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Oct. 10, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:18
COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Can Ukraine Survive?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, October 10th, 2024.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now.
Colonel Wilkerson, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you for letting me pick your brain and interact with you, with all of our viewers observing.
I want to talk to you at some length about the status of Ukraine, and we have a...
We'll get to that in a minute.
I've started all the interviews this week with similar questions.
We are a year out from October 7th, 2023.
How, if at all, in your view, Dramatically, but not in a way that those of us who've been watching it very closely, myself for over 40 years, didn't expect.
Because once you started the movement towards Likud and the coalescing of Likud and the extreme right-wing parties with which it allied itself in order to stay in power, It was inevitable that this was going to happen.
Whether Netanyahu had a hand, inadvertently or even perhaps knowingly, in setting up October the 7th, or it just was serendipitous, it was coming.
We knew it was coming, and we were waiting with bated breath for it to come and hoping that the U.S. administration would have at least a modicum of common sense and not be in so fully as it is now.
We were wrong about that.
You know, I have two retired colonels on this show, you and Doug McGregor, and you both intimated the same thing about October 7th.
I would not discount Netanyahu's involvement.
I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Meaning, A. He looked the other way.
B, he knew it was coming.
C, he capitalized on it.
D, he made it worse.
All of those.
And all of those are true, Judge, even, in my view, even if the direct link is not there, because his opportunism provided that link.
It wasn't like he said, we used to say this about Dick Cheney.
He didn't say to George Bush, Get me a war.
I need it for Halliburton.
But there was a hell of a lot of influence on Dick Cheney by the fact that he'd been CEO of Halliburton, and he knew that his blind trust would increase enormously if Halliburton made, oh, $40 billion off the two theaters of war, Afghanistan and Iraq.
It's not like a direct link exists, but these people are very opportunistic and very capable of taking advantage of something that happens.
Maybe they didn't have a direct reason for starting it themselves, but when it happens, they capitalize on it and make it far worse than it should have been.
Colonel, is Israel stronger and more stable, weaker and less stable, or somewhere between those two extremes today, a year after October 7th, 2023?
Much weaker.
I just finished reading at the request of the author, Dr. Dan Steinbach.
He's a Finn, but he came to this country in 86, I believe.
He's a really smart guy.
He wrote a book called The Fall of Israel.
It will be available very shortly.
It's already available for ordering on Amazon right now.
The Fall of Israel, colon, the degradation of Israel's politics, economy, and military.
And it covers the waterfront.
And Israel's done.
As a Jewish state in the Levant, Israel is done.
It could survive if it became a true liberal democracy.
Maybe one day it would be called Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel or whatever.
It could survive, but it is not going to survive as a Jewish state.
Why do you believe it won't survive as a Jewish state?
I mean, that's its raison d 'etre.
That's its reason for being.
No, not really.
And that's what this book makes crystal clear, whether you're talking about Golda Meir or you're talking about any of the previous prime ministers who had more sense than Bibi Netanyahu, strategically and otherwise.
The tension between the two parts of Israel was there in the very beginning.
You know, most of the people that came out of Europe fleeing the Holocaust, most of them were communists.
Most of them wanted to settle a kibbutz somewhere.
Ironic that that's what they hit on October the 7th, basically.
But what happened was you had this tension that was kept in check all along, partly by the U.S. circumspection and dealing with Israel, but mostly because you had these forces in Israel that were on both sides of the political spectrum, if you will.
That kept going all the way up to the seminal event that changed everything.
And Bibi Netanyahu orchestrated that event, as surely if he pulled the trigger, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
Rabin was a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
He started off as a rabid, almost Zionist-type zealot, but he changed.
He saw what was happening.
He saw Israel couldn't continue in the mode that it was, that it would have to make peace with the Palestinians.
They would have to have their own land.
It would have to be a reasonably competent state that they lived in, and Netanyahu killed him.
Ever since then, we have been on this path to nothing but Likud, allied with the worst elements of those people who were always there, this extreme right-wing, non-worshipping the secular state.
