All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 10, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
31:30
COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Can Israel Defeat Hezbollah?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, September 11th.
September 11th, 2024.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now.
Colonel, where were you on September 11th?
Were you in the Pentagon when it was attacked?
No, I had just come back from a 6 a.m. breakfast where I was talking about knowledge management.
I got out of a taxi in front of the C Street entrance to the Harry Truman Building, the State Department, and the announcer on the taxi radio was talking about a plane hitting the towers.
And I happened to glance over across the river at the same time and saw a column of smoke rising, and I rushed into the building kind of suspecting what might have happened.
Was Secretary Powell involved in the analysis and planning that must have gone on in the days and weeks following 9-11?
Very much so in the beginning.
And when I say the beginning, I mean the few days that he was allowed to hold sway, if you will, including at Camp David.
And Richard Haass, the policy planning staff director, and at that time my boss, Was instrumental, as were the rest of the staff, in putting together a strategy that I thought, had it been executed, would have been marvelously successful.
Cheney and Bush rejected it pretty much, except for the part about war with Afghanistan.
What did they reject?
Rejected a really interesting diagram that Richard and his people had drawn up and that we had put some emphasis on.
And it essentially showed all the countries with whom we had significant relations and some lesser ones, and what we wanted from them in, as Powell put it, this moment of global solidarity unparalleled in the 21st and 20th century.
And we had a million people marching by candlelight in Tehran, for example, and sympathy from Tehran registered to the government officially.
And we wanted to go through this and say, This is what we want from this country, this from this country, and so forth.
This is who will execute it, the ambassador in the country, the vice president, the president, the secretary of state, or whatever.
And it was a panoply of things that we needed to get done in the world that we thought we could use this solidarity to expedite doing.
And it was pretty much rejected, except for the war.
Moving to current matters, Colonel.
As we speak, the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, and his British counterpart are in Kiev speaking with, I keep calling him, former President Zelensky for reasons we all know.
And apparently the discussion is about the use of long range missiles.
Do you have any intel on what they're talking about and whether or not President Biden and Prime Minister Starmer are going to allow American and British long range missiles, ones that can reach Moscow, for example, to be used by the Ukrainians?
Just me, it wouldn't surprise.
But what I have heard in the last 48 hours is a little bit opposite of that.
What I've heard is that we have come to a realization that the situation is And that we are going to bring some pressure on Zelensky to accept some sort of ceasefire and some sort of negotiations.
I don't think it will happen, if this is accurate, I don't think it will happen before the elections.
But I think in the interregnum, whatever that brings us, and that's an important point, what that brings us, it might.
And I think in some senses, maybe some sobriety in some sense has struck some people.
You've got to look at NATO right now.
NATO's on the verge of falling apart around the debacle that is Germany, both economically and politically now.
I don't see how even Luddites can look at this from the perspective of Washington and not understand, at least in part, what they're doing and have done with Ukraine.
Well, Colonel, what you say is based on fact, and what you say is largely true.
Listen to this.
Sir Peter Moore, head of MI6, cut number 10. And it's important to remember how this started in this phase with Putin mounting a war of aggression in February 2022.
And two and a half years later, that failed.
It continues to fail.
The Ukrainians will continue to fight.
We will continue to help them to fight.
And it's difficult.
What do you think of that, Colonel?
I think he's insane, just like the rest of the people who continue to hold those positions.
You know, people like General David Petraeus and others who, at the beginning of this, I fought them for not having a very good military sense of geography and other elements of power that were clear to me and others like me.
But they're not clinging to these ideas now so much as in the case of that gentleman.
And I think the insanity is running its course here.
I hope it is anyway, because I know that the election is a critical thing here that's stopping anything from happening.
And I'm also hearing from Ukraine that the Ukrainians are about ready to replace Zelensky.
Now, what that means probably is they're ready to put a bullet in his head, or at least a segment of them.
Others are willing to walk up to him or whatever and say, go to one of your dashes and get out of here because we're going to hold elections and we're going to have a legitimate leader.
And that legitimate leader is going to assess the situation in conjunction with military leadership.
And we're going to see what we need to do after that.
I suspect what we need to do is go into some kind of negotiations.
