Sept. 3, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:23
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| Yes, great to be with you. | |
| Rush is out for a few days. | |
| Uh Eric Ericsson uh will be here tomorrow, and Rush will be back uh next week uh for authentic full strength all American as Apple Pie, uh if you can still say that uh in these days of Michelle Obama's nutritional guidelines. | |
| Rush will be back live next week for the real deal when it comes to excellence in uh in broadcasting. | |
| Uh I mentioned earlier in the sh the show this uh intriguing story uh out of uh Tripoli, uh the the uh Obama's uh failed war, Libya is in danger of uh imploding entirely as a failed state. | |
| The government has resigned, uh the parliament has resigned, uh warring militias are now carving up the joint, and uh Egypt is talking about military intervention because a lot of the Muslim Brotherhood fellas from Cairo have uh have gone across the border uh uh into Libya and maybe making mischief uh there to use against Egypt. | |
| Uh and among the many fascinating details of what's happened there, twelve uh commercial passenger jets have gone missing from Tripoli Airport and fallen into the hands of a uh a jihadist uh militia, and uh nobody quite knows where they are or what's going to be done with them or what they purpose to which they could be put. | |
| But one fellow who's as close to anybody on this story is Bill Gutz, who uh wrote about it in the Washington Free Beacon today and Bill's uh on the line. | |
| Bill, this is uh an amazing story. | |
| Uh uh uh essentially uh just on the eve of uh the anniversary of nine eleven, a date we know these guys attach great significance to, uh, they have managed to get their hands on an even dozen uh passenger airliners. | |
| Yeah, uh hi Mark, good to be on the program. | |
| Um this is uh this is an alarming story. | |
| It's based on some recent intelligence reports indicating that Islamists in Libya who took over the Tripoli airport uh got control of uh eleven to twelve uh jet liners of two state run Libyan airlines. | |
| And uh again, this set off alarm bells uh and security alerts from Lagos, Nigeria all the way to Cairo, Egypt, uh in the last couple of weeks. | |
| Uh people are on the lookout. | |
| The CIA is trying to confirm these reports. | |
| The administration's trying to play down uh the seriousness of this. | |
| The intelligence sources that I talked to are are very, very worried about the use of one of these or more of these aircraft in some type of a terrorist attack coinciding with the nine eleven anniversary. | |
| Now now when the Malaysian jet uh disappeared, and w n none of us know what happened to that uh so many months after it, but when when that disappeared, a lot of people in this age of drones and satellites uh didn't actually think it was possible for for something as large as a passenger jet for its whereabouts not to be known. | |
| Uh and that was what uh caught their attention about the Malaysian airliner when you when you don't even know whether it's in China or the southern Indian Ocean uh or maybe headed up to one of the Central Asian stands. | |
| You just don't know where it is. | |
| Now now we've got that now with twelve jets, uh and twelve jets that were reliably in one place on the ground and in a place where you would have thought that uh U.S. drones would be keeping an eye on things as they were uh on the night of Benghazi a couple of years ago. | |
| Yes. | |
| This is the the problem here is that uh Libya is spiraling out of control and into a failed state. | |
| Uh the government of Libya announced on Sunday that they no longer control the Capitol City. | |
| And what you have is these marauding militias and they're divided up into numerous camps between Islamist and uh anti-Islamists, and of course the Al Qaeda groups are among the best armed. | |
| Uh the group Ansar al-Sharif, uh they have uh surface to air missiles, they have some armored vehicles, lots of shoulder-fired missiles, and if they get a hold of some jetliners, uh again, this uh really raises the specter of some type of nine eleven suicide attack that could be carried out uh against some target in the region, or perhaps even a long range um uh uh attack. | |
| Uh some of these airbus jets that are owned, if in fact it's confirmed that they obtained some of these airbus jets, they have the range to reach certainly uh NATO, uh the NATO summit coming up or the United States. | |
| Right. | |
| So th so these aren't uh these aren't say I mean uh by by the time these jets were taken, not a lot was flying in and out of that airport except uh uh to Tunisia and Egypt and uh Nigeria and a couple of other relatively local places. | |
| But but actually the st they've got a first world air force, as it were, that can get to Europe and conceivably to North America as well if they wanted to. | |