It's like, Judge, it's like when Moses came down from the mount, in that myth, whatever, came down from the mount, saw them worshiping the golden calf, and shattered the Ten Commandments on the ground, because what he saw was what Israel is now.
Worshiping the mammon, the golden calf of the state of Israel and wanting to pursue that as if it were a religious objective.
That's what they're doing.
And that isn't going to work.
And let me just say practically, people are leaving Israel at such a rate right now, and I predict we'll continue to leave.
And if Iran gets involved in it, they'll leave even faster at a rate that Israel cannot sustain.
Its economy is taking, we can support their economy.
We've given them to this point, let me see, I wrote it down, something like 19.7 billion dollars.
It's close to 20, yes.
Yeah, we can give them 20 more, 30 more, 50 more, if we can find it anywhere.
We'll just print it.
The presses will run over time.
And it's still going to be almost impossible for them to survive as a Jewish state.
Now, they could survive if they really became a liberal democracy.
One of the things that he points out in this book, The three forces that we unleash that help Netanyahu do all of this, and listen to this closely, neoliberal economics.
There are more billionaires per capita in Israel than in this country.
It's ruining us too.
Second, aggressive and assertive neoconservatism.
And third, Jewish American billionaires giving lots of money.
Look at Adelson, what he did before he passed away.
He bought every newspaper of consequence in Tel Aviv and handed it to Bibi Netanyahu.
The only one he didn't get was Haaretz, the oldest newspaper.
Why do you say, this is an extraordinary statement, Netanyahu killed Rabin?
We did.
Just as sure as he pulled the trigger.
He did not pull the trigger, but he got the...
There is actually a documentary made.
Netanyahu killed it.
It died.
It was made by Jewish filmmakers.
And about a third of the documentary is actual film footage.
Look at that documentary and watch what happens when that student walks up without hardly a care in the world and shoots Rabin and kills him.
And then look at the political rallies that the documentary documents all through the previous months where Netanyahu is working the crowds up.
To a fury, an absolute fury, and he's working them up against Rabin.
He knows one of those settlers is going to take him out.
And it was a right-wing fanatic, as I recall, accolade of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who murdered Rabin.
And when Netanyahu got full power, he pardoned him.
As we transition...
This is a rather extraordinary takedown.
A young man by the name of Liam Cosgrove, who's a reporter for The Gray Zone, that's Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampol and Aaron Mate, just letting the spokesperson for the State Department, a spokesperson you would never have had when you ran the State Department, Matt Miller.
The question is a long one, but it is such an elegant, irrefutable summary of the misbehavior of the federal government and the interaction, interplay, I guess is a better word, of potential nuclear weapons in the Middle East and in Ukraine.
So it covers the gamut, and we'll use it to transition to our conversation about can Ukraine survive.
But I'd like you to listen to this.
I think you'll be impressed with it, and I want your opinion on it.
Cut number seven.
And in July, Blinken said that Iran was one to two weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon.
So I guess for all we know, they might have one by now.
And meanwhile, in Ukraine, they've struck deep within Russian territory several times, as deep as 300 miles from the border.
And in that case, we don't have to guess.
We know that Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, as many as 6,000 warheads.
And so one of the risks of arming militaries that are striking in the territories of nuclear powers is that one of those gets deployed, and then it could escalate very quickly from there.
So it's rarely discussed, but it's important to address that the nuclear risk is real, and it could very abruptly mean the end of what humans have worked for thousands of years to collectively achieve.
Us today are very lucky to live with the fruits of that achievement, and I feel like we're treating the risks kind of brazenly.
So my question for you is, you know, we often hear in response to these concerns that, well, Putin, Khomeini, you know, they're war criminals, they're terrorists, as if they're too inherently evil or immoral for us to negotiate with.
But meanwhile, this administration has financed a genocide.
in Gaza for the last year, and every day you're up there denying accountability for it.
So, I mean, what gives you the right to lecture other countries on their moral...
If you want to give a speech, there are plenty of places in Washington where you can give a speech.
