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Aug. 26, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
34:20
Alastair Crooke : Western Propaganda Wars
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, August 26th.
August 26th?
Where has the summer gone?
2024.
Alistair Crook will be with us here in a moment on the new Western way of war.
Is owning the narrative just as important as achieving the victory?
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Alistair, good day to you, my friend, and welcome here.
I want to dwell at some length on your fascinating piece on the modern Western way of war with an emphasis on propaganda.
But before we do, the news here this morning, as the sun is coming up on the east coast of the United States, is all about the exchange of fire, I'll call it.
Between Hezbollah and Israel, if you read the New York Times and the newspapers and websites that we all look at over here, it sounds as though Israel didn't receive a scratch and succeeded in stopping these devices before they did any damage.
What can you tell us about the latest?
Well, it's very important because it's very important to understand really what's happening.
Because it's setting the tone for the next phase of this war.
And whatever you've read is almost certainly wrong.
It's a narrative.
Again, what you've seen, it's not.
So let's just go through it, and I will explain what it meant in terms of what's happened.
Please do.
First of all, it all happened around about 4 o 'clock in the morning.
On Sunday.
And the Israelis started to see people moving in Lebanon and moving towards platforms.
And so Hezbollah was planning the operation to fire drones and rockets at 5:15 on Sunday morning.
And Israel started To an attack, a direct attack, and it involved, I think, about 100 aircraft.
But contrary to what the Israeli propagandist at the IDF was saying, and I know this not from Hezbollah, but I know this from inside Lebanon, people who were on the ground there, it was a chaotic 20 minutes.
Israel just bombed various valleys where they imagined the ballistic missiles were.
But they'd been cleared out of there some time ago, and there were no ballistic missiles.
You can check that.
I mean, you know, there are people on the ground who know what's happened.
There are no missiles.
So when it said they destroyed thousands of missile launchers, this is a complete lie.
Because first of all, There are no missiles, no ballistic missiles, no large missiles south of the Litani River.
What you have is drones and small rockets there.
And none of these had launchers, and they destroyed none of them.
It was just a show.
It was a show of force, and it only lasted about 20 minutes.
And you can tell that it wasn't really anything terribly serious because Hezbollah, Who actually does admit casualties in these occasions, have always been very honest when they've lost people, say that the whole process, they lost two men in this, which indicates, I think, that it wasn't a very serious.
and they had no launches.
In fact, Hezbollah say, and there's every reason to think this is correct, that the platforms, the drone platforms that they were flying, were unaffected, or they lost one, I think, or two maybe, but it was no great.
I mean, what is the strategy and what are we seeing here?
What we're seeing here is a recalibration of the war.
Originally, the war, if you like, for the Axis group, It was all about supporting Sinwar and Hamas in Gaza.
They were auxiliaries to this war and were supporting it.
And what we have seen in the subsequent period was that the war fragmented in different ways.
First of all, it fragmented by the killing of Fuat Shukr in Beirut, just before Haniyeh was killed.
In Tehran.
And for that reason, the actual operations of the resistance changed.
Because as far as Hezbollah was concerned, the killing of Fuad crossed all the red lines.
All the understandings, the careful balances were broken by that.
And they opened a separate account, quite separately to Gaza, what was happening to Gaza.
And they opened a separate account.
And so what happened in this weekend was about settling that account with Israel.
And it stuck very carefully to the equations, the war equations that they had between Israel and Hezbollah.
They didn't go out of the equations.
So they, if you like, attacked in Tel Aviv the Mossad headquarters.
And the headquarters of 8-2000, equivalent roughly to NSA in the US.
It's the, if you like, the communications intercept.
Because that was a decision-making, if you like, structure that led to Fuad Shouk's killing in Beirut.
And they did it in Tel Aviv because they killed him in Beirut.
So it was a complete equivalent, if you like, on that.
And they had one phase with 320 rockets.
Of course, it's been played down.
I can't tell you exactly how many might have been shot down or didn't land properly, but they were targeted not on people or on civilians.
They were targeted on military bases, and they were targeted very precisely on And on air defense systems.
So you don't see that.
And then immediately on Sunday, after the, if you like, so four o 'clock, the Israelis came in just before, started bombing pretty randomly in the valleys and the areas where they thought Hezbollah would have their ballistic missiles.
But as I say, there were none.
There are none there north of the Litani.
Israel sent a message to Hezbollah by not going beyond the Tani, that the equations of war with Israel were still holding.
And that's a very important point.
The Israelis were signaling that, okay, you know, you just did Tel Aviv for Shukkah, but we are not going to hit Beirut or the civilian areas.
So now Hezbollah restarts the war.
For the 40 kilometers of territory that Israel has lost and given up to Hezbollah.