| Yes, and they have uh access to fuel as well, because of course Libya's an oil rich country and they have refineries and they they definitely uh have them the makings of a of a very dangerous uh uh missile type suicide bomb attack. | |
| Uh uh another possibility according to the terrorism experts I talked to is that they could use these jets to transport their militias uh to other places. | |
| And another key element of the story that I that I reported on is that the Egyptians are are finally getting very serious about uh making some preparations for possible military intervention in Libya to try to prevent uh the country from being taken over completely by Islamists and then turning it into uh yet another Al Qaeda safe haven uh in that part of the world. | |
| Well, uh and you've you've got a situation where the the more or less functioning Middle Eastern states now all border uh the most dangerous pathologies, like at the uh the the uh eastern Jordanian uh tribeal border crossing that now borders on the other side of that there's a guy uh from ISIS uh standing underneath an ISIS flag. | |
| Uh in Egypt, uh where they they're spending all this time cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood, presumably they don't just want every dodgy character in the country to skip over the border to Libya and l and use that as a base to uh to destabilize Egypt. | |
| I mean, where th these are s these are real problems for what's left of the functioning Middle East. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And uh the Islamists in Libya have been staunch supporters of the Syrian rebels. | |
| Uh what's not known clearly is what are the relations between some of these Al Qaeda linked groups like Ansar al-Sharia and ISIL, the the emerging uh Islamic State terror group that has been in the headlines lately. | |
| So if they were to connect, uh again, you could uh again be seeing an an expansion of this uh this terror threat expanding uh not just from Syria into Iraq, but uh potentially from Syria and Iraq into Libya. | |
| Well you you s you you link these jets. | |
| Uh you quote someone uh from Morocco who says these jets have fallen into the hands of something called uh the masked men brigade, which sounds like a kind of joke name for a uh serious organization, but in fact is designated as a terrorist organization uh by the United States. | |
| Well who are these masked men uh such a as the Lone Rangers guys used to say? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Uh the State Department just did this designation in December, and uh they are an offshoot of Ansar al-Sharia and they go by a number of different names. | |
| They're one of these Al Qaeda linked groups uh that have been operating as a militia inside Libya. | |
| I don't think there's a lot of details on their activities at this point, although uh the United Nations is getting ready to develop some more uh designations of of uh Libyan terrorist groups. | |
| They just passed a resolution doing that, and they warned that the threat of Al Qaeda terrorism in Libya is growing. | |
| So this is clearly uh a growing and bigger problem uh for not just the United States but all the states in that region. | |
| Well, one one of the interesting things is that some of these countries haven't been waiting uh for uh U.S. leadership on this. | |
| Uh Saudi Arabia and uh the United Arab Emirates actually uh scrambled their planes and took military action without notifying uh Washington uh uh a few days ago uh in uh in in uh Libya. | |
| And uh that's presumably because one of the things these planes could reach very easily is the Saudi oil refineries. | |
| Yes. | |
| Yeah, and they're very extremely vulnerable to that kind of an attack if uh you know and and the terrorists have been targeting these uh oil refineries for years. | |
| Of course they've done gone to great lengths to protect them against such attacks, but an aerial strike on the Saudi oil fields and refineries there could have major implications on the world economy because it would uh it would sink the uh the world into uh an oil crisis uh and so that's clearly would be one of their uh targets if they were in fact able to get these jets uh and use them as uh uh guided suicide bomb missiles. | |
| Yeah, that's uh that that's that's certainly true. | |
| Uh are we uh how how uh you've you've said that uh in essence the State Department is underplaying this threat, that the disappearance of twelve passenger jets from some uh uh ruined burned out airport is like no big deal. | |
| Do you think that's that's just like the official line uh and that somewhere in the government they're actually taking this thing quite seriously? | |
| The latter, yes. | |
| The people that I talk to, I wouldn't say that their hair was on fire about it, but they are very, very worried about this, especially because of the threat of uh of a nine eleven attack uh style attack on the anniversary. | |
