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Dec. 3, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:32
AMB. Charles Freeman : Why Netanyahu Will Fail.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024.
Ambassador Charles Freeman will be here with us in a moment on why Netanyahu will fail.
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Ambassador Freeman, welcome, my friend.
Always a pleasure to have you on the show.
I want to spend a fair amount of time.
Exploring your thoughts on Prime Minister Netanyahu's stewardship of Israel.
But before we get there, I do have some questions to ask you about events that are happening as we speak.
What's going on in Syria, as you understand it?
What's happening there today, Ambassador?
It's extraordinarily complicated.
There are multiple Syrian factions, all of them with foreign patrons.
Basically, the United States and Israel have had a long-standing objective of overthrowing the Assad government.
Israel has an objective of fracturing Syria so as to render it not a threat or a contender for power in the region.
Turkey has a bound to pursue with Assad, the President of Syria.
And it also has a problem with the Kurdish minority in Syria, which is quite independent and allied with the PKP, which is the insurgent Kurdish party in terrorists, basically in Turkey.
So now we have a situation where Israel having
the The allies of Al-Qaeda that we have been supporting in Syria for the purposes I mentioned.
And they've gone on the attack.
And the initial response of the Assad government has been weak.
basically apparently lost control of much of Aleppo, the second major city in Syria in the north.
And so we have...
But it is an incredibly complex mess with many moving parts.
Why is the US involved at all other than because we do whatever Netanyahu wants?
Well, we have been involved in trying to overthrow the Syrian government for decades before Bashar al-Assad, his father, Hafez al-Assad, was our target.
We've consistently failed to dislodge the Assad government.
But this is just a case of the United States picking fights with people who are enemies of Israel and who have...
Is the Israeli military itself attacking the Assad government?
Yes, they have been bombing Syria intermittently for years.
This is a strange situation where a country like Israel feels free to cross borders, bomb targets, kill civilians.
Don't forget that they took out the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the capital of Syria, back in April.
And this led to an Iranian retaliation against Israel, from which Iran has subsequently escalated, as has Israel.
The start of all of this against the present president of Israel.
Is this Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deciding that Assad must go and unleashing the CIA and whatever local colleagues it can muster to attempt to do that?
It actually goes back to Eisenhower.
I mean, it's been a long-term project of the United States.
And, of course, Hillary Clinton was...
We're rabidly against the Assad government, presumably reflecting the influence of Israel on our thinking.
But this is a long-term phenomenon, and for much of the decades that we've been trying to overthrow the Assad government, we've had assistance from other Arab countries who don't like the secular I mean, Syria is a country in which women have total equality with men and serve in the army and so forth.
It resembles Israel in that regard.
And it is, therefore, a bit of a deviant within the Islamic world.
Understood.
Switching gears to Ukraine, Ambassador, is the West and is the United States properly fearful or maybe I should say regardful Well, I think it changes the equation because it gives the Russians an alternative to an escalation to the nuclear level.
It is devastating.
It cannot be defended against.
It is ingenious.
And it is formidable.
And so, in a way, it reduces the danger of a nuclear war.
Of course, that danger is receding anyway because Russia's winning the war, and the only circumstance in which it would use nuclear weapons would be if it were losing, which it is not.
But this is a major technological achievement, combining ICBM technology with MRBM, IRBM technology, and hypersonic capabilities.
The warheads, if you can call them that, are not explosive.
They just come in at such a speed that their kinetic energy is the equivalent of more than if they were filled with TNT.
How debilitated is Ukraine as we speak?
How decimated is the army?
How gloomy is the future?
Here we are in early December and I don't know if Ukrainian homes and businesses are going to have adequate heat in the next four months.
I think most objective observers judge that Ukraine has actually lost the war.
It's run out of manpower to conduct an effective defense, the indiscipline in the Ukrainian armed forces.
Many people are conscripted and sent to the front where they immediately defect to the Russians.
Others risk their lives trying to escape Ukraine.
Morale is low.
Even the Zelensky government is beginning to recognize that it cannot recover the territories that it has lost as a result of this war.