Now they say that first phase with the shooting of the rockets and then the actual drones were shot from the Beqar Valley, which is in the east of Lebanon.
The drones that were shot and Hezbollah says they got through and hit that Mossad building.
Which is just outside.
I've been to it long ago.
It's just outside Tel Aviv.
It's about a kilometer or two outside Tel Aviv.
Which is also the headquarters of, familiar to you, lavender.
The people who set up lavender and operated lavender.
So it was to be an equivalence, okay?
So this was taken now that they have settled the open account on Fuad Shuka.
And Hassan Nasrallah last night made a statement in saying, if we have been successful, as our evidence and intelligence suggests, then this can be the end of this account on Fuad Shuka, but there may be a second stage to it later.
But that's only if necessary.
But this first phase has now entered, finished, and now we go back to what we were.
Originally fulfilling, which is, if you like, the liberation of the Palestinians.
It is very clearly now that Hezbollah has moved away from Shukkah and is now returning to, if you like, the support for Hamas, the support for the Palestinians.
This is an anti-colonial liberation fight that involves all Islam in their view.
If you look at the major newspapers, if you look at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal this morning, the print editions, they both feature prominently the same, the exact same photograph, which purports to be the Israelis exploding some sort of a Hezbollah missile way up in the sky and doing so successfully.
That's an old photograph.
It's nothing new.
It's nothing new.
And one of the reasons we can't give more detail of this is immediately at five o 'clock in the morning, the Israeli government issued an absolute ban on any reporting of any damage or any attacks on either major infrastructure or military objectives in Israel.
A complete censor was imposed.
On what happened in Tel Aviv, what happened at the airbase, which they also attacked, which is where the drones flew from, that attacked Fuad Shokar.
Absolute ban, no reporting, no photographs, no visuals.
And so they've put a complete blackout on any news of any damage to any infrastructure, any defense sites or to the intelligence bases in Tel Aviv.
So, of course, we can't see and we can't prove it.
But as I say, I do know independently what I said about the Israeli attack where they say they knocked out thousands of locket launchers.
It's complete phooey.
There's nothing.
It's completely untrue.
Is Hezbollah happy with...
Yeah, I think so.
I think so, because first of all, I think that what we're talking about here is they've re-established the equation with Israel, and clearly Israel for the moment doesn't wish to go to all-out war against Hezbollah.
Hezbollah, I think, are satisfied, although, of course, you know, the narrative has been spun.
As if it was a great defeat for Hezbollah.
As I say, they didn't touch their main weapons.
They didn't use a single cruise or ballistic missile.
They just used drones and simple rockets, katusha rockets, 340 katusha rockets.
And the drones were fired from far out on the east, almost in Syria.
And they went through, and according to Hezbollah, and Hezbollah has good intelligence, it has airborne intelligence of these, the drone intelligence.
He says these drones landed on those two targets just near Tel Aviv and caused damage.
Of course, there's no sign of that from Israel because there's a complete blackout on news on anything of that sort coming out of Israel.
So what Hassan Nasrallah also says is, It's now complete.
We go back to attrition.
This is the whole point.
We're talking about attrition, attrition, not to go to a full all-out war.
And they said that the other members of the Axis, including Ansallah, the Houthis, and Iran, I've all agreed that they're going to do their own thing because Iran has a separate account open.
Justice Hezbollah has an account open with Israel for the killing of Wadshuka.
So Iran has an account, which is separate to the Palestinian issue, open state, but this one is state to state.
The Hezbollah...
Iran has one with Israel, which is about the honor of Iran, the humiliation of killing a guest at the inauguration of their president in Tehran, and they will take their time and do it separately.
And the key point I just want to finish, because I think it's very important, In other words, we've seen a friend of mine who recalled and was present and saw the six-day war, if you like, in the Middle East with Syria and Egypt.
He said, you know, this huge buildup of forces by the Americans, enormous forces, and we just waited till everything was in place from the Americans.
And then in a few hours, they destroyed everything of the Egyptians and the Syrians in terms of their air forces.
And you can see the same thing.
I mean, I think it's nearly half the Navy, US Navy, is in the Mediterranean and in the Gulf at the moment.
Huge forces have been...
Now, Iran is not frightened by this.
This isn't the, you know, 67. Things have changed completely.
They've been planning a defense against the United States for 20 years.
They have these huge missile farms underneath, which are entirely automatic.
The missiles fire from deep in the ground, 90 meters, through, if you like, the tubes, straight out.
And they're across Iran.
Same in Lebanon.
It's not a worry.
But the point is, you know, it's clear that Netanyahu wants war and some in the United States wants war, want war with Iran.
So if they want war, why give it?
I mean, why do you, you know, don't...
Don't help them out.
Go back to attrition.
Get back in control of the escalatory process.
They want to control the escalatory process.