| Uh we're thirteen years out from the uh two thousand one attack and two years from the Benghazi attack. | |
| So and these are Libyans who would want to make a statement this is something that they can do. | |
| Uh my senses, uh and I'm only speculating, the State Department's playing this down, is that they just don't want another crisis on their plate, uh having to deal with Iraq and and ISIL, and here you have a failed state. | |
| They're hoping that perhaps the Egyptians can pick up the ball on this. | |
| Um like I said, uh my I got the sense that they were that uh the other thing is that the CIA was caught flat footed on this and was uh has been unable to locate all of these jets, and they're they're working very hard to try and account for these uh these uh two state-owned Libyan airlines uh inventory of uh commercial jets, which range from airbuses to bombardier uh regional jets to some uh turboprop planes. | |
| Right. | |
| And uh in other words, the same planes that everybody uses to to to fly around uh the the Western world. | |
| So i even though they're Libyan airlines, presumably it would be the work of it would be relatively easy to repaint the tail fin so it looks like an Air France jet or uh or Bulls. | |
| Exactly or whatever. | |
| Uh and so in in essence these these planes could get quite a long way uh without any if you if you knew flight schedules and things uh before anybody was alert to the fact that it was like a uh it was a fake passenger plane, as it were. | |
| Right. | |
| And uh well the question was could they get pilots? | |
| Uh can they train up terrorists to fly the plane? | |
| We know that from nine eleven that they were able to do that. | |
| Question is uh would they be able to do that? | |
| Obviously uh they have targets throughout the Middle East. | |
| They could crash it into embassy buildings, uh they could do it into uh capital cities of of enemies of states they regard as enemies. | |
| They certainly could reach uh uh Europe fairly easily, and the question could be could they cross the uh the Atlantic Pond and and attack targets in the U.S. Again, it's you know, at this point it's a theoretical threat, but certainly there are people that are very worried about it and they're trying to account for all those uh those missing aircraft. | |
| Well that's uh let's it's uh thank you for your thank you for the story, Bill. | |
| And uh we we'll keep an eye on it. | |
| And and and great to have you and uh and your insight on the show. | |
| And we don't want this to be like Benghazi, folks. | |
| So uh w we hope that uh Bill's story will at least have caught the attention of people uh so that this isn't like the night of September eleventh uh two thousand and twelve, uh when the deputy ambassador uh back in Tripoli was calling Washington and nobody wanted to take his calls uh and they'd all left. | |
| They'd gone to the Vegas fundraiser or whatever it was, uh and Hillary Clinton wasn't answering the phone at the three AM phone call. | |
| Uh Bill's story is a fascinating story. | |
| It's in the Washington Free Bacon, and uh he's given us a heads up, so hopefully uh if anything does go down uh on the anniversary, there will be someone there to answer that 3 a.m. phone call. | |
| Thanks uh Lob Bill. | |
| This is Mark Stein Inforush. | |
| We'll take your calls straight ahead. | |
| Mark Stein sitting in for Rush. | |
| Before we uh leave the subject of those uh missing Libyan planes, uh I forgot to ask Bill what his uh uh w what was the kind of obvious question, which is how these planes got out of the airport. | |
| Um because I was in Tripoli Airport as I said years ago, and I remember it as being, you know, when you land at an air, you land on the field and you you then go past the hangars uh and all the rest of it. | |
| And I remember there being uh Libyan uh jets uh uh from some Libyan airlines sitting around there that you don't see a lot of, it's not a big hub for US air or Northwest or Delta or whatever. | |
| So the planes that are sitting around there are the ones from these Libyan airlines. | |
| And it wasn't uh it it seemed to me that uh once uh you were it would it would not be relatively easy to get hold of those planes and actually fly them and take them off. | |
| Uh Bill Bill says they don't actually know how those planes left the airport, whether somebody actually drove them past the parking garage. | |
| You know, if these guys have been if these planes have been seized by guys who don't know how to fly, then they can just take them out the parking garage uh onto the highway to toward downtown Tripoli and then fork off and go into the desert and do what they want. | |
| But if they actually uh had pilots who could fly them out of there, then who knows where those planes are by now? | |
| And this is why I asked Bill the question about the drones. | |
| Uh we as Tripoli Airport was falling, we have these drones. | |
