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Dec. 11, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:07
COL Douglas Macgregor : SYRIA - a looming crisis awaits.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, December 11th, 2024.
Colonel Douglas McGregor will be here with us in just a moment on Syria, the looming crisis that awaits.
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Colonel McGregor, welcome here, my dear friend.
I have a lot of...
Questions to ask you about Syria, but before we go there, a little bit about South Korea.
Is it your understanding that American intelligence was involved and hoped to exploit the presidential declaration of martial law in South Korea recently, as a result of which the former defense minister has been arrested and attempted suicide in prison,
and the president has been restrained from leaving the country?
Well, that's the unconfirmed rumor that's very widespread inside Korea.
And of course, we've had a presence in that country now for 70 years.
And we certainly have a very large and effective intelligence network on the peninsula.
So what happened could not have been a secret in Washington.
There's no doubt that our government was aware of what was going on.
And it seems reasonable to assume, as they have in the past.
That the CIA would work to support the people in power.
And the people in power are those that have historically supported whatever the United States wants in terms of foreign independence policy.
And the opposition party to the president does not support what American defense and intelligence want.
Am I correct?
Oh, absolutely.
These are the so-called liberal nationalists.
We usually try to tar them as socialists or leftists, and that's not really accurate.
They are simply people who, they want a liberal society, but they're nationalists.
And since the mid to late 1990s, they have been trying to persuade us to give them control of their troops on the Korean Peninsula.
And that would involve replacing the U.S. Army four-star on the peninsula who commands all forces.
United Nations presence in Korea during the Korean War.
This Army four-star commands everything on the peninsula.
And the Koreans and the Liberal Nationalist Party have wanted to change that because their argument is, how do we pretend to be a truly sovereign state with its own independent national policy as long as we are subservient to the United States military and are therefore viewed in Asia as a military colony of the United States?
And so they want that Korean four-star to replace the Army four-star.
We have dug in our heels and tried to, as politely as possible, obstruct that change.
The attitude of the Liberal Party, I know they have a different name, but I'll use that as a handle so the audience knows what I'm talking about, might find some sympathy in the ears of Donald Trump.
Well, initially, I think they thought they would.
But enough effort was undertaken to obfuscate, confuse, and make the situation opaque that President Trump moved on to other things.
Remember, the South Korean president is one of those individuals who plays a major role in terms of working with Beijing as well as with Tokyo, and ultimately also with North Korea.
He had a role to play in this effort that we had underway to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.
M. Bolton and Pompeo were instrumental at the last minute in persuading Donald Trump not to sign the denuclearization agreement, because that would lead inevitably over a five-year period to reductions in the U.S. military presence and ultimately our departure from the peninsula.
Now, that's what the liberal nationalists wanted then.
I'm sure they probably wanted even more now, because frankly, from the standpoint of North Korea, if there is no American military presence in South Korea, There's no rationale for the existence of the North Korean state because there's no enemy to the South.
We have not allowed that to happen.
Now we've seen that these people who have worked tirelessly in support of whatever we want, these are the so-called concord.
They've had different kinds of names over the years.
They're called conservatives, but they're really lackeys of the United States, and many of them, interestingly enough.
Have parents and grandparents who were lackeys of the Japanese back during the Japanese occupation.
So it's a strange sort of set of circumstances, but they want to stay where they are as the permanent sort of cuddled puppy of America.
But the majority of Korean people don't want that.
And I think the liberal nationalists are now going to come roaring back into power.
And that's why the coup occurred, because...
The president knew that his party, the conservatives, had no chance whatsoever of winning another election.
They have disappointed the Korean people consistently.
And one of the more obvious disappointments was standing up and perpetrating the lie that North Koreans were fighting on the ground in Ukraine when they aren't, and then suggesting that therefore South Korean troops should go to Europe to fight as part of NATO.
They don't want anything to do with NATO.
These people live in Asia, and they don't want to be part of any of the wars that we start.
Boy, I don't think this looks good under the Trump administration, given the folks with whom he has announced he plans to surround himself, who will ally themselves to the wishes of the American deep state and military establishment.