So that would mean some sobriety has come to Keefe, too, or at least to a portion of it, probably the most powerful portion.
This is also probably backed by some oligarchs who don't want to disturb their money any more than they have to.
So I'm hoping, and I realize I may be hopelessly optimistic, that we're going to see some movement.
I listened to John Mearsheimer the other day, and I respect John's opinions probably more so than most others.
And he's saying that it's going to go on into the summer and spring and the summer.
And I just don't see how we're going to tolerate that without NATO falling apart around our ears and us kind of standing there with the leash that NATO was on and nobody at the end.
Colonel, your thoughts are profound and I hope true.
But if there's going to be an election in Kiev, can they possibly have one without bringing Mrs. Newland back to the State Department to make sure that the right people win?
I mean, here she is.
It's just a photograph of her.
But over the weekend, she acknowledged what we have accused her and her colleagues of doing for a long time.
That both Moscow and Kiev initially sought a diplomatic resolution in early 2022.
There was an agreement.
It was reduced to writing.
It was an inch and a half thick.
The negotiators each signed, initialed both pages.
And then she and Boris Johnson and Tony Blinken and Joe Biden scuttled it.
And a half million people died on one side and 200,000 And in a recent interview, which I watched, she pulled out a tiny little portion of a back page of that agreement, which had to do with one of the, I will admit, it had to do with one of the most serious concerns of Vladimir Putin.
And she said, that's the reason because he put that in there.
That's the reason that that agreement was not approved and didn't go forward.
Well, that's nonsense because that portion dealt with, That is to say, tactical nuclear weapons delivery.
And that's what Putin feared.
And I think that was the trigger that caused him to put that in the agreement.
And when we saw that, maybe Victoria Nuland thought that was, you know, don't go any further.
But that's nonsense.
That was his concern all along, and he made that quite clear.
She's making it sound like he's beeping Netanyahu, demanding more concessions when everything else is agreed to.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And that's a favorite negotiating technique of people like us who think we're always right.
Over the weekend, or maybe it was two days ago, 140 drones were aimed at Moscow.
139 were shot down.
The one that got through killed an innocent civilian woman in her home and injured six others.
Is this a PR show?
Does this arouse Putin to be more aggressive in response, or does it just roll off his back?
They're not going to do that, not with Vladimir Putin.
He's demonstrated that his equanimity is one of his greatest characteristics, regardless of what we think of him otherwise.
This is like the Kursk incursion.
We now have the Strategic Reserve of Ukraine cut off, beleaguered and besieged.
And the best thing that Zelensky had to throw into the mainline, which is the principal place where Ukraine's future is going to be determined, Not available.
Gone.
Out.
It's over for Ukraine.
It's finished.
It's done.
All the Russians have to do is wrap it up now.
Colonel, we just got a clip in of Secretary Blinken just a few minutes ago in Kiev saying that Ukraine, I understand this is what it says.
I haven't seen it.
We'll watch it together in a moment.
Ukraine still plans to join NATO.
It seems inconceivable, but let's watch and listen.
It's important that the Ukrainian people continue to hear directly from us.
We remain fully committed to Ukraine's victory.
To not only ensuring that Ukraine can defend itself today, but can stand on its own feet strongly, militarily, economically, democratically, for many, many days ahead.
to securing the path the Ukrainian people have chosen toward greater integration in the Euro-Atlantic community, including the European Union and NATO.
video.
you Thank you.
Why would NATO want Ukraine?
Saying NATO would not, and as I said before, I think NATO is going to get a lot more sanity as the Germans, the French already, and others began to question what has happened to them under the primacy America has exerted.
And exerted viciously even on NATO.
Now, those remarks belie what I just said.
But if I were considering what is coming down the road as being more positive, and I were considering that it would happen in the interregnum, as it were, between the election and the inauguration, I might be saying things like that.
Because you don't want to say that before the election day.
And I think the debate pretty much showed that neither candidate was going to say anything significant about that.
Although Trump gave more of a hint that he might shut it down immediately.
Isn't a statement like the one we just watched, which is just a few minutes old, sort of poking the bear?
It is.
And that's what we've been doing all along.
And the bear has been, as I said, very, very I'm sure he's concerned.
