, you know, may not be very far away, and it's more important than ever that we be actively and aggressively engaged over there in these kinds of issues.
So and those were our same concerns we had when we went into Iraq, because we had a guy with a track record of of producing and using weapons of mass destruction, he had ties to terror, and uh we uh anticipated that that was where there was most likely to be a link up between the two now.
Once we got rid of Saddam Hussein, we had Moamar Gaddafi come forward and surrender his nuclear materials.
We have all of those.
We also then shut down the black market operation that had supplied Qaddafi, and it also helped the Iraqis and and the North Koreans uh with their uh weapons of mass destruction program.
So the problem actually, the basic fundamental principle or theme runs all the way through from when we went into Iraq to uh what we're having to deal with now in the Middle East to the possibility that someplace like Pakistan, for example, or even Syria remember wasn't that long ago that we discovered that the North Koreans had built a nuclear reactor for the Syrians.
Thank goodness the Israelis took it out before they could uh could take advantage of it.
You think we need to be working with Iran to clean up the mess in Iraq?
I think it's it's better.
I'll answer that one, Dad.
If you uh I you know, I think uh first of all, on the issue of uh of Iran, I think it's a it's you know, the notion that somehow the Iranians have have any interest in common with us is outrageous.
And uh the the talk about the fact that we might be working with the Iranians again just gives our allies uh you know, th they they're apoplectic, they don't understand what we're doing.
And i i this notion of sort of who's to blame.
I think it's really important also that we recognize the next president is gonna have a heck of a of uh of a challenge and of a task to clean up the mess left by this administration.
And you've got to look at the facts, which are you know, from the beginning of the administration, this president has walked away.
This president has abandoned our allies, he's apologized for the nation, he has uh appeased our enemies, and we've got to learn the lessons of that.
We've got to recognize that what's happening today in Iraq, what's happening today across the rest of the Middle East, what will happen in Afghanistan if he follows through on his promise to withdraw there, are all a direct consequence of the policies he's been following.
And people have been warning about those policies ever since he came into office.
People have been warning that weakness is provocative and it invites the aggression of our enemies.
And and if we don't learn those lessons, the next president, frankly, will not be able to dig us out of the hole that we've now found ourselves in.
So we do have to be very clear about cause and effect.
When the Bush administration left office, Iraq was stable.
The U.S. military said they needed 20,000 troops in country in order to maintain the stability, and the White House said no.
They said, All right, how about 10?
The White House said no.
The White House said you can have 3,500 troops, and they told Maliki that he had to get any agreement, any SOFA agreement through his parliament.
Now, you know, when the president says, Well, I tried to get a SOFA agreement, it's just not true.
He didn't want one, he wanted out, and their rejection of the commander's recommendations on the ground tells you that he just wanted out.
Let me step in.
I I I've simply run out of time.
Um but your timing there, Liz, was superb.
I just want to remind people again of your new organization.
It's the Alliance for Strong America, and the website is strongeramerica.com.
And people can learn exactly what you're doing by clicking uh and then surfing there.
Thank you both very much for being with us today.
It's always a pleasure.
And I want to thank Vice President Shady and Liz Cheney for their time mere moments ago.
One little addendum to something that Liz was addressing vis-a-vis the status of forces agreement, a status of force agreement.
Um the things that Obama was offering as a reason for us skedaddling was that he couldn't secure any immunity for U.S. troops, you know, prosecution for war crimes and this kind of thing.
And he wasn't gonna put our troops in that kind of circumstance.
And he was using that as an excuse to get out of there and a hightail it.
Um because what Obama wants in Iraq is essentially the same thing that he got with the the uh the the death of bin Laden.
He wanted to be able to say, okay, we got Saddam and and so it's over and Iraq's done, and we're out of there, and I'm coming home on a job summit or whatever.
The same thing you did with bin Laden, okay.
We got bin Laden, Al-Qaeda decimated on the run, and of course, none of this is true.
And so the latest is, and this is from the Daily Beast, Obama has flip-flopped on immunity for U.S. troops in Iraq.
He is now going to take Iraq's word for it.
I. Readily believed
our troops capable of doing.
But now Obama is promising to send in hundreds of special operations forces based on a written promise that these soldiers will not be tried in Iraq's famously compromised courts for actions they're taking in defense of Baghdad.
Yeah, we had that last time, and this is nothing new.
It's just that Obama is deciding to accept it now.
And what the the bottom line is that while Obama has said that he's just sending in what he said here is absolutely ridiculous.
We're gonna send in advisors.
I had this in the stack yesterday, but I didn't get to it.
Now imagine this.
He actually said we're going to send in advisors, but both sides have to listen to them.
Now, how asinine is that?
Both sides, meaning ISIS, i.e.
Al-Qaeda, and the Iraqi government have to listen to our advisors.
You know, I was joking when when um Obama announced they're going to send in 300 military advisors, but that we're not going to do any military action.
Okay, well, well.
And then I said, well, that's not fair.
I mean, 300 military advisors for Iraq, what about the bad guys?
Shouldn't we give 150 of the advisors to them?
