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Oct. 7, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
31:06
Larry Johnson : The Middle East One year after October 7th 2023.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, October 7th, 2024.
Larry Johnson will be here in just a moment on how the Middle East has changed in the past year.
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Larry Johnson, welcome, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure to have you on the show.
How has the landscape in the Middle East changed from October 6th, 2023?
Israel has solidified its status as the country that engages in the most terrorism in the world.
It has become more isolated.
It has become less respected.
It has managed to make itself a pariah.
You know, and none of this had to happen, regardless of how you interpret the Hamas attacks on October 7th.
You know, Israel describes it as this horrific terrorist incident.
Hamas describes it as, hey, we were attacking military targets, and we were taking hostages with the intent to trade them out for all the Palestinians that are being held illegally in Israeli prisons.
At that point, Israel had a choice.
It would have, I believe, been in a very strong position to have gone to other countries, and particularly with the United States, and even countries like Russia, to have intervened and come up with a negotiated settlement.
Because initially, Hamas, the attacks were condemned.
But since then, Israel has launched just an unprecedented A bombing campaign against civilian targets, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, Christian churches.
They've killed elderly.
They've killed the very, very young.
They always claimed that, oh, these Hamas terrorists are hiding behind civilians.
But I wonder if Israel will accept that.
You know what the answer to that is.
They're going to be screaming bloody murder.
Oh, terrorism!
So I'm just saying there's no consistency in this.
How about the strength and stability of the Israeli state?
Is it as a...
Is it stronger and more stable or weaker and less stable than a year ago?
Well, ask that question like it was a presidential election through the averages rating.
Are you better off today than you were two years ago?
Good way to put it, Larry.
Yeah.
Well, the answer to that's no.
No, they're not.
Moody's has downgraded their bond rating.
One more downgrade, their junk bonds.
Which means, you know, your choice is either investing in Israel or going to the casino and playing blackjack.
You probably have better luck with blackjack, okay?
The Israeli army is the number of mental, psychological casualties they're suffering is going way up.
Because, you know, the average soldier, when they're out there and they end up shooting and killing civilians, it takes an emotional toll.
And it's something that the Israeli soldiers are not immune to.
And so on top of that, they're enduring actual casualties.
At least 800, close to 800 have been killed in the last year.
And the number of wounded is far greater than that.
So, no, this isn't serving Israel's interest.
and it's not like it becomes stronger in the Middle East.
If anything...
That doesn't help Israel.
And Saudi Arabia and Israel, which were on the verge of establishing diplomatic relationships, Saudi Arabia now says no way without a two-state solution, which is over the horizon.
Over an inevitable and endless horizon.
Right.
Yeah.
What's happened is Netanyahu's major achievement is bringing more countries around the world into a position of supporting a Palestinian state.
And not just giving lip service to it, but actually insisting that there must be a Palestinian state.
Before, you know, there was that talk about it, but there was never any real firm movement towards it.
But now, you know, Israel's managed to, with the Bibi Netanyahu charm offensive at the United Nations two weeks ago, where he, you know, insulted everybody and questioned everybody's mother's sexual history, he has managed to leave Israel quite isolated.
Is it more and more apparent that the ferocity of the Israeli response was intended to retain Netanyahu in office, cement his legacy as the man under whose watch Israel expanded its borders, rather than return the hostages and achieve a lasting peace?
Yeah, the latter were never on the table.
You know, the Zionist mentality, and I've had direct interaction with the person.
I can tell you off-air who it was.
Right.
But it's frightening because they come at it this way.
God gave us this land.
This land is ours.
It was given to us 3,000 years ago.
And we're just taking back what is ours.
And, you know, these Palestinians need to go elsewhere.
These are interlopers.
These are people.
These are outsiders.
They genuinely believe this, Judge.
And it's not just one or two.
It's not just the Ben Gavirs and the Smotrich.
Even Netanyahu is bought into that.
And so with that is the mentality.
There's no room for compromise with Palestinians or Lebanese or Syrians or Egyptians or Jordanians.
None whatsoever.
This land is ours.
God gave this land to me.
That's the song.
That's the belief.
And there's no gray area in there.