Yeah, but people are sick of the bullshit in here.
I mean, it is a genocide.
You are abetting it, and you are risking nuclear war in Ukraine for this proxy war.
Plenty of other places to give a speech.
Go ahead.
And you are risking nuclear war.
What did you think of the young man's recitation of recent history?
I thought he was pretty good.
He could be a professor at William& Mary any day.
I'll tell you something else.
The two men in this administration who make me ill are John Kirby and that guy.
They are despicable spokespersons.
They're not even good spokespersons.
All they do is lie, and a good spokesperson can make it look a little less like a lie than they do.
I know because I was there helping them for four years at the State Department.
You don't lie.
You just nuance it.
And you don't say things like, if you want to give a speech, there's places in Washington where you go, you cute little son of a, you know what?
These people, they're despicable people in my view, both of them.
Do you think that the neocons in the State Department have recognized that they're gambit?
In Ukraine is a failure?
Most have, but I think they're still trying to do things.
You probably watched at least the video that was available of Zelensky's talk and his description of his peace plan.
I was kind of stunned that he actually mentioned some things in that address.
That essentially said, we're going to sit down and we're going to talk about a ceasefire and we're going to talk about peace.
Of course, he put it in the way that we will be triumphant.
I'm designing the victory plan for this conference.
I'm going to be the person who comes out of that conference with my integrity intact and such.
But I still was curious to see that he is now moving himself, apparently, towards a process that will evolve into, I have no doubt.
They're talking, and they're talking seriously, because it's over for Ukraine, and he's either going to take a bullet between the eyes, or he's going to do something.
And I think he's made his decision.
He's just having a real difficult time eating the proper amount of crow in order to make it believable.
Yesterday at the European Parliament...
I didn't know that until Dr. Rowe explained it.
It's a rotating presidency.
It changes every six months.
between June and December of this year, the president is Viktor Orban.
So Viktor Orban, also the president of Hungary, was addressing...
He was basically saying, let's get the heck out of Ukraine and talk peace.
In the worst wars we've ever had, both sides were talking to each other, and this time nobody is.
And the parliamentarians more or less cut him off by singing a song.
The left-wing parliamentarians drowned him out with a song.
As soon as they finished, He stood up and went right back at them without any notes.
This is what he said when he went right back at them.
Cut 12. The European Union has a mistaken policy when it comes to this war.
If we want to win, then we need to change this losing strategy that we are currently implementing.
It was a poorly planned and poorly implemented strategy.
If we continue on that route, we're going to lose.
If we don't want Ukraine to lose, then we need to change strategy.
And I think that you should consider that in every war.
There needs to be diplomatic work.
We need to have communication, direct and indirect contacts.
If we don't do that, then we will Go even deeper into war and the situation will be even more desperate.
More and more people will die.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died.
Thousands of people are dying while we're talking here and here now.
And with this strategy, we won't find any solution in the battlefield.
So I think we need to stand up for peace.
We need to focus on a ceasefire and create a different strategy because otherwise we will all lose.
Otherwise, we will all lose.
What did you think, Colonel?
That's a one-minute summary of the 17-minute speech that they tried to drown out.
Two points that I think I would make forcefully, as I can.
First of all, he could have quoted Clausewitz.
War is an extension of policy by violent means.
There's no policy.
All there is is war.
That's what he was saying.
Not just no strategy, there's no policy.
The two go together like love and marriage.
You've got to have a policy and you've got to have a strategy to implement the policy.
And war becomes your instrument, but it's still an extension of policy.
But if you have no policy, there's nothing going to happen except death and destruction.
And that was Clausewitz's point.
What he called that kind of war was absurd in German.
Absurd.
Now, the second point I would make.
Is that he is talking to some people.
Judge, this is honest to God truth.
That I never heard a foreign minister, a prime minister who vouchsafed an opinion in front of me from a European country who had any respect whatsoever for Brussels and the European Parliament.
They despised it.
And Viktor Orban is showing you why.
Why are we still in Ukraine unless the answer to that is November 5th?