I'm sure he's concerned about projections.
I've heard that the Russian economy might have some problems next year.
And that, I think, is probably based on projections on the price of a barrel of oil and, to a lesser extent, on the price of methane, natural gas.
But I think all in all, Putin is in the catbird seat here, and all he needs to do is Now, let me add that I do think he has made a decision that the duplicitous, lying nature of Washington and London in particular, but NATO in general, has soured him on any kind of relationship in the future, at least in his lifetime, in his rulership, if you will.
And so he's preparing Russia to have to take on NATO in a significant sort of way.
I don't think he envisions it actually happening yet, but he's making sure that he's ready if it should happen.
I remember Powell used to talk all the time about the thing that really catches you is not the one you expected, it's the one that you didn't expect.
Well, Putin's move now from that position of that being operative with regard to Russia to being Absolutely convinced that it might happen and doing things that are right and ready for the eventuality should it happen.
Look at what he's doing around the world.
I mean, he is creating allies and friends all around the world.
He's not building military bases in Mexico or Cuba or South America like we've done to him, but he is building friendships and relationships all around the world.
And from what I'm hearing from Hanoi to Tehran, those relationships are based on things that these countries and these peoples need and aren't getting.
In fact, they're getting the opposite from the United States.
He's peeling away our friends, allies, and our potential friends and allies.
So Brexit, at its current size, has a greater GDP than the G7.
And these folks, Putin and his friends, plan on...
Doubling the size of bricks in the next five years.
Absolutely.
And if you look at Central Asia, from roughly Turkey all the way to Xinjiang province in China, it is becoming the most rich place in the world.
There is enough methane underneath the Caspian Sea, I'm told by all experts.
There's enough methane to run China, the Stans, and Russia for 100 years.
They've built pipelines to distribute that.
They have pipelines on the drawing board, and they have pipelines that they envision in the future for that.
Take Texas now.
Texas, the great state of Texas, where I went to high school.
They can't even get their negative value methane, natural gas, out of the Permian Basin because they didn't envision distribution.
So they're flaring it.
They're losing millions of dollars every month in the Permian Basin.
Because they had no vision to build pipelines to transmit and distribute that gas.
That's not very smart.
And that's not a problem that Putin and his allies will have.
They'll anticipate that.
All right.
Switching gears, Colonel, will the IDF attack Lebanon?
And can the IDF defeat Hezbollah without the United States?
I don't think so, and yes.
I got that backwards.
You got them backwards.
You think they will attack, and no, they can't win without the United States.
So Netanyahu may be a genocidal psychopath, but he's not stupid.
If he's going to attack Hezbollah, he's got some kind of an agreement from Biden, Lincoln, and Austin.
He's got assurances from the combatant commander who just visited, the combatant commander of Central Command.
Can the United States defeat Iran?
Without the use of nuclear weapons?
The operative question, I think, there is the question that we've asked in the military for half a century, actually, ever since the Shah fell.
Can the United States mount an invasion of Iran and succeed?
And I started asking this as a war planner in the Pacific Command, which was the operative unified command for that region before they stood up Central Command in a significant way.
We started asking the question as the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and we thought very, very dangerously, we thought.
That the Russians would come on down to Chabahar and Bandar Abbas to get warm water ports.
We thought that was ultimately what they wanted.
It wasn't Afghanistan.
It was they wanted access to Iran because that's an age-old desire of the old Russia and the Russian Empire.
And we had to do the war planning for Iran.
And we did not want to go to war in Iran, a country of, at that time, about 80 million, about 90 million now, a country of So we didn't want to go to ground war with Iran.
We just absolutely did not want to.
And I don't think that's changed unless the Pentagon has joined in the insanity in Washington.
That I get asked is, could we win if we invaded?
And the answer I give is no.
We would regret it as much as we regretted Iraq and Afghanistan times 10. And we would spend somewhere around 10 to $11 trillion on it.
And we would have to go to conscription because it would take at least...
Take at least a half a million men and women to even have a possibility.
So how much longer can the two...
You tell me.
Aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean sit there waiting to attack southern Lebanon.
How much longer can they stay there?