And lo and behold, in effect, it's what Obama was demanding.
That both sides had to listen to our advisors.
I think the upshot of this is that U.S. troops are now going to be defending back dead.
They're not just going to be supervising the helicopters leaving the embassy.
You know, which was the original purpose.
Well, our military advisors, but there's no remember we did this whole song in dance last week.
He was saying we're going to send in 300 military advisors, but there's not going to be any military action in Iraq.
Well, why what?
Uh well, yeah, 300 doesn't sound like it's it's enough to do anything.
But 300 could become 500, 300 can grow.
This is the you know, the way these things work, particularly with somebody who doesn't know what they're doing or doesn't care.
So anyway, upshot is that for now, these advisors, these units will be protected against potential prosecution based on the promise of the Iraqi government, which may not stay as constituted as it is.
It uh it probably will change as they choose a new prime minister and get rid of Nouri al-Maliki.
And still, it is thought by um people in the know that risks for U.S. soldiers remain potentially high.
So we've got I don't know, continued mess, essentially.
And now I owe some phone calls here because we've only had uh we haven't taken any.
That's why I'm gonna start on the we'll start with Weston and Philadelphia.
Wellston, I really appreciate your holding, and welcome to the program.
Hello.
Rush, nice to talk to you.
Thank you, sir.
Uh Rush, you and I I think very much alike.
But I, you know, it's apropos that uh Vice President Cheney was all.
We we all know that during the Bush-Cheney years, we had to hear that the the Iraq war was all about oil, about us getting cheap oil.
Uh of course, if truth be told, it would have been far cheaper for us to have just worked out a deal to buy the oil uh than to have sent troops over.
Right.
We didn't get any of it.
We gave it away.
Nothing.
But now Iraq is all about oil, because you know, my belief about the left is uh that one of their main objectives of objectives is population change, changing the demographics of the country.
Yeah.
Uh and part of the way that they do this is by raising the cost of living on the white middle class.
Uh the education, food, energy, the whole deal, it all changed, you know, the the attack on traditional marriage abortion, it all changes uh how many children the middle class are having.
And here, I believe what Obama and the left are doing is purposely destabilizing the Middle East in order for oil prices to raise higher.
Uh you know, you think about the left.
I mean, Stalin had had no qualms about starving seven million uh Ukrainians in order to help modernize Russia.
I mean, the the left, it's all about the end, justifies the means.
What are a few hundred thousand slaughtered Iraqis if we can get gasoline up to six dollars a gallon in the United States?
And this, I mean, this is how sick I believe these people are.
Uh then, you know, I I just I think we're that's what we're gonna see.
I mean, if it's it's the least, let me explain what you're talking about to people, because I I I understand, I understand what you're saying.
And we can trace your point, by the way, back to uh the now famous, because I made it such, Peter Bynard column That ran in the Atlantic, in which he basically threw down the gauntlet and said to the middle class, hey, look, you know, this is a changing country, and it's changing demographics mean that we're now becoming a country of tolerance.
It was because of demographics, tolerance and social justice.
And what he meant was that all of these disparate minority groups, whatever it is that makes them a minority, their gender, their gender orientation, their uh uh race, whatever, these people have been stepped on for so long.
They've been maligned, impugned, disregarded, they are rising to power now.
And if you don't realize it, you better because it's coming.
And you are the one that's going to have to give up some power in order for them to have it.
And that's going to require you to be tolerant.
And he was speaking to the middle class and the Republican base.
And his basic point was that those in the Republican base, in his view or the Tea Party, the more you oppose this, the more you're going to fuel the rapidity with which this happens.
And he was essentially saying that you guys had better accept this, i.e., become Democrats.
You had better sign on to this changing America, or you're going to be left out.
So what Weston is saying here, that in order to affect that, you need to destabilize the middle class, and the best way to do that is economically.
By raising their cost of living.
It dispirits them, it depresses them, uh, they will start having fewer children, they will raise them in different ways.
And his theory is that what's going on in Iraq is going to cause so much instability that the price of oil is going to rise.
And this is going to lead to gasoline prices soaring, and that's a profound impact on everybody, but particularly the middle class.
It's not going to have an impact on people who don't buy it anyway.
And the poor who have no cars don't buy gasoline.
And immigrants who've got no place to live, don't pay utility bills.
We do.
We're paying for all of that.
And uh Weston thinks that the pressure of paying for everybody else plus yourselves is part of the uh the destabilization effort that Obama is attempting to affect.
Now, Iraq is the fourth largest oil supply in the world, or exporter, let's put it that way.
And we never have taken the oil.
He's exactly right.
They the the the critics call this a blood-for-oil war, and uh that we were simply engaging in this for cheap oil for Halliburton and so forth when Cross Halliburton doesn't, they're not an oil company, but none of that mattered.
The truth was a distant stranger to the left in all of these allegations that they were making.
Anything they could do to delegitimize American activity in Iraq, they did, and to simply reduce it to it was a bunch of greedy capitalists trying to get cheap oil for themselves so they could raise prices and screw you.
That was their theory.
But we never did.
We we let the Iraqis keep some oil, we let them sell some oil.
