Rumsfeld: There's a 'Reasonable Possibility' Qaddafi Could Last Out Reluctant Coalition in Libya

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, it seemed so unbelievable at the time, and then just two years ago, not under -- not under your watch, but under the new administration in Scotland, releasing -- one of the killers of Pan Am 103 goes home, and he's embraced by Libya, a huge hero. He's still a hero now. And it's, like, the United States just -- on that particular incident, that we've looked the other way, and you know, we've done -- we almost rewarded him.

RUMSFELD: There -- I mean, old phrase that, in fact, I talk about it in the book, is that weakness is provocative. And behaving in a certain way can encourage people to behave in an aggressive way against the United States. And if you go back and look at the videos and the documentation, people like Usama bin Laden talk about the fact that they concluded that the United States was a paper tiger. Saddam Hussein concluded that we would not do anything because of the fact that he fought the mother of all battles against the United States in the first Gulf war, and there he was still in power. And as someone said, Mrs. Thatcher was out of power and George Herbert Walker Bush was out of power, but Saddam Hussein was still there.

If you think about that principle and apply it to Libya today, people -- think of magnetic particles and how they point to what's going to happen next and where something's moving. The issue today that's being debated about Qaddafi, whether or not there's regime change is the idea of the coalition or not -- and there's a debate taking place, apparently, about it.

And if you go back and look at the videos and the documentation, people like Usama bin Laden talk about the fact that they concluded that the United States was a paper tiger

So true! I think Barack Obama actually thought Gadaffi was going to do exactly what the President of Egypt did. Just step down. Obama got so much of an ego trip by seeing Israel's only friend in the neighborhood President Mubarak step down at the mere sound of his voice that Obama got cocky and thought Gadaffi would do the same.

A shame we have a President who probably never even knew who Gadaffi was until he became President.

A country that is the biggest industrial power in the world and spends more money on defense than all its allies and adversaries put together is never weak, even under someone like Obama. No one with an IQ above room temperature could ever see the US as weak. The drooling retards bin Laden and Mullah Omar perceived - in a fit of Koran-induced hallucinations - both American and Russian military weakness, deciding that the US was the Byzantine Empire and the Russians were the Persian Empire, both of which - in antiquity - had fought wars over centuries that had exhausted both empires from a manpower and financial perspective, paving the way for Islamic conquest. What these Koranic idiots savant don't seem to have noticed is that the US has never actually fought a war against Russia. This is why the period after WWII (and before the fall of the Berlin Wall) was called the Cold War. We got through the Cold War with manpower and weaponry intact. Whatever bin Laden's fantasies used to be, he now knows - tens of thousands of dead al Qaeda later - that Uncle Sam can pack a punch, even under a Community Organizer like Obama, not because Obama is any great shakes, but because we spend more money on defense than all of the other countries on Earth put together. A country like Israel needs to demonstrate a willingness to fight. We don't.

>> A country like Israel needs to demonstrate a willingness to fight. We don’t.

The only thing Israel needs to demonstrate is it willingness to fight without US approval. But, that may not exactly be to its benefit.

Personally speaking, I feel sorry for the children...they can’t chose their parents or idiotic cultures. That being said, I think the problem is for the Libyans and I don’t think it was necessary or wise to get involved.

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