They don't want to hand a gift free to Netanyahu to say, oh, of course there will be a new provocation that will come.
I mean, one provocation was in Damascus when he assassinated those IRGC generals.
Then there was Hanir in Tehran.
And for sure.
He's going to try something else to try and get the Americans involved in a war with Iran.
But why give it to him on a plate?
So let's go back because attrition is working extremely effectively.
Don't just allow yourself to be led like a Pavlovian dog into reacting as the Americans and the Israelis would like you to react.
Just wait.
Leave strategic patience.
It is not a weakness.
It is a very clear sense of strategy that actually the greatest weakness, a prominent general, just these last days, said, a major general, senior, was saying that in a big war or in this war of attrition, Israel cannot last a year.
This is an Israeli general, Alistair?
Yes.
Brick is his name.
B-R-I-K.
General Brick.
Major General Brick.
Very highly regarded general.
This is such a fascinating scenario.
And I'm also fascinated with the highly misleading news this morning that publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Yes,
indeed.
I mean, and we see this, I mean, first of all, you know, what that Israeli spokesperson was saying, I mean, it was just, The sort of lies that we are used to in Ukraine.
But it was a complete lies and it's about creating a narrative of victory, even when actually the situation is quite sombre for Israel.
And it's been the same, if you like, with this Kursk initiative.
It is entirely an attempt to be able to say: You know, this is something that is going to puncture Putin's self-confidence.
I mean, of course, you know, in both these cases, there's huge danger in this sort of narcissistic, sort of exceptionalist language and type of narrative because it distorts reality.
It is completely severed from reality, severed from reality in the Middle East and severed from reality in the Middle East.
Because Kursk means things to Russians.
This is where they fought the last battle against the Germans.
You know, this is where the Germans crossed into Kursk and the Battle of Kursk in 1943 was fought by the Soviet forces in that very village that things are happening.
How do Russians interpret this?
What they understand this to say when they see German armor They say, you know, the West is coming for Russia again.
It's clear.
Germans in, I mean, German armour, not German troops, but NATO-backed, if you like, proxies.
Doing the same thing, coming in to curse.
It's not so much, you know, the logistics and whether it was a sensible operation.
It wasn't.
But I mean, nonetheless, you know, all this is being spun.
I mean, the head of CIA said very clearly, you know, this was great because, you know, the problem is, you know, we've got to puncture Putin's self-confidence and his sort of humor.
They're not going to give it anyway.
But all this does is make the Russians absolutely more determined because they know their history.
Just like British people know the Battle of Waterloo.
Kursk is known to them as the one where they finally broke the German army.
At Kursk.
What do they see?
The West coming through that vulnerable frontier, the Western frontier, which has always been vulnerable after Napoleon, after the Germans' First or Second World War and the Battle of the Kursk.
All those things, I mean, you know, spells very clearly to Russians.
You know, this isn't just a proxy war about Ukraine.
The West wants...
Or does it just want to have a nice story for the election?
It's just a story.
Finally, one doesn't know how far they want to go with this Russia project, given that they've got what's happening in the Middle East and China is certainly heating up as well for them.
So I don't know, but that's the trouble that they've given this impression.
Now, what they've done in Israel just now is equally dangerous because it's going to seem, oh, you know, there's no risk there at all for Israel to attack into Lebanon.
Look, they easily dealt with all these rockets they just sent and they preempted everything.
The Israelis were great.
They knocked out all of these missile launchers.
They stopped it.
There was no damage done.
It was just a joke, rather like, you know, Iran.
On April the 13th.
That is such a dangerous misunderstanding of what is awaiting them if we do go to full war with Hezbollah and with Iran and with the Houthis and with Iraq.
complete misunderstanding of what the consequences will be for the West.
It's not like'67.
It's not like'83 when they fired missiles from cruisers into Lebanon.
It's totally different.
The warfare has changed.
It is a revolutionary change in warfare.
And we are still going on as if it's just the post-Second World War era.
Does Hezbollah care about propaganda?
That the West is trying to make them look like something other than what they are.
The blunt answer, the frank answer is no, because they can't.
And I used to have this discussion often with, sometimes with Hezbollah, and I'd said, you know, but you don't do anything about your image.
You don't do anything.
And they just say to me, you know, what's the point?
I mean, the West completely dominates.
And completely manages the international media.
What would be the point in us trying to do it?
And occasionally, I did once get from some of the Los Angeles Times, and I said, why don't you spend a month with a family in Beirut, in a Hezbollah family, and just understand the culture and the situation.
And to his credit, he did.
He stayed nearly a month there with the family, talking and hearing about what it was like and trying to understand it.
And then he wrote to me afterwards and he said, I wrote a 10,000 word essay on it.
I want to play for you what is arguably Israeli propaganda.