We should have been paid back for everything that we did by virtue of getting that oil.
It should have become ours, as a thank you, if nothing else, for what we had done for Iraq.
But we never took a barrel.
And the uh now the battle in Iraq is indeed in part about that oil.
Terrorists need it to be able to sell it to finance their operations.
It's more legitimate than uh than opium.
Uh heroin, which is one of their primary funding tools out of uh out of Afghanistan.
And so I'm I'm drawn back to a point that I made earlier, and that is that what is never talked about, very seldom mentioned in talking about the projection of American military strength and power is the impact it has on global trade.
We keep shipping lanes open, we keep prices down, we keep oil flowing at market prices rather than uh exorbitant high prices that that are punitive and not related to uh market forces.
We're the only nation that can do this.
And the point is that there are far more benefits than just military to military success.
And we have a president who is not interested in military success for any reason.
And that's what the Cheneys are finally speaking up about and are admitting.
So many people, I have to tell you, I don't mean to beat a dead horse here.
but I really was alone on an island in January of 2009 when I said I hope he fails and I'll tell you I'll let you know something else I thought I'd had a lot of people joining me.
Once once I broke the ice I thought a lot of people would join me and particularly elected Republicans.
I thought there would be pushback because of who Obama is he's a strident leftist and everything that entails vis a vis his view of this country it was no mystery to me what Obama was going to do.
I had listened to interviews that he had given throughout the 2000s on health care and the Supreme Court any number of things.
I listened to Reverend Wright I listened to what these people say they will they told us what they were going to do.
They told us what they thought and I I thought that I would have some people join me in this and instead everybody was frightened away by the historical aspect of Obama's election first black president therefore we can't be critical and I'm saying for crying out the president of the United States is not not an African American guess of the United States policies matter ideas matter where's the opposite and there wasn't any Eric Holder's nominated same thing happened.
Oh what a great nominee was a disaster for the premise of justice.
Well now in uh six years now some people are finally seeing that this is not accidental or the result of incompetence or inexperience this is not managing a decline this is shepherding it in essence.
Anyway, I'm a little long here, so the next segment's going to be short.
Back after this.
Audio soundbites of the fireworks at the IRS hearings at the Government Oversight Committee will be coming up in the next hour.
Back to the phones in Gibbon, Nebraska.
This is Jeff.
Thank you for calling, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
I just wanted to make a point that Liz Cheney made just a little different.
Regarding the SOFA agreement, we weren't exactly invited into Iraq, So generally what you do in a situation like...
like that is you dictate the terms to your defeated enemy and then tell the public that you've negotiated situation amical into the war we weren't exactly invited into Iraq.
Yeah they don't really they really can't tell us if they told us to leave we could say well no we're not leaving until you sign this agreement or you know we're gonna leave troops behind.
What are you going to do about it?
Oh I think okay so uh what what is your what is your what was the point you the point is you you behind the scenes you dictate to the Iraqi government this is how it's going to be and tell them to accept it and in public you say well we negotiated an agreement on status of forces.
Maybe what's gonna are you talking about the Bush administration or Obama?
Obama Obama Obama yeah it that's a lot of people I I thought you might have been saying we weren't invited in there in 2003 and I'm trying to figure out that's that's that's that's the big point.
We weren't invited.
It's not as though we would negotiated an invasion nor should we negotiate status of forces.
I don't think we negotiated with the Japanese or the Germans on how many forces we're going to leave behind.
No that's true.
Absolutely and the the other point I'd like to make is just I don't know how you how the soldiers are continuing to fight in Afghanistan.
I can't imagine what their morale must be like at this point watching the uh situation unravel in Iraq oh is that ever well you know I I have to I um bring that up I forget the year, but I I did a troop visit, uh, part of a State Department tour in Afghanistan, and it was uh it was during a period of time where success was profound in Afghanistan.
There was a lot of success in it.
None of it was being reported because all the attention in the media, which Afghan troops, uh our troops in Afghanistan had access to, and all the commissaries who've got all the the cable networks are brought in by satellites.
They're watching the American media trash our effort in Iraq while they were having success.
I can't say the number of guys in Afghanistan.
Well, what about us?
Why don't they talk about the great success we're having here?
There was there was already some related morale problem like you're describing there, but just look at one of his speeches at West Point.
If you want to question morale, you're absolutely right.
I mean, the even the the cadets at West Point at their own commencement didn't know what they were hearing.
It didn't make a whole lot of sense.
So no, that's a extremely valid point.
Plus the troops in Afghanistan, oh, there's a date certain they're getting out of there anyway.
We've already signaled that uh we're out of there and then whatever happens afterwards we really don't have any concern about.
It's a mess.
Big time.
And Jeff, I appreciate the call.
I've got to take another quick time out.
I'm I I told you it could be a short segment, because I went a little long in the previous one, so don't go away.
Back after this.
The point was that we had all the cards.
Nuri Al-Maliki was not in a position to tell us what we could or couldn't do at all.
We had gone in and defeated that government.
That's what Rosefeld said.
Even a trained ape could have gotten a status of force agreement.
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