Switching gears, Colonel, what role did the United States play, if any, in toppling President Assad of Syria?
I think we have to take credit for having played a very major role.
We have had people on the ground working to remove Assad certainly since 2011.
And we could go through this timeline, but the point to keep in mind is that we've done everything we could to support his removal because that, of course, was the wish of the Israeli government.
They were always anxious to remove Assad and would do anything at all possible to remove him.
Keep in mind...
Right now in Egypt and in Jordan, the other two Arab states that border Israel, other than Lebanon, we have what are effectively regarded in the Arab world as puppet governments that are essentially loyal to us.
We buy them.
In fact, this morning I discovered that a $900 million check from the U.S. Treasury just arrived this morning in Jordan.
The Jordanian government will obviously be very grateful for that.
We're renegotiating the debt that Egypt has.
In other words, we have bribed people in those places.
We bribed people all over the world, but specifically in those places to keep them on side when it comes to Israel.
Now, the Jordanians are in a tough spot because the Israelis can shut off their water supply.
They're not anxious to end up like Gaza at this point.
Egypt's a little different now, and the Egyptian population there is very angry.
We should come back to that.
Because what happens in Egypt is very important, and you could see something similar to what has happened in Syria happen in Egypt.
Here is the president of Syria, President Assad, before he was deposed.
This is in 2017.
Saying very similar to what you said, that the United States does not want partners, it only wants puppets.
The key part to what he says, this is about 60 seconds long.
The key part to what he says, with which I suspect you'll agree.
The problem in the United States is about the whole political system.
It's not about one person.
Trump's election has proven again for us, again and again, that the president is only a performer.
He's not the decision maker.
He's part of different lobbies and the deep states or the deep regime, as we can call it, who implement and dictate.
On the president, what should he be doing?
And the proof to what I'm saying is that Trump, after he became president, he swallowed most of the promises and the word that he was boosting during his campaign.
He made 180 turns in nearly every promise.
So why?
Because the deep state wouldn't allow him to go in a certain direction.
That's why for me...
Dealing with him as a person, it could be.
But can that person deliver?
No.
The United States president cannot deliver.
The whole state, the deep state only, is the one who can deliver.
And this is the problem.
This deep state doesn't accept partners around the world.
They only accept puppets.
They only accept followers.
They only accept proxies.
That's what they accept.
We're not any of these.
He's gone, of course, but I think he had a good handle on the influence of the deep state and foreign affairs, don't you?
Well, he's repeating essentially what President Putin has said and others have said over the years.
In his case, he tried to evade becoming a puppet or being removed through the arrangements that the Russians, Iranians, and Turks made in Solzhen and Astana.
And these were agreements that were designed to essentially It was never a perfect outcome because there was a Kurdish state emerging in the northeast of Syria,
and the Turks had moved into and occupied a portion of northern Syria and then created, under Erdogan, this enclave.
Of radical Islamists, essentially the survivors of ISIS, and nurtured them over the years and prepared them for what they're doing now.
We've also done the same thing in the enclave that we control over on the border with Iraq.
We've repurposed many of the same people, roughly 11,000 of them.
About 17,000, 18,000 more were under Erdogan.
And of course, Mossad was involved with the CIA and MI6 in the equipping and training.
But the principal job of coaching the Islamists collectively in how to do it and where to go and what to do is really President Erdogan.
The funding that the United States, through the CIA and other intelligence services, supplied, did it make its way to al-Julani, who has a $10 million bounty on his head because he cuts the heads of other people off?
Well, I rather suspect so, and I don't think he's terribly worried about the bounty at this point, because obviously we are his allies.
Right.
We are 100% aligned with them, and what you're seeing, and this is where we really ought to spend some time, people need to understand that we're watching something that we have not seen yet in the 21st century.
We've seen it in the 20th century and earlier in European history, which is a formal partition of a third country.
It has an uncanny resemblance to the partitions of Poland in 1795 and the partitions of Poland later on again in 1939.