They can't say, okay, well, we'll give some of it to the Palestinians.
There's no sharing.
It's all taking.
Were Bill Burns, the head of the CIA and the chief American negotiator, Amos Hochstein, an American negotiator born in Israel and fought with the IDF in his youth, were they duped by Netanyahu into believing that he really was serious about negotiating for peace, or were they part of the group that was duping the West?
Were they in on this game that there never was and never would be a serious Israeli effort toward a ceasefire?
I think they went along completely with Israel on this.
It wasn't, you know, it wasn't the United States calling these shots.
This was Netanyahu calling the shots.
And just the fact of the Israeli influence within America's, you know, domestic political scene is significant.
And in pointing that out, you get accused of being an anti-Semite, but the reality is that between the money that's paid out by the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, between the number of very prominent Americans who are Jewish, but who also share very deeply held beliefs about Zionism, they wield enormous influence in the American political scene.
And so here you've got, you know, Burns, I mean, and it's not confined to just Israel, because we've seen Burns do backflips as well with respect to Ukraine and Russia.
You know, his viewpoints there have been diametrically reversed.
Right.
But it is, this is something that, they used it as a charade.
And I think a very credible case can be made that the entire ceasefire The ruse that was used two weeks ago was a setup in order to try to kill, in order to kill Nasrallah, the head of the Secretary General of Hezbollah.
When the Israelis go about very effectively, but, you know, using a bazooka to get a mosquito to decapitate various organizations, whether it's Hamas or Hezbollah.
Well, it depends on how fragile the organization, the institution is.
And what I mean by fragility is, is it really, If he dies, then that group loses its cohesion.
But that's not Hezbollah.
Yeah, Nasrallah was a prominent figure and there were other leaders that had been killed, but Hezbollah is not built on a hierarchy.
You know, let's say like the Catholic Church, where you get all the way to the Pope, and then below the Pope, you've got the Cardinals and the Bishops, and you've got this whole elaborate structure, but that if you start taking out that upper level, maybe the structure becomes unwieldy.
It's really, it's much more dynamic that they are able to operate in independent cones.
So, yeah, this, you know, all it did, though, Was it really united some Sunnis or brought the Sunni people around to the cause of the Shia?
Because Hezbollah is a Shia movement.
And so what you're looking at here is that the Shia and Hezbollah are getting more support around the world than they had a year ago.
I mean, there was a time, Larry, You and I have been covering this stuff since George W. Bush was in the White House.
I mean, there was a time when any sort of unity between Shia and Sunni was unthinkable.
Has the Israeli response to October 7th succeeded in uniting these two groups that have been at odds for 600 years?
Not entirely, but it certainly made some headway.
So let's remember, over the last eight years, you've had Hezbollah fighters.
Up in northern Syria fighting against groups like al-Nusra, radical Sunni Islamists that have been funded by and had the backing of people like Turkey and the United States, mind you.
So the United States has actually been, you know, helping sponsor radical Islamic terrorism.
Just as long as it's directed against the Syrians, it's okay.
And so when Nasrallah, for example, was killed, there was wild cheering going around that Sunni community up in Idlib in Syria.
However, in places like Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia, you've had the expressions of grief and concern.
So we've really seen a growing unity between Some key segments of the Sunnis, as well as with the Shia community.
And that, again, that didn't happen a year ago.
So using that as a metric, Israel's worse off.
Do we know any more about the nature and extent of damage done and targets reached?
By the 200 or so projectiles, since they all have different names, that Iran hurled at Israel 10 days ago.
No.
Yeah, they did some damage.
But again, it goes back to what's the assumption about the intent of that Iranian strike?
I believe that Iran's effort was not designed to inflict specific damage to Their goal, I believe, was to now tell Israel, "We can hit you and you can't stop us."
Because after the April attack, the messaging around the world was, "Oh, Israel and the United States stopped the Iranians' cult." It was a total failure.
So Iran said, "Okay, we'll hit you now." Because I think if this escalates, if Israel decides to strike Iran and strikes an Iranian nuclear target, Iran will turn around and immediately hit an Israeli nuclear target.
If Israel strikes an Iranian oil facility, Iran, in turn, will start hitting energy facilities in Israel.