| We pay for the most uh expensive military on the planet that has about forty-four percent of the planet's total military expenditure. | |
| And on Benghazi, that money didn't actually get us a lot. | |
| But what it got was drones that could see what was they could watch in the Oval Office, what was happening in real time. | |
| Uh they could watch in the situation room uh live footage of those drones over Benghazi uh and what was going on at that time. | |
| And you would have thought, you would have thought, given the complete failure of Obama's Libyan policy, given the total implosion of Libya, given the total disaster of it, uh that as the capital city falls, as the main airport falls, that these drones they had over Benghazi, a couple of years later they might have been actually watching what was going on at Tripoli Airport. | |
| So at least, even if we weren't doing anything, we would we would know what was happening. | |
| Just like a Beng in Benghazi, we didn't do anything. | |
| The superpower was passive, but it at least knew what was happening. | |
| Uh and it's distressing to learn that even that minimal advantage of uh uh uh of of the uh uh the forty-four percent planet military expenditure, even that minimal advantage uh was apparently uh uh squandered uh when Tripoli Airport uh fell to these guys. | |
| Uh you know, uh Obama is testing out a uh an uh uh uh a new slogan. | |
| Uh Gregory French uh just uh sent me a thing, calling it his latest platitude. | |
| Cynicism is a choice. | |
| This was in his speech uh for Labor Day. | |
| Cynicism is a choice and hope is a better choice. | |
| Um but we're conservatives, you know. | |
| And sometimes you don't get to choose. | |
| There's certain things you you don't get to choose. | |
| Reality isn't a choice. | |
| Reality is a given. | |
| Uh and it doesn't matter whether you're cynical and it doesn't matter whether you're hopeful. | |
| At some point you have to acknowledge reality. | |
| And Obama's whole uh shtick uh that simply the total awesomeness of his charisma, the spectacular, godlike messianic glow of his cleague-like celebrity, can negate reality, which is essentially the deal he sold to the American people in 2008, uh is is uh is what is up for grabs here. | |
| And you notice he seems uh what I find it uh interesting is how listless he seems when he professes to be outraged. | |
| You know, he's outraged by the latest beheading of an American. | |
| That's what he said in in uh Estonia. | |
| And he's so inert and listless and unengaged. | |
| He's been written these butched up words to express his outrage. | |
| And at the same time he doesn't sound in the least bit outraged because he's not. | |
| In the end, he still believes that his aut awesomeness, his Cleague-like celebrity trumps reality. | |
| And the lesson of the world is that it doesn't. | |
| Hey, great to be with you. | |
| Let us go to uh Janine in Minneapolis, uh Minnesota, uh, where I will be uh at or orchestral hall at uh uh October the ninth I think it's gonna be uh so uh if uh if you happen to be in that part of town it's uh it's the Center of the American Experiment uh eve it's an evening with Mark Stein. | |
| Oh great I love that guy I must make a point to be there. | |
| Oh I will be there. | |
| October the ninth uh in Orchestral Hall Minneapolis uh presented by the Center for the American Experiment. | |
| Let's go to Janine who is in Minneapolis that fair city itself. | |
| Great to have you with us on the show, Janine. | |
| Hi, Mark. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| My pleasure. | |
| I appreciate this opportunity to vent on an issue that has been very frustrating to me for many years. | |
| I'll just say that I was a many, many year mechanic with a major airline here in the Twin Cities. | |
| And in 2005, the workforce changed greatly. | |
| there was a mechanic cleaner strike and the mechanics most of them were outsourced at that time and all of the cleaners were outsourced to contract companies and the Somali population was growing in the Twin Cities here and what we found were the majority of the cleaner replacements were done with a Somalian workforce. | |
| Right. | |
| And at that time I was shocked actually because then the the employees were security cleared, drug tested long term employees and this was not that long after 2001, September 11th and I was just shocked. | |
| I I I couldn't believe it. | |
| And I tried to make an issue of it and at this time the the workforce was out on strike the cleaners and the mechanics and we had a lot of newspapers the coverage and and the reporters were there and I went to the newspapers and I said listen how do you get background checks and security clearance out of Somalia? | |
| Right. | |
| And the union leaders I went to them and I even went to the conservative radio stations and was cut off because nobody would touch this story with a ten foot pole. | |