Between 1795 and 1939, in both cases, the Polish state vanished and only came back later as a consequence of new powers emerging and demands made by the By the new winners of the Second World War.
What we see in Syria is something similar.
And we already know that the Israelis have forces on the outskirts of Damascus.
And we know from the map that President Netanyahu held up in front of the UN when he spoke to it, showed effectively his Greater Israel Plan.
And the Greater Israel document includes the lower half of Syria, much of Jordan.
And reaches all the way over into Egypt, as well as most of Lebanon.
And this is very real now.
Two weeks ago, three weeks ago, when things were going very, very badly in southern Lebanon, as well as in Gaza, people lost sight of this.
But this has been cooking for some time.
We have ultimately had a great deal to do with organizing this.
And of course, Mr. Erdogan has made no secret of his Ottoman...
He's got maps floating around on Turkish television that show Greece and Bulgaria as part of Turkey, along with most of the Caucasus, parts of northern Iran, and most of Syria, and most of northern Iraq.
So these are two states with two leaders right now, Netanyahu and Erdogan, who are determined to realize their dreams.
And we have simply said, go for it.
The problem with all of this is you've unleashed a tiger.
At least two tigers.
And you don't know where this is all going to end up.
And that's why people in Egypt are now very uneasy about the potential for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to become another disciple of Erdogan in this great game.
And we don't know what could possibly happen in Jordan and how long we will tolerate that state under anybody other than Israeli direction.
And now, if you move to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, they are genuinely fearful.
And they're not probably going to want to bet very heavily on any guarantees that we give them.
It's a very strange situation.
It's something nobody expected to see.
We have always listened to people with aspirations and show us maps with new territory.
But now these aspirations are realities.
And the realities are dangerous for the entire region and potentially, depending upon how the rest of the world acts, to the world.
Well, Prime Minister Netanyahu is being cross-examined.
In a criminal case in which he is the defendant accused of bribery in Tel Aviv, is his IDF actually conquering, stealing land that two weeks ago was part of Syria?
Well, I don't think they have to conquer much.
They launched a furious air campaign over the last 48, 72 hours to destroy virtually everything that had any military value on the ground in Syria.
And I think that was also part of the...
That was very successful in terms of destroying what was there.
That doesn't mean, though, that the Islamist hordes that are running wild across Syria don't have other sources of equipment and ammunition.
They do.
It's called Turkey.
And the Turkish military is moving cautiously behind them.
The Turkish military intelligence officers are forward.
They're seeing what's happening.
They're reporting.
And again, Erdogan is coaching.
We think they're probably going to kill at least 100,000 people if they haven't already done it in Syria.
But Erdogan has coached them and said, don't kill everybody.
Avoid villages that are Christian.
Avoid certain areas.
We don't want to awaken the West to what's happening.
And ultimately, I think that'll be the end of the Christian community in Syria and probably inevitably what's left of it in Iraq, unless the Shiites in Iraq can protect them as they have in the past.
It's a very grim situation, Judge.
The militant groups that you're referring to as Islamic hordes, they're hardly Zionists.
I mean, might Israel have unleashed a tiger which would try to consume it?
No, I think that's true.
And if you just take a step back and think back to 1939, Guderian, who commanded forces in Poland, He was sent to the demarcation line to meet his Soviet counterpart where they would agree to the final line of demarcation between Soviet and German interests in 1939.
And he remarked in his diary and later confided to Hitler that he had an ominous feeling about the whole thing because he said ultimately this border has been moved from its former position, that is the Soviet border, 300 miles further to the west.
He was obviously worried in the future about A Soviet attack.
Now, I think the Israelis are looking at the ground.
There's not much in southern Syria, frankly.
It's mostly open desert once you get off the Golan.
And there's really nothing much until you get to Damascus.
And it's very obvious that Mr. Netanyahu wants to claim Damascus.
Now, once that's done and this line is drawn, they will gradually realize, I think, in Israel, if they haven't already, That they have moved Turkish power, influence, military capability, subterfuge,
you name it, much, much closer to Israel than it has ever been before.