Well, we've got marine bottoms now that have been substituted in the Red Sea for aircraft carriers that are dead in the water.
We do not have the Navy we should have, Judge.
We should have done a lot of concentrating on naval assets starting 10 or 15 years ago.
We didn't.
We spent tons of money on F-35s and other things like that that cost just a fortune for the American taxpayer.
We didn't do anything that we really should have done with regard to the Navy.
When Donald Trump said he'd go to 350 ships or whatever that figure was, we were sitting at about 272 or whatever.
We couldn't even man those ships, Judge.
We'd have to go to full-out mobilization-type conscription in order to man those ships.
That's part of the problem now.
Not only are the ships breaking, we don't have enough people to sail the ships.
The Navy has just raised its age to 49, I think I read.
And they're taking people who can't possibly pass any physical tests.
They can't pass an academic test.
They'll take anybody to swab the decks and sail the ships.
We're in trouble.
We're in deep trouble.
And our Navy, which is, I think, I'm a soldier.
I think our Navy is the most important arm of our armed forces because it protects our commerce.
It keeps the seas open.
All of our founders thought the Navy was the most They wrote, provide for a Navy.
There's a reason why they wrote that.
And we're letting that Navy go to hell.
Two days ago, the admiral in charge of the Pacific...
Cool it.
According to the people on my show, the Chinese politely said goodbye.
What are we doing with ships in the South China Sea, Colonel?
Ostensibly, we are exercising freedom of navigation, which is a fancy term for we're making sure that our Navy ensures all our allies and friends, and for that matter, the world, can ply the high seas without any harassment or problem.
What we're doing with China is harassing them.
That's what we're doing.
We're moving our forces and Japanese forces and British forces, occasionally with us, through the South China Sea and going very close to Chinese assets in the Spratlys and Parcells and other islands and asserting the fact that we can be there.
This is the last vestige of American attempts to say that we still have a Gemini in Northeast Asia and in Southeast Asia.
We do not.
China is the hegemon in Asia now.
That is a fact.
Economically, financially, military power-wise, and defense industrial-based-wise, they are the hegemen.
But we're still contesting it, and these are the feeble efforts we make to say that we're contesting it.
I can't even imagine what it costs to send ships there, the fuel, the food, the health care for the thousands of sailors.
Do you have any idea what that number might be?
I'm trying to think of ways.
I can get it for you.
It's hugely expensive.
And you do not see the Chinese doing it in the Gulf of Mexico, nor do you see the Russians doing it, who have roughly comparable fleets, if you will.
Are the Chinese off the coast of New Jersey?
They can be.
They can be.
And what usually goes out for the Chinese, their fishing fleet, Judge, which is fully armed, Five times as big as our Navy.
And if you saw some of their fishing fleet boats, you would think they were naval boats.
And they're armed, as I said.
Colonel, say that again.
Their fishing fleet?
Their fishing fleet.
Their fishing fleet.
It's huge.
It's five times the size of our Navy.
It's absolutely huge.
The other day I saw a figure that was something like 5,200 ships.
I couldn't believe that.
So I looked it up and I saw another figure of about 2,100.
And then I saw a picture.
Of a regalia that they put out in the South China Sea, and you look at that picture, and I don't think it's a fake picture, and this just ships endlessly.
They never stop.
You're just looking at this video, and these ships just keep going.
That's the Filipinos.
That's the Vietnamese.
They've had encounters with them when their fishing boat or boats are surrounded by 30 or 40 Chinese boats, all fully armed.
They would not say the U.S. was the hegemon in the South China Sea.
Let me, before we conclude, just get back to Israel.
What will stop Prime Minister Netanyahu from the genocide and the refusal to negotiate seriously for a ceasefire?
What will stop him from doing that?
Yes.
Will anything short of overwhelming force stop him?
I don't think Bibi Netanyahu is mentally geared to stopping this carnage.
I think Bibi Netanyahu is either going to go out on a plank or he's going to go out as the hero of Israel who killed every Palestinian available to be killed in the West Bank, in Gaza, in East Jerusalem, wherever they might appear, or drove them out.
I think that's his claim to fame that he would stop after achieving.
And I don't think he's going to achieve it.
He hasn't achieved it in Gaza.
