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Dec. 9, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:44
AMB. Chas Freeman : US Funding Terrorists in Syria.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, December 10th, 2024.
Ambassador Charles Freeman joins us now.
Ambassador Freeman, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
Ambassador, why did the Kremlin allow President Assad's regime to fall in Syria?
Well, for many reasons.
The Russians for years have been pressing Bashar al-Assad to reform his army, to shape up his regime, to make peace with the jihadi groups which have now conquered Syria.
And he always refused.
I think he was trying to wriggle out from under the kind of dependence on Russia and Iran that he had.
And in the event, his regime was rotten.
He himself fled the country, instructing his government To manage a peaceful, blood-free turnover, and that's what's happened.
You say turnover.
Can we characterize the people that triumphed over him as a government of Syria?
Stated differently, does Syria have, at this moment in time, 48 hours after the Assad regime collapsed, maybe 72 hours, does it have a central government, Ambassador?
It has an interim government which has been appointed by the HTS which is the movement that is loosely united that took over Syria.
That government is the government that was operating in Idlib in the northwest of Syria and there is an expectation on the part of Syrians that there will be elections at some point.
So far, the new authorities have proven to be very politically astute.
They continue their rebranding.
They are a terrorist group.
Some of them are on film from earlier days executing people by beheading them.
These are not nice people, but they claim they have repented and been saved and that they will now Treat Christians, Druze, even Alawites, the sect to which Bashar al-Assad and his father belonged,
with due consideration and due process.
That remains to be seen and I think many Syrians doubt very much that that will be the outcome.
And here I'd just like to make a broader point and that is that what we have seen in the Arab world and more widely in the Islamic world It's the collapse of secular governments modeled on Western norms.
And it's their replacement by a combination of Islamism and intolerant Islamism and anarchy.
So we had a secular government in Libya.
Men and women were treated equally.
It was not an attractive society from our point of view, but it worked.
A similar government, secular, in Afghanistan that we and the Russians had each tried to create, and that has been now replaced by the Taliban.
We had in Iraq a secular government, which has been replaced by a religiously dominated government.
We had in Syria a very nasty secular government, which has now been replaced by what?
We don't know.
And finally, of course, In Israel, the secular government has been overtaken by religious fanatics.
So what we're seeing is a broad trend which is not encouraging and includes many people who are violently anti-American.
Did anybody tell George W. Bush in '01 or '03 that it was impossible to export Jeffersonian democracy?
A fatal flaw, in my view, In the neocon thinking, you mentioned the fact that these people that have taken over Syria have a history of monstrosity.
Isn't it true that the head of the group, I think it's pronounced Jelani, himself has a bounty on his head by the State Department?
And yet was funded by the CIA.
I mean, if this is true, how could the same government want to arrest someone and incarcerate them and prosecute them and at the same time fund them?
Well, if you ever touted that this was a great country, that proves that it is.
I mean, they're able to embrace contradictions like this.
Not only that, what has just come to power in Syria...
It is demonstrably a movement with a monstrous history.
And yet we have our president and everybody else jubilant about this.
That is why I mentioned the broader context of secular government being replaced with religious fanatic government, which may well be the case in Syria, if Syria in fact holds together.
It is a mosaic of many faiths and nationalities.
A very, very diverse country.
And it has dozens of armed groups who hate each other.
And it's not at all clear that Mr. Jolani, which is, by the way, his nom de gao, his pseudonym means his parents came from the Golan Heights, which Israel had taken.
They were expelled from what is now Israeli-occupied territory.
And Israel, of course, has just taken more territory there, wiping out the UN-established demilitarized zone on the grounds that it has to protect itself against extremists in Syria.
So it clearly suspects that Mr. El Jelani is not going to be the benign, tolerant governor of Syria that he purports to be.
Is this really a cause for celebration?
In Tel Aviv, or might Mr. Jelani and his people decide they want the Golan Heights back?
Well, they definitely will want the Golan Heights back.
And just to illustrate another contradiction, apparently HTS, as it's called in English, the movement Mr. Jelani, or Mr. Shadda, actually is his name, runs,
has promised Israel, which supported it, With training and probably money, along with the CIA, that it will recognize Israel.