The infrastructure is devastated.
The economy is ruined.
The country has been depopulated.
It started probably with 40 million people.
It's now down to about 20 million.
And so, and of course the graveyards are full of brave young Ukrainians who gave their lives defending their country.
In the end, Kyiv, And I think that is quite frightening to the Ukrainians.
A final point, however, is that for propaganda purposes, the West, the United States, and some NATO powers have deliberately distorted Russian war aims.
Those aims have been very clear, and they do not include Conquering all of Ukraine and absorbing it into the Russian Federation, nor do they include a plan to conquer all of Western Europe.
So, I think the terms that Russia will demand, I hope the Russians will have the sense to realize that, given the war and all of the disinformation that's been piled on it, they have a problem.
If they want a long-term peace in Europe, I don't know whether they have it in them to do that.
They've lost an awful lot of men and spent a lot of treasure, and they reoriented their country in fundamental ways.
They've learned to cope without the West.
Will they now turn back to the West?
I don't think Europe can be stable or peaceful without a role for Russia in its management.
That is the lesson of history.
After World War I, when the United States and other countries, Britain, France, sought to exclude both Russia and Germany from a role in Europe, we got World War II.
Then we got the Cold War.
The 19th century was one in which Russia wasn't active.
And welcome participant in European affairs.
And I think that should be the thing that we aim for in the future, much as it is just unpleasant to Americans to contemplate our brainwashing by the Cold War.
Here's President Zelensky just two days ago talking about some sort of a vision for a termination of hostilities.
It doesn't make much sense to me, but I'm being anxious to hear your thoughts.
Chris?
If we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control.
That's what we need to do fast.
And then Ukraine can get back the other part of its territory diplomatically.
But this is delusion.
This is delusion, isn't it?
the rules.
It is.
The Russians have shown everyone that they are prepared to take enormous risks in order to prevent Ukraine from being part of the Western alliance against them.
They know that if Ukraine goes into NATO, American and other NATO troops and weaponry will be stationed in Ukraine.
That is what has happened with NATO enlargement everywhere else.
And they have shown that they are prepared to go to war to stop that.
So the notion that somehow or other, when Ukraine is losing the war, it can be brought into NATO, and that will magically empower it to diplomatically recover the territory it's lost is completely delusional.
Before we hop over to Israel, here's Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov.
This is yesterday giving a summary of what he thinks the West is planning.
Cut number two.
We are concerned about what we are hearing lately, particularly from the West, in Brussels, London, Paris, and Washington.
There is increasing talk about a ceasefire as a way to give Ukraine a break and provide time to arm it with modern, long-range weapons.
This approach is certainly not the way forward.
Western leaders, it seems, are catering to Zelensky and his demands.
Their stance has been not a word about Ukraine without Ukraine.
Yet they have been discussing Russia without Russia for over two years within the framework of Zelensky's proposals.
As President Putin pointed out, Zelensky's Western backers should first compel him to cancel the decree that prohibits negotiations with Putin's government.
Russia is ready for negotiations, but they must be based on a comprehensive and legal consideration of the legitimate interests of all parties involved.
So what Mr. Lavrov is referring to is discussions in which Ukraine would be modeled on Korea.
So there would be a ceasefire, some sort of demilitarized zone, and the war would be over.
But in fact, the Korean model is exactly the opposite.
That is to say, if you do that, and Korea shows, the war never ends.
You don't get a peace.
You get a permanent situation of tension and confrontation.
And that is something that Russia absolutely will not accept.
Let's remember that the reason, one of the reasons, or the main reason perhaps, that Russia went to war was that it had demanded a discussion of European security architecture that would enable it to feel safe and enable the West to feel safe.
It wanted a discussion.
We refused.
It is significant that in his four years as Secretary of State, Mr. Blinken has never visited Moscow.
The last time Lavrov was in Washington was five years ago, before the Biden administration.
So I think there is no diplomacy here, and people waving the magic wand of diplomacy and claiming they can accomplish things.