It's the first time I've seen A personal insult of this magnitude on international media, but on the floor of the United Nations Security Council.
So here's Danny Denon, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, now sort of a roving ambassador.
Tell me what you think of this.
It's from August 22nd, last week.
The representative of the Palestinian Authority is still here.
He has been sitting in that chair for 20 years.
You have accomplished absolutely nothing.
Since October 7th, you have delivered hundreds of speeches, yet you have never uttered anything even resembling a condemnation of Hamas.
Mr. Mansour, if you cannot condemn them, you are one of them.
You do not represent the Palestinian people.
Mr. Mansour, you are a terrorist in a suit.
I demand you to condemn Hamas.
If you do not condemn them, you are one of them.
What is served by this kind of a personal attack, and have you seen anything like this before?
Well, unfortunately, you know, I've been dealing with this part of the world for a long time, so I have seen things like this.
You know, it's something that I've been saying here quite a lot.
There is a huge change in Israel, and we're seeing really, you know, it's almost to a civil war level.
Ben Givir has armed 10,000 vigilantes with weapons.
He handed them out legally, gave them to them.
He's just now appointed a police chief, which is one of his protégés.
To take over.
There is a deep, deep, if you like, schism in Israel, almost to the point of getting to civil war.
And the feelings and the anger and what has gone completely is any empathy for Palestinians whatsoever.
They just feel, you know, if we get to an existential point, it's either them or us, and it's going to be us.
That survived and not the Palestinians.
And so that's where we were.
Nothing happened in the talks.
Netanyahu insists on keeping, if you like, the Philadelphia corridor.
We all know why.
It is because when, as he sees it, when Gaza has been sufficiently stripped of any means of supporting life.
They will open the gates at Rafa, which they now control, and just drive them into the Sinai Desert.
And of course, Sisi will complain, and the West will give him a few billion to pay off his debt.
And it will happen.
That's the plan.
That's why he wants the Philadelphia Corridor.
That's why Hamas says absolutely no.
Who could take Netanyahu as a negotiator seriously?
Who could possibly believe that his end goal in these negotiations is a ceasefire?
No one.
No one.
But, you know, I mean, one of the problems we have in this age is, and I said it out some time earlier on this thing, is there are two complete narratives.
I mean, you know, there is an outer narrative, which is that he's working to get the hostages home and Israel is working to get these things done.
And of course, they'd like a ceasefire and then quiet in Lebanon and everything will go back to normal.
But there is an inner story, which they will not admit so openly, which is about a new Nakba, which is the actually removal of Palestinians from the river to the sea.
And that is really what this is about.
And Gaza was always to be the first step.
WestBank would follow, and then it would move on.
And there will be a provocation that will come because they know they need a war or a crisis or chaos in order to do the clearance of Palestinians out of the West Bank and push them into war.
So they need this thing.
And they've said that.
I remember seeing it seven years ago by Smotrich saying, don't worry.
We need a war.
We need chaos.
And then we can go ahead with this plan and fulfill the plan.
And this is, I mean, and this is, and the first step is Gaza.
Depopulate Gaza.
Then we will move to the West Bank and depopulate the West Bank.
And then we will depopulate the whole and take.
The security control from the river to the sea.
That is the unstated, inner, if you like, objectives.
No one will say them publicly, but if you read the vibes, if you read the runes of what is happening, that's why he doesn't want to deal.
This is why there's all these objections coming up to it.
Now, some of Israelis don't agree with us, and they see the danger because they worry that if they go into If they start a Nakba, anything can happen.
And it might be the existential, and as Major General Brick said, you know, we may collapse within a year under these sort of pressures.
Either of attrition, he said.
He actually said.
Either the attrition on us or original war, we won't last a year.
Do we not realize, oh Israelis, that it's this serious?
And then you get this propaganda coming up.
This is why it's so dangerous.
Then you get the propaganda from the Admiral, who's the spokesperson for the IDF, saying, "Oh, we knocked out thousands of missile launchers.
They did no damage.
It was fine.
We don't have to worry.
So if we have another war with Hezbollah, you Israelis, Americans, don't worry.
It'll be easy.
It's fine." Alistair Crook, thank you for a marvelous analysis of modern warfare and geopolitics from Kourtsk to Rafa.
Very much appreciated, my dear friend.
Thank you for your time.
I commend to anyone that wants to read it, Alastair's piece, The Western Way of War, Owning the Narrative Trump's Reality, about which we've just had Thank you, my dear friend.
All the best.
See you next week.
Thanks very much.
Bye for now.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
Wow.
A great conversation.
Coming up later today at 10 o 'clock this morning, Eastern, Ray McGovern.
At 11 o 'clock this morning, Eastern, Larry Johnson.
At 2 o 'clock this afternoon, Eastern, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
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