But at the same time, he's told his followers, now we've got Damascus, next step is Jerusalem.
So there is some ambivalence here.
And I wouldn't celebrate if I were Israeli.
Although, in a broad geopolitical sense, this is a masterstroke for the Israelis.
They have cut the supply lines between Iran and...
Hezbollah, which they have greatly reduced by decapitating its leadership and decimating its followers, at least in Beirut.
And they now have the prospect before them of achieving their long-term objective, which has been to fragment Syria, destroy it as a unified state and therefore as an opponent in the Middle East.
And finally, of course, They're now in direct confrontation with Iran.
Iran has lost its frontline deterrent forces, Hamas and Hezbollah.
And one consequence of that is very likely that having lost that deterrent, Iran will now finally make the decision it has not made earlier to build a nuclear weapon as a deterrent.
There was already a lot of talk about that in Tehran after the last Israeli strike.
I suspect that religious scruples which have prevented that will now be set aside and we will see the emergence of Iran as a nuclear power.
I do want to ask you about Iran, but before we go there, here is Prime Minister Netanyahu on Sunday crowing about the demise of the Assad.
This is a historic day for the Middle East.
The collapse of the Assad regime, the tyranny in Damascus offers great opportunity, but also is fraught with significant dangers.
This collapse...
It's a direct result of our forceful action against Hezbollah and Iran, Assad's main supporters.
It set off a chain reaction of all those who want to free themselves from this tyranny and its oppression.
But it also means we have to take action against possible threats.
One of them is the collapse of the Separation of Forces Agreement from 1974 between Israel and Syria.
This agreement held for 50 years.
Last night it collapsed.
The Syrian army abandoned its positions.
We gave the Israeli army the order to take over these positions to ensure that no hostile force embeds itself right next to the border of Israel.
This is a temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found.
Equally, we send a hand of peace to all those beyond our border in Syria, to the Druze, to the Kurds, to the Christians, and to the Muslims who want to live in peace with Israel.
We're going to follow events very carefully.
If we can establish neighborly relations and a peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that's our desire.
But if we do not, we'll do whatever it takes to defend the state of Israel and the border of Israel.
Right.
And in fact, the Israelis have advanced into Syria on the ground.
They have also launched a ferocious bombing campaign intended to destroy Syria's air defenses and other military installations.
They are engaged in territorial expansion in Syria, whatever nice phrase you put on it.
It is also somewhat ironic, I think, that Mr. Netanyahu, who heads a tyranny over the Palestinians, which he has used to very cruel effect, should claim to be extending the merits of the end of a tyranny in Syria to other people.
It was a tyranny.
And the horrible evidence of torture and murder in the vast prison system that the Assad government came to depend on to stay in power is now being revealed.
There are probably over 100,000 people who had disappeared who are actually dead, according to Syrian sources.
What to me is odd, but you have a far superior understanding of this, alliance between Israel and Turkey with respect to the demise of the Assad regime.
I mean, Erdogan says the most awful things about Netanyahu and about the behavior of the IDF in Gaza, and then he forms some sort of a temporary alliance with the Israelis to topple Assad.
Can you unwind that for us?
Well, the objectives of the two, to some extent, have coincided.
They both wanted to get rid of Assad and his government.
They both had territorial ambitions.
They both were engaged in support for jihadi groups in Syria, fighting against the Assad government.
In the case of Turkey, they have an additional motive, There are 3.5 to 5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, and Turkey is desperate to have them return.
It has also wanted a free hand in Syria to batter the Kurds, who have a quasi-independent state, which is allied with the PKK, the domestic Turkish terrorist movement that fights for Kurdish.
Self-determination.
And I suspect that Turks will now go after that.
I would note that much of the training, this was not a guerrilla force that took Damascus.
This was a very well-organized conventional army with tanks and other modern weaponry, well-led, well-trained.
And most of the training, I think, was probably done by the Turks with some help from the Israelis and probably the CIA.
They part company when it comes to the issue of Palestine, and I suspect that Turkey will have dominant influence in Syria if it remains intact as a country.