| Nobody wanted to listen. | |
| And you make a... | |
| The people who don't live in Minnesota are not generally aware that in the last 20 years, Minneapolis has acquired a significant Somali population to the point where there's a part of town called Little | |
| Mogadishu, and they're in the position to elect people to office, as may well happen in November, and that these people came to America originally as refugees during the collapse of Somalia a couple of decades back. | |
| And actually, and under chain migration, you're allowed to bring in your relatives and all the rest of it, but nobody knows anything about Somali paperwork. | |
| Nobody actually, when these people are admitted, you have to take their name on trust, nobody knows their identity, nobody knows who their brother is nobody so in fact these these people were admitted to the country without a background check but then amazingly ace the background check when they want to get a job at Minneapolis airport Janine. | |
| Well you know Mark I don't know how that works because back in 2005 it was acknowledged that there was not background information even to the point of not having ages And you're right, even names. | |
| Nobody being able to tell what was proper and correct. | |
| Right, right. | |
| So I stood there and and we were growing this behemoth protection government agencies, and I saw the people going in with their little kids in the front door of the airport, and they would go through the scanners and the the screening lines and TSA. | |
| And I just stood there and I thought this is all a farce. | |
| Right. | |
| Because you can put all the locks you want on the front door. | |
| If your back door is open, none of it m none of it matters. | |
| None of it works. | |
| It's absolutely meaningless. | |
| No. | |
| No. | |
| And that gets that gets back to the security theater point uh we were making. | |
| Basically, uh these these guys are expressed through to the secure area of the uh of the airport and they uh and they have free reign to do what they want there and then. | |
| And like uh, you know, a lot of them just want to do a job and get their money and go home at the end of the day. | |
| But if you're if you're if you're if you're not like that, if you're like this fellow who wound up signing up with ISIS, uh Abdul Rahman Mohammed from Minneapolis, uh who went off to fight for ISIS, and you want to make mischief at an American airport, uh then this gives you this gives you a a a secure pool to splash around in because the checks and the checks are not being done. | |
| Uh and and nobody wants to make a fuss about it. | |
| Nobody wants to make a fuss about it because you're racist or you're Islamophobic, or we're gonna have to put you in for uh uh that was the other story out of Minneapolis a few years ago, the the uh the imams who started uh behaving oddly uh on uh I think that was a U.S. Airways flight. | |
| There were six of them, and they started asking for the uh seat belt extenders uh and doing a lot of funny stuff before takeoff and people made a fuss about it. | |
| And that that wound up as a lawsuit and the guys uh the the flight crew wound up going uh to the the sensitivity training to be uh trained not to notice suspicious behavior, uh which is the insanity of this system. | |
| So if you're trained not to notice uh suspicious behavior by an MM asking for seatbelt device uh extenders, even though he's not a large imam while he's saying a lahu Akbar, if you're if you if you're trained not to notice that, the only thing left to notice is uh you know, the ninety-three-year-old granny uh making her remove her uh her leg brace or or whatever. | |
| And this is this is the craziness, this is the craziness of the system we uh we have, Janine. | |
| But but but you saw that you tried to do you tried to interest uh uh people in your city about it in Minneapolis, and they didn't want to hear about this. | |
| Well, I'll tell you what, it is not on my behalf. | |
| I am not racist. | |
| I'm not an Islamophobe, I care about the security of the aircraft. | |
| Right. | |
| That's that's it. | |
| I have people I love getting on those aircraft. | |
| I see families with their children getting on those aircraft. | |
| That's what I care about. | |
| Security of the aircraft. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, you're you're uh you're right there, and uh and that's what we're told this stuff is uh is all about, uh Janine. | |
| Thank you for your call. | |
| By the way, uh this is why I'm in favor of the President of the United States flying commercial. | |
| We were we were originally told that you know he has to fly Air Force One because uh in the old days, because airports anybody could turn up and get on, get off and all the rest of it. | |
| And then after 2001, they made airports secure, secure, and they're supposedly secure. | |