It will be tit-for-tat and it will be immediate.
They're not going to be waiting two or three weeks to figure out what we're going to do.
They'll realize at that point they are at war with Israel.
That's where this is potentially headed.
And I think that we've seen, we have not seen, but we can assume that there has been some pretty strenuous behind-the-scene activity involving particularly Russia and China, I believe, to try to prevent this escalation from taking place.
The problem is in Israel.
The Israelis around the ultra-Zionists that are around Netanyahu are not amenable to reason.
They believe that they are fully entitled and justified to what they're doing and that God is on their side and that they will prevail.
Our friend George Galloway Based on the conversation I had,
oh my lord, 30 years ago with a neighbor of mine who worked at the Naval Surface Warfare Labs in Maryland.
Absolutely.
They've had them.
I mean, he was telling me what he knew back then about Israel's capabilities.
Israel absolutely has them.
But, again, crossing that nuclear...
That's why North Korea has them.
Not that they're out trying to use them immediately on everybody else, but it hangs out there as something that one of these days someone's going to make a bad decision, and once that genie's out of the bottle, we are going to be into a very much changed world and a more dangerous world.
What is the nature and extent of Russia's likely involvement?
If Israel attacks Iran and the United States joins in the attack, I'm not talking about troops on the ground, but projectiles, will Russia just provide the defensive equipment that it's provided, or will it provide more or get more actively involved?
I mean, stated differently, do we know the nature and extent of the Russian-Iran defense pact that is about to be signed later this month?
What we've seen is that the S-400 air defense system has been deployed in Iran.
And that's been deployed, I believe, with Russian personnel to man it, to operate those systems.
So in a sense, you actually do have Russian personnel on the ground.
And I think that's been one of the messages conveyed to the Israelis by the Russians.
Saying, look, any attack on us...
You're bringing us into it.
And Russia has some other means of conveying that message because I think it has been pointed out on your show before by Alistair.
Anywhere between 1.5 million, 2.5 million Israeli citizens are actually citizens of Russia.
So you have a significant Russian influence already in Israel.
So there are ways to convey information to the government of Israel that, even though it's intellectually inclined to ignore it, they get to a point where they actually have to take it into account.
So Russia's playing, I think, a significant role there.
Do you think the United States will attack Iran?
In response to the egging on of neocons in both political parties in Congress and out of Congress?
Not before the November 7th election.
The Biden administration already is in a bit of disarray with their inability to handle the hurricane that hit Florida and North Carolina more than two weeks ago.
So they're struggling to deal with that.
They've got another hurricane inbound now.
And the last thing they want is to be seen stirring up a war, because there's no popular demand for that in the United States, despite the rantings of people like John Bolton and Lindsey Graham.
But the consensus among most people is...
If there's an October surprise, what form do you think it would take, Larry?
An attack on a nuclear power plant, say, in Russia.
A bombing.
Inside Israel that would be seen as having been a terrorist attack carried out by Hezbollah that would then justify, you know, something like an attack against the US Embassy that would be used to try to justify a sterner response.
You know, there are some, despite Israel's confidence following the use of the pager attacks.
And the assassination of Nasrallah and killing several senior leadership, there still is, I think, a bit of an era of panic because the situation is spun out of their control.
They're not able to really dictate and direct what's happening, that the enemy, Hezbollah, and the Houthis have a role.
I mean, just today, first you had the larger rockets fired into Haifa.
And then a short time later, Houthis followed up with another ballistic missile that's inbound.
So the sirens are going off all the time now in Israel.
That wasn't happening two years ago.
Not at all.
So the daily life of the Israelis is becoming more stressful.
Is Israel using the United States to expand its borders, or is the United States using Israel to kill Arabs, or is there some truth to both of these?
Yes.
Israel's doing what Israel's going to do.
Look, the United States is in a position to stop it.
We won't, but the reason we won't is because of the political clout that Israel has achieved in the United States through the work of groups like AIPAC, as well as other prominent American citizens who are Jewish and strongly pro-Zionist.
Israel's been doing its own thing.
I remember having a discussion back in 2003 when I was teaching a senior crisis management seminar for the U.S. State Department anti-terrorism assistance training program.