Without regard to what has happened over the last two and a half years on the battlefield, are smoking dope.
Switching over to Israel, Ambassador, why do you think Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon?
I think there are complex reasons.
First of all, it isn't a ceasefire, really.
It's just a pause in the fighting.
Israel is continually violating the so-called ceasefire.
It's for a limited period, 60 days.
It happened for many reasons.
The main one, I think, is that Israel got badly roughed up by Hezbollah, which acquitted itself very well in the southern Lebanese battlefield.
Israel was not able to accomplish its objectives there, although it did enormous damage to housing, infrastructure, and killed a lot of people.
And of course, it has bombed Beirut repeatedly.
But I think Mr. Netanyahu has gained something from this.
Namely, Hezbollah is not in a position now to support Hamas.
And you can see that the Israelis are taking advantage of this to prepare for the resettlement of northern Gaza by Israeli settlers and the annexation of that part of Gaza to Israel.
They originally wanted Also, their maximum objective in southern Lebanon was to annex that.
But that has proven impossible.
Still, Mr. Netanyahu has gained.
Iran has yet to retaliate against Israel.
Its retaliation is now complicated by the probable unwillingness of Hezbollah or inability of Hezbollah to join it in an attack on Israel.
So this is a mixed picture.
The basic fact is the war wasn't going well for Israel, and Israel needs some time to recoup.
So does Hezbollah.
Former IDF chief and former Israeli defense minister, you may actually know him, Moshe Yalon, also a member of the Likud party, that's Prime Minister Netanyahu's party, over the weekend accused Netanyahu of engaging in genocide.
Rather startling, given the military and militaristic background of the former and now retired defense minister.
Are cracks beginning to show in Israeli solidarity, or is the former defense minister an outlier?
I think he's a bit of an outlier, certainly in his use of the word genocide.
But the cracks in Israeli society and politics have been visible for a long time.
There are too many groups in Israel that are disgruntled and totally dissatisfied.
There are the Israeli residents of northern Israel who have been driven from their homes by the skirmishing with Hezbollah and who are now reluctant to return.
They don't feel safe.
There are the ultra-Orthodox who have been threatened with conscription.
Because Israel's running out of manpower to conduct all the wars it has initiated.
And there's the hostage families who are upset about the failure of the government, the detenium government, to pursue the release of the hostages.
But I think the startling thing is that so many Israelis seem to favor genocide while they object to the word.
They favor the policy.
I don't know, Mr. Yalom, but he seems to be a realist.
Do you think that American neocons truly believe that Iran is a threat to American national security, or do they say this to further Netanyahu's political goals?
Well, I think they regard Israel as the equivalent of the 51st state.
And very much part of the American national security world.
And certainly Iran is a threat to Israeli efforts to commit genocide in Palestine and to expand its territory into Gaza and to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and to take southern Lebanon.
It has been a threat to every country on its border at one point or another.
It has attacked every one of them.
And so, yes, Iran is a threat to Israel.
And if you equate Israeli security with American security for some reason, then it's a threat Do you think that Israel is on the brink, that Netanyahu's leadership has brought it military, political, and economic destruction from which it cannot easily recover, no matter the nature and extent of American?
I think that's entirely possible.
Mr. Netanyahu took the October 7 breakout from Gaza by Hamas and other groups as an opportunity to go on the offensive everywhere within Palestine, against Israel's neighbors, against Iran.
He's been trying to enlist the United States in all these battles.
And having some success with the Biden administration.
And he looks forward to further success with the Trump administration.
So he's going for broke.
And indeed, this may end up in the destruction of Israel rather than its aggrandizement.
Ambassador Freeman, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you very much for joining us.
A belated happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
And I hope you'll come and visit with us again next week.
Thank you.
Of course.
Coming up later today, a busy and happy day.
At nine in the morning, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
At noon today, Matt Ho.
At two o 'clock this afternoon, Roger Waters.
Yes, that Roger Waters from Pink Floyd.
And at three o 'clock following Roger, Karen Kwiatkowski.
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