| Why can't the President of the United States fly on a commercial jet then? | |
| Uh if they're so secure. | |
| Uh the Prime Minister of Australia does. | |
| He he flew coach. | |
| He flew coach on a commercial flight from Sydney to a skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps uh uh over the winter a few months back. | |
| Uh so there's and that's like a long flight. | |
| That's like a twenty-three hour flight or whatever the hell it is. | |
| It's like takes forever from Sydney all the way to the Swiss Alps. | |
| He's sitting there, the Australian Prime Minister sitting there at the back of the plane in coach, and people said, Hey Fred, how how is your uh uh flight uh uh to Geneva? | |
| Oh, it was uh murder. | |
| I uh I had the uh Prime Minister in the next CD wouldn't shut up all night. | |
| Uh if the plane is secure, it's secure for everyone. | |
| Uh so the President of the United States should be able to fly on those planes. | |
| But if not, all the hell of the travel now, the hell of travel is completely pointless. | |
| If, as Janine says, you've got all this security at the front door, but at the back door everybody's going in. | |
| Same thing with this thing that Homeland Security gave false and evasive answers on. | |
| You have to have picture ID to board a plane. | |
| Uh again, i that's a waste of time because there's all kinds of millions of people in this country of fake picture ID. | |
| Millions of illegal aliens have driver's licenses. | |
| Uh on September eleventh, uh, those guys uh got on the plane uh in Washington, boarded with uh genuine state of Virginia ID they got from the 7 Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia, which provided them with an address. | |
| They went to the Virginia DMV and got formal uh picture ID. | |
| So that again, it's irrelevant. | |
| But you see them now with these little loops screwed in, like jewelers looking at diamonds. | |
| They got these things screwed in the in into their eye, and they're looking down for the water mark on your driver's license, or you don't need a fake driver's license to get on a plane in America. | |
| Anybody can get a genuine driver's license. | |
| But they've taken it to the next level now. | |
| You have to sit there while the g while the guy looks at your uh looks at your uh uh driver's license uh to see uh whether the watermarks are all correct and everything, and he's got the thing screwed in his eye like he's the jeweler and you're you're pawing uh your grandmother's wedding jewelry, and uh meanwhile, meanwhile, illegal aliens uh are able to board the plane without picture ID and with nothing but a so-called notice to appear for their deportation hearing. | |
| So again, it's like everybody uh the the more they let the more they torment the law abiding, the more they let the lawless do what they want in the United States of America. | |
| Mark Stein for Rush, more straight ahead. | |
| Mark Stein in Farush as uh President Obama continues his travels, he's on his way from the uh uh Estonia in the Baltic uh to Wales for the NATO summit. | |
| Um H.R. uh mentioned to me just before the show, he he had he he he called NATO uh the military welfare state. | |
| Uh and in and in a way it is. | |
| It's broadly speaking, it's a military alliance of countries that don't have any militaries. | |
| Uh and that's that was how the United States designed it uh in a way that they would provide Western Europe with a security umbrella uh in order that Western Europeans would stop fighting and killing each other and uh everyone would get a bit of peace for a few decades. | |
| And that situation uh no longer prevails, uh and yet the the United States still is basically picking up the tab uh for this uh for for this so-called military alliance. | |
| For uh and if you uh look at uh remember President Reagan's remarks about welfare queens, defense welfare queens, military welfare queens are in many ways no more uh attractive. | |
| And uh as uh uh as an old colleague of mine uh famously used to say, uh a country uh isn't really a country if it doesn't have a military. | |
| Uh so uh so NATO is uh is a problematic institution. | |
| But uh and like NATO, the European Union, the Middle East, all over the world, all these countries are looking for American leadership. | |
| Uh but the the the guy who uh currently occupies the role of leader of the free world uh doesn't take the title seriously, so he's not interested. | |
| Uh and uh so he just wants to stay home and play golf and do uh Obamacare and lots of other things that he's interested in, expand food stamps and all the rest of it. | |
| He's not interested in the rest of the world. | |
| And uh at one level this is hilarious because uh the European Union guys uh finally got one of their own elected as President of the United States. | |