And the Turks are formidable.
In other words, whatever we're seeing now that looks like a honeymoon between these two groups that both want hegemony, it's not likely to last, Judge.
Colonel, is there any moral or legal justification?
Now, I suppose I could stop there and you'll say, Judge, the intelligence community, the deep state doesn't care about morality or law, but is there any moral or legal justification for American warplanes bombing military assets in Syria,
American government funding the terrorists, the jihadists that took over Syria?
Is there even the remotest?
Well, I think most of it is Israeli-connected.
There's no question about it.
We have supported Israel, and for many good reasons over many decades.
The idea of supporting Israel now in this larger land grab, that's another matter entirely.
That always is fraught with problems, as we've seen in previous wars.
That's why I don't think this is the end of something.
I think this is the beginning of something very new that's ultimately going to come crashing down on all of us.
Now, at the same time, America has always been very myopic about seeing its potential opponents or adversaries or enemies.
We obsess over one.
The Israelis demonized Iran and saw to it that Iran was the ultimate evil that had to be crushed.
We have adopted that position.
Well, let's assume that you're successful, and eventually this results in the destruction of Iran, that we and the Israelis, along with help from the Turks, because the Turks, of course, are also in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan and Turkey regard themselves as two states in one nation.
Azerbaijan borders Iran and has provided the Israelis with platforms, with support, with airfields from which they can strike Iran.
And, of course, the Israelis have conferred enormous advantages militarily with drones and other equipment on the Turks in Azerbaijan who were trying to drive out what remains of Armenia from the Caucasus.
I think we're going to see that play out, too, in the near future.
That'll be a second front for Iran, and God knows what will happen to the Armenians in the Caucasus.
But the point is that we're so focused on the destruction of Iran as the principal problem.
That's something I've never signed up for and don't agree with.
It doesn't matter what I think or you think.
We see that very, very myopically to the point where we don't look at the peripheral consequences, the collateral damage, just as we were anxious to destroy Germany and Japan until there was nothing left during the Second World War,
woke up and discovered that we had consigned half of the world to communism, half of Europe.
And most of Asia.
There was no thinking about the consequences of empowering Soviet military strength, which we did.
And without us, the Soviets would have had an enormously difficult time prevailing against the Germans.
So we don't think about those things.
We're so busy focusing in one direction that the consequences that are there are simply ignored.
And I think what's happening right now is there will be great consequences strategically in the region.
And by the way, remember, This is not something that the Russians signed up for.
But the Russians have never regarded their position in the Middle East, especially in Syria, as the vital strategic outpost for Russian influence.
It isn't.
There are other places that they can go and other places where they will be welcomed.
So they're not going to fight to the bitter end for a place like Syria.
They did everything they could, but clearly Assad was unable to reform, reorganize anything.
He didn't have much money.
We'd starved him of that.
You know, once again, it's bully, sanction, and bomb.
We've done plenty of that.
So his fate was sealed once it became clear that Erdogan was willing to work closely with Israel because Erdogan has his own agenda.
And again, this is the problem.
You empower an alliance like this, the Israeli-Turkish de facto alliance for hegemony in the region, and you end up with problems, with serious problems over which you have no control anymore.
I remember.
A line from JFK's inaugural address.
Foolish people have tried to gain power by riding the back of a tiger and have ended up inside.
We'll see what happens.
Colonel, we have to go, but I must tell you that we are just a few subscriptions away from 499,000.
Our goal, of course, is 500,000 by Christmas.
I'm very happy, Judge.
I would just like to make one final observation.
I don't know whether or not everyone is aware of it, but the spokesperson in Moscow, this very striking lady who speaks beautifully, she announced today that all Russian citizens have been urged to leave the United States.
Terrifying.
But the subscriptions that we've achieved have been in large measure because of you and your time and your...
Extraordinary brilliance.
Thank you, Colonel.
Thanks for everything.
We'll see you again soon.
Thank you, Judge.
Of course.
Coming up later today at 2 o 'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer.
At 3 o 'clock, Phil Giraldi.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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