That's it.
That's it for us.
That's bingo.
Domestic politics around an election in particular becomes the arbiter of every decision, every fate, everything anybody's thinking about.
It binds you, and it binds you sometimes very dangerously.
Look at LBJ when he decided to beef up the 500,000 men.
In Vietnam, and arguably caused another 35,000 deaths.
Where do you think, well, how much longer can Ukraine last?
How triumphant has the Russian military been?
Quiet in the West.
The West doesn't cover this anymore.
The West is now fixated on Israel and Netanyahu and his disputes with Biden.
Well, Putin could do a number of things, militarily speaking.
His military could.
I'm sure he'll probably leave some of the leeway up to them.
They could just coast and not take any more casualties than they have to and just keep what remains of the Ukrainian army, which isn't very much, at bay.
I don't think they'll do that, though.
I think they'll keep methodically moving forward.
But at one point, they're going to have to probably stop unless they want to go to the point where they, It causes themselves more problems in terms of taking more Ukraine terrain.
I don't think they want to do that.
I think Putin has been very explicit about that.
He just wants control over those oblasts that he's concerned with in the East, and he's willing to stop there.
Now, what I heard Zelensky saying sort of had some overtones to that, and I hope I'm not hearing wrong.
I hope I'm hearing that he's speaking to an audience he knows he has to speak to and say things to.
Including Washington.
And he's also speaking to the other side.
And he's hoping they understand.
And when he gets to the point where he sits down, he is going to be willing to deal with this in a realistic way.
So is Putin's refusal to talk to Zelensky publicly stated?
And Zelensky's publicly stated refusal to talk to Putin nonsense when Zelensky's back is to the wall?
It could start with someone that Zelenskyy selects and Sergey Lavrov or someone else that Putin suggests.
But ultimately, it will be them speaking in the background, I think.
And it may stay that way for a long time.
I mean, this isn't going to be easy.
I suspect it'll take a year to get this worked out.
How will the American empire look when the world knows that Ukraine was a colossal failure?
Judge, that's part of the reason for not backing off.
You know, I think I've said this before on your show.
The number one mistake you see throughout military history, and for that matter, state history, is reinforcement of failure.
Not counting your losses, backing up and adopting a new policy and a new strategy to implement it, but reinforcing the failed strategy and policy you have.
That's and it's usually.
Colonel, do we have a republic or an empire?
Empire?
No question about it.
I mean, no question about it.
750 military bases in the world.
Rome should have been so lucky, even regionally, to have, on a per capita basis, such a spread-out empire.
We are the only country in the world, Judge, that has AORs for the entire world, the whole world, including the Arctic and the Antarctic.
Now, we have a four-star.
That commands the world, a portion of the world, everywhere.
Excuse me one second.
I want to play a clip from President Zelensky.
Chris, cut number eight.
Two new sanctions packages were imposed today on those who have betrayed Ukraine and also on military production in Russia, those legal entities and individuals who are working for terror.
And we will continue to synchronize our Ukrainian sanctions and our pressure on the enemy with everyone in the world who, like Ukrainians, wants real peace.
Well, he's searching desperately for tools, no matter how minuscule and infinitesimal, that he can use when he gets in these talks.
He wants leverage, and he's trying to create some of that leverage.
And other people have done that in the past, too, and just created it by words.
And sometimes it works, and most of the time it doesn't work.
But he's desperately seeking for things that he can use as leverage.
He doesn't have much.
His position is going to be extremely weak.
And the longer he holds on to fighting, such as it is, it's going to be weaker.
Colonel Wilkerson, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you very much for joining us and letting me pick your brain, as usual.
It's a great conversation.
I hope you have a great weekend, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Thank you.
Take care.
You have a good weekend, too.
Thank you, Colonel.
I'm going back to my fish.
Okay.
Going back to fishing.
God love you.
Coming up next at 4 o 'clock Eastern, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern.
And at 5 o 'clock Eastern from midnight in Moscow, the inimitable Pepe Escobar.
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