The Israelis will do everything possible to ensure that it doesn't.
Does this bode ill for a Palestinian state, the fall of Assad?
I don't think it has much impact, really.
Assad stood aside from the Palestinian struggle for the most part.
He did for a while provide asylum, safe haven for the leaders of Hamas in Damascus, but he broke with Hamas.
Hamas left Syria for other places, has been resident in Doha and Qatar and in Iraq.
So, I don't...
Anyway, I'll stop there.
Okay.
What role did the CIA and MI6 play here other than either funding the Zolani group directly or indirectly?
Well, clearly someone was funding them because they were very well paid.
They were paid an astronomical amount of money in comparison to what the Assad government was able to pay its military.
And the demoralization of the military, the corruption of it, if you pay people very little money and they can't survive on their salary, they engage in corruption.
That all became apparent in the swift collapse of the Syrian National Army.
Somebody's been paying now.
Israel has a habit of using U.S. funds rather than its own, and I rather suspect that might have been the case.
Was the Israeli ceasefire with Hezbollah a trick in order to free up the IDF to do what they're doing now in Syria and to give Hezbollah a false sense of security It was a phony ceasefire.
It was not a ceasefire.
You can't have a ceasefire when one side reserves the right to break it at will, which the Israelis did from the outset.
There have been something like 150 violations of the so-called ceasefire by the Israeli forces since it went into effect.
I think both sides Wanted a moment, a short period, 60 days in this case, to regroup.
The Israelis ran into a buzzsaw in southern Lebanon.
They took a level of casualties that they couldn't sustain.
They lost a lot of equipment.
No doubt Hezbollah lost a lot of men also.
And both sides wanted a timeout.
So they got the referee, the United States, to call it.
Actually, Israel didn't sign anything, as far as I understand.
This was something that the United States and others proclaimed.
Probably orchestrated by Mr. Hochstein.
Yes, who is an Israeli Defense Force veteran and dual national, and yet in charge of our policies toward Lebanon.
What do you expect the Kremlin thinks about all of this?
I'm sure that they're dismayed by this, but it is, frankly, in terms of their current priorities, and they're very good at setting priorities, a sideshow.
It was enough of a, not a sideshow from the Ukrainian point of view, apparently, to equip the victorious insurgent forces with drones from Ukraine, I guess, to deal a blow to Russia.
On another front.
And I assume that was partly our motivation in supporting these terrorists as well.
But the Russians have taken a loss in the Middle East.
This will probably draw them closer to Iran rather than distancing them from Iran.
And it will probably strengthen the axis between Tehran and Moscow.
But we will have to wait and see.
A good deal depends on what now happens in the discussions that are ongoing between the new authorities in Damascus and the Russians about the naval base at Tartus and other facilities in Syria that the Russians have had access to.
I'm sure the Russians want to retain the naval base and are bargaining hard on that.
Said President Assad fell because his patron abandoned him and he identified the patron as Vladimir Putin.
Now, putting aside whether that's sophisticated diplomacy, is there any merit in that argument?
There is some.
Both Turkey and Russia, as I indicated earlier, without mentioning Turkey, had been pressing Assad to get his act together and he wouldn't do it.
And I think they just wrote him off, finally.
Iran did not do so, but Iran did not attempt to intervene in this battle.
It withdrew its forces.
So did Hezbollah.
And I'm sure Iran is now, as I said, under considerable pressure to develop a new means of deterring Israel, which I'm afraid will probably be nuclear.
No, I think that was a very unsophisticated, simplistic, propagandistic analysis that our president just uttered.
I was looking at the president's foreign policy team, and it doesn't seem to me to present much, President-elect's foreign policy team, it doesn't seem to present much of a difference from what we have now, except the new people call themselves Republicans and the folks in there now.
Yes, it's a long neoconservatism is a persistent disease that keeps manifesting itself regardless of whatever other changes take place in our body politic.
We even face, with the Trump administration, threats in Ukraine where he said he would end the war in 24 hours to escalate in order to de-escalate.
In other words, put more pressure on Russia in the mistaken belief that that will somehow bring the Russians to surrender or capitulate or stop the war.
The Russians are on a roll.