| Uh and then they're uh now they're living with the consequences of it, which is that when you get someone who at best is like a Scandinavian social democrat, and at worst is is some Eastern European Marxist uh elected as President of the United States, uh the planet tends to go to hell, because he's just like you, he doesn't want to do anything. | |
| He's waiting uh the the the The fellow you look to for leadership isn't interested in playing that role. | |
| And and uh Mr. Snerdley spotted this story in the Associated Press. | |
| Uh they're now worrying that Afghanistan is going to go like Iraq, and that they're and that their um uh things the minute the uh last Western troops depart, the whole thing is gonna implode and the Taliban will be back in power in Kabul. | |
| And the interesting thing uh said uh I I spotted in this story uh is that there's still a ton of countries uh with their militaries in uh Iraq. | |
| The the um the US has about thirty thousand troops there, uh Britain has four thousand, Germany is two thousand, Italy has about sixteen hundred. | |
| Uh okay, those are real deployments. | |
| Those are real-sized deployments. | |
| But seventeen countries. | |
| Seventeen countries. | |
| Th there's there's there's officially a 48 nation coalition in Afghanistan. | |
| And about a third of them, 17, have just 25 or fewer troops still deployed. | |
| So if your kid, for example, uh went on an eighth grade school trip to Washington in uh May or June, just before graduation, like my kid did. | |
| Uh there's about the same number. | |
| That's the military deployment. | |
| Think of your kid getting on the school bus with his class. | |
| That's the size of the military deployment that these countries have in Iraq. | |
| They've got fewer than twenty-five. | |
| Austria has fewer than twenty-five troops in Afghanistan. | |
| Bahrain, fewer than twenty-five. | |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina, fewer than twenty-five. | |
| Estonia, fewer than twenty-five, Greece, fewer than twenty-five, Iceland, fewer than twenty-five, Ireland fewer than twenty-five, Latvia fewer than twenty-five. | |
| Montenegro, fewer than twenty-five. | |
| Tonga, fewer than twenty-five. | |
| Ukraine, fewer than twenty-five. | |
| And right now they could use those guys uh at home back now. | |
| Uh what's the point? | |
| Now you think you've got fewer than twenty-five. | |
| You've got you've got fewer than twenty-five Austrians, fewer than twenty-five Bahrainis, fewer than twenty-five Estonians, fewer than twenty-five Greeks, fewer than twenty-five Irishmen, and then you think about all the diplomatic effort the United States expended in go flying to those capitals and uh twisting the arms of those people and providing incentives for them to send two dozen guys over to Afghanistan. | |
| That's the first thing. | |
| It's a complete waste of your energy. | |
| Because by the time you've done that, by the time you've spent all the time twisting the arm of the fella in Slovenia and the fellow in Sweden, and whoever the defense minister of Montenegro is, uh, to get them to send a couple of dozen people, if that. | |
| This is fewer than twenty-five. | |
| So they might just be sending seven or eight or nine people to Afghanistan. | |
| Uh it's you've you've you've expended a ton of energy that would have been better focused on your strategy killing your enemy. | |
| And secondly, if you are going to go into in for nation building, what is the hell the use of a forty-eight member coalition? | |
| You know, when you've got a 48-nation coalition, who who are you actually sacrificing blood and treasure for? | |
| Who are those 30,000 US troops still in Afghanistan fighting for? | |
| You don't have a national interest when you've got a 48-member coalition. | |
| You're basically a global traffic cop. | |
| You're basically the school traffic guard of Afghanistan. | |
| And that's why you end up uh in a country for thirteen years and nothing to show for it but sharia law and women in body bags uh and uh and uh Afghan tribal warlords being bribed with Viagra so they can use it on their nine-year-old child brides. | |
| Uh the reason you're doing that is because of this fig leaf of this uh internationalism and the and the uh and and the forty-eight nation coalition. | |
| Uh you if you're gonna go in for nation building, you build it in your interest, what serves your national interest instead of wasting your time as a global traffic guard. | |
| Mark's time for Rush, lots more still to come. | |
| Atlantic City started this year with twelve casinos. | |
| It will be down to eight casinos by the middle of this month, with eight thousand people out of work. | |
| Even gambling, uh even gambling isn't a gamble, it's just the certainty of uh closure and out of work. | |
| Coming up snake eyes in uh in Atlantic City in the new Obama economy. | |
| Trump Plaza is closing September 16th. |
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