I dealt with eight different countries that year.
Several of them were from the Middle East.
And all we're trying to figure out was what the hell was our strategy in going into Iraq.
And they were shocked to learn we didn't have a strategy.
So the notion that the United States is being driven by some long-term vision of what it's trying to accomplish in the Middle East?
No, we're just scrambling around trying to plug the holes in the dike that have sprung leaks.
We're not...
And then in the immediate aftermath, we did everything we could to enable the Israelis to go out and kill Palestinians instead of trying to find a genuine peaceful path forward.
But, you know, who's driving that bus?
I see Israel calling the shots, not the United States.
It's true.
The United States has the power.
To call the shots.
Has the power to intervene, but we don't use it.
Because using it means creating political problems at home for the likes of, you know, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris.
You know, the Israelis are quite willing to let Donald Trump come in and do it because Trump has made it very clear what his intentions are.
So, you know, Israel exercises and always has, as John Mearsheimer And Stephen Walt wrote years ago an inordinate amount of influence in the American political system and in American decision-making.
There have been reports of a major seismic event on Saturday in Iran, an event inconsistent with an earthquake.
But of significant magnitude.
Did the Iranians test a nuclear device?
There's that possibility.
It was a 4.6 on the Richter scale, if what I read was correct.
Look, you know, and I think I've said this before on your show.
One of my CIA buddies, whose job was, he was dealing with Iranian assets.
He told me, good Lord, 20 years ago.
He says, Iran's going to get the bomb.
There's no doubt about it.
Iran has the scientific capability.
They've got the engineering capability.
They've created missiles, ballistic missiles, capable of carrying such a warhead.
It's just a matter of doing it.
Up to this point, they haven't done it because of the religious dictates of the Ayatollah Khamenei, that it was seen as a violation of Islam.
To move forward with that.
Now, in light of events over the last six months in particular, you could see the potential that a change in religious doctrine.
That Iran would come to the conclusion that the only way we can safeguard ourselves permanently is to actually have a nuke.
And that if we have nuclear capability, then the United States and Israel will leave us alone.
I could see that happening.
They definitely have it in their ability to do it.
The question is, have they done it?
And we still don't have any solid evidence that that is the case.
Larry, what is the interest of China in the conflagration in the Middle East?
Oil.
Keeping the oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf.
Russia and China got together with Iran and conducted joint military exercises.
Now, you know, I spent close to 23 years scripting military exercises like this.
At least I know what the process is.
And so this means you brought together high-level Chinese and Russian military officers, Iranian officers, They would sit down and actually plan everything out.
They would come up with what's called a master sequence of events list, a measle, which lists you start on day one and it takes you through whatever, however long you've scripted the exercise for, 10 days, 14 days.
And in there, you create injects, message traffic, or you manufacture an event that's happened in the world.
That causes you to react and then see what the reaction is.
What's that reaction?
How many ships?
How long will it take Russian ships and Chinese ships to get to that area?
Once they're to that area, how would they coordinate with the Iranian Navy?
What kind of weapons systems should be brought into play?
How would they interact in actually carrying out offensive operations?
So they've been doing that for five years.
So it's not like China just suddenly woke up and said, "Oh, do we have a problem in the Middle East?" So extrapolate that out.
If John Bolton and Lindsey Graham get their way and the United States aids Israel in attacking Iran, do China and Russia physically enter the fray?
Yes.
I mean, you know, they haven't been doing those exercises just because they said, oh, we haven't had enough activity, so we want to get our heart rate up.
Okay?
I mean, they've done them for a reason.
And part of that reason is a deterrence, which I think factors into, you know, while Lindsey Graham and Bolton are, you know, oblivious to the reality, I think at least Lloyd Austin understands that, that carries the risk of the United States getting embroiled in a direct conflict with now Russia and China.
And we can't even handle...
So the last thing the United States needs to do is so overextend itself that it's going to face certain defeat.
Larry, thank you very much, my dear friend.
Fascinating stuff.
I hope we can see you with Ray at the end of the week on Friday afternoon.
Me too.
Okay.
Have a great week.
All the best.
Thanks, Judge.
Sure.
Fascinating, fascinating conversation.
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