They do not want a ceasefire.
They want a peace with Ukraine and with Europe.
And with NATO.
And they're going to keep going until they get that.
But there seem to be some sort of delusions that, quote, maximum pressure, unquote, if applied to Russia, would produce the opposite result that it produced with North Korea.
What it did with North Korea was force the North or compel the North or incentivize the North to develop a nuclear arsenal with which to hit the United States.
The same danger exists with Iran.
Maximum pressure there will produce that result.
And it will not lead to a Russian surrender in Ukraine or a capitulation or an accommodation of Mr. Trump's desires to end the war.
That's going to have to be done by diplomacy in a very messy process.
We'll have to deal with a bunch of issues.
The border between Ukraine and Russia.
No DMZ.
No Russian will want to have a permanent state of war and antagonism dividing his or her country from Europe.
Some discussion of the rights of minorities in Ukraine, which have been trampled, not just for Russian speakers, but for Hungarian speakers, for Romanian speakers and others.
And finally, of course, what Russia demanded in the beginning, that is, neutrality for Ukraine.
And in the context of a broader agreement on European security that would remove threats to Russia and from Russia to the rest of Europe.
Well, that is very complicated, and it's probably going to take years.
And is President Biden exacerbating all of that by continuing to send military equipment to Ukraine, some $3 billion worth between now and Christmas, which is just two weeks from tomorrow?
I have to say that I consider this to be a very cynical move on the part of the outgoing administration to make sure that Ukraine survives until they can blame the incoming administration for acknowledging the defeat that has,
in fact, already occurred and is all but formalized.
Well, I don't know.
I think in the case of Ukraine, the Russians are winning.
They have no need to escalate to the nuclear level, especially because they have fielded the Oreshnik missile.
Which provides an alternative to the use of nuclear weapons, but equally potent in some respects.
I think the danger of greater war in West Asia is much larger than it is in Europe.
But I would remind you also that as we speak, the Chinese are carrying out the largest show force around Taiwan that they ever have done, with dozens of naval vessels deployed all around the island.
And as paths to a peaceful resolution of that issue disappear, the danger of war goes up.
And that, like the wars in both West Asia and Europe, is a potential nuclear war.
So Mr. Biden is bequeathing his successor a series of messes with grave danger embedded in them.
And I wish Mr. Trump's administration luck.
Marco Rubio, the likely new Secretary of State, Michael Waltz, the likely new National Security Advisor, Sebastian Gorka, the likely new, I'm not sure what the title is,
but functioning as sort of the Deputy National Security Advisor, are all China hawks.
Do you think?
They would advise President Trump to deploy the United States military to resist any effort on the part of mainland China to take over or neutralize or exert more influence over Taiwan, bearing in mind it is the public policy of the United States of America,
going back, I believe, to the Carter administration, that there is one China and not two.
Well, that one China thing was invented by Chiang Kai-shek.
We pursued that all through the 50s and 60s, and we insisted that the legal government of all of China, including Mongolia, by the way, was situated in Taiwan, not on the mainland.
And do not denigrate American diplomacy and its ability to preserve absolutely ridiculous situations.
We did that for 23 years.
I hope that these likely nominees, and you're right to use that word, because Mr. Trump has no authority to nominate anyone until he takes office on January 20th, I hope they can get security clearances and have a briefing on what has changed in the Taiwan Strait.
If we get into a war with China, every scenario that we run in war games suggests we will lose Half two-thirds of our Navy and Air Force and we will be unable to prevail.
So this is not a fight we should enter lightly, if at all.
And I don't know what advice these men, all of them seem to be men, would offer the incoming president if in fact the Chinese feel that they have been compelled to.
Drop their policy of peaceful unification and achieve it by force.
Ambassador Freeman, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you very much for your time.
I hope you can come and visit us again before Christmas is upon us.
I hope so.
Merry Christmas to you, by the way.
Oh, yes.
Merry Christmas to you and your family.
All the best, Ambassador.
Thank you.
Christmas, of course, is our goal to reach 500,000 subscribers.
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Coming up later today at 2 o 'clock, Aaron Maté.
At 3 o 'clock, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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