He isn't going to achieve it vis-a-vis Hezbollah.
The Chinese are the only people who are getting ships, I understand.
And this comes from both the Chinese and from U.S. sources through the Red Sea now.
The Houthis are very particular.
They are not shooting Chinese ships.
And that's making a huge difference in Chinese costs and other costs for other countries like the United States.
It's making a huge difference.
The Houthis have achieved something, if nothing more than they've caused everyone to recognize the fact that they can, in fact, impact a very strategic area with almost nothing other than a little support from Iran and, I think, increasingly support from Russia and a lot of courage.
You may know the Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi.
He took to task his German counterpart, Counterpart over Germany's complicity in Netanyahu's mania.
It's a little long, but it's a fascinating clip.
Cut number 11. And the Germans' relation with Israel.
And we're going to say it very openly and very clearly.
Supporting this Israeli government is not supporting Israel.
On the contrary, supporting Israel means standing up.
To what Israel is doing in terms of violating international law, in terms of violating humanitarian international law, in terms of pushing towards escalation, in terms of killing innocent people.
The Palestinians are the biggest victims of this aggression.
But the credibility of international law is also a victim.
The standing, and I have to be very, very honest, if I may, Annalina, the standing of countries like Germany in the region is also a victim.
This Israeli government does not care about international law.
It has shown that it does not care about international humanitarian law.
It has shown that it does not care about peace and about its friends.
And that's why it has defied even its friends.
The humanitarian acts, the U.S., Germany, other close friends of Israel have urged Israel to end the siege on Gaza and to allow for sufficient humanitarian aid.
The Israeli government shunned them.
The U.S., Germany, and others have been pushing for ceasefire talks.
Israeli Prime Minister aborted those talks.
Even the exchange deal.
Everybody has supported the exchange deal.
The Israeli Prime Minister aborted the exchange talks because he does not want them.
He wants to continue with this war.
True.
All true.
The only thing he left out is that sharing the blame with Israel for all that he cited is the United States of America.
Correct.
Correct.
I don't know what relationships are like at this level, but she sat there.
Presumably she understands English, even though she's the German foreign minister.
She just sat there mute, essentially not challenging anything he was saying.
Maybe she challenged them after the cameras went off.
I dare say she probably agrees with him privately and personally.
And she knows that the complexion of Germany with regard to Israel is changing majorly right now, politically.
And the difference is going to be significant, I think.
That's one reason you saw Putin very cleverly.
I mean, this man is smart.
He very cleverly has offered to reopen the Nord Stream system for Germany to restore its cheap energy and to restore its relationship with Russia and to restore its economy.
Very smart thing to do.
That would be the Nord Stream pipeline, the one that was destroyed by two drunken guys in a sailboat, according to Joe Biden.
By the way, has it been repaired and restored?
There is another portion to it.
And it wouldn't take much to get it going back again if Germany said it wanted to do it.
It just wouldn't take that much.
At least that's what I'm told by the law.
Something about the winter weather may cause Germany to say.
They want to do it.
I think that was part of the reason Putin said it when he said it.
He knows what's coming.
Colonel, it's a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you very much for joining us.
We'll see you again, hopefully, at a time convenient for you next week.
My parting word.
I was going over some papers that I gave to Powell.
At the end of 2001, it was a memorandum, essentially.
I was still working for Richard Haas on the policy planning staff, and it said, here's what we've accomplished at this point.
Now, remember, this is December, January 2001, 2002.
I used the phrase, a dearth of diplomacy.
And he said, that's D squared, right?
I said, yeah, we have a dearth of diplomacy.
Little did I know how deep that dearth would become.
We have no diplomacy.
And how much worse it would get.
When is the last time Sergei Lavrov and Antony Blinken spoke to each other?
Yep.
Thank you, Colonel.
All the best, my dear friend.
Thank you.
Sure.
Coming up later today at 3 o 'clock.
Phil Giraldi at 4 o 'clock, Aaron Monte.
Please remember to like and subscribe.
We're close to 440,000 subscriptions.
Our goal is a half a million by Christmas.
If you like and subscribe and ask friends to do, you help us spread the word, word that you don't see or hear on mainstream media.
▲
Export Selection