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Dec. 16, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
31:56
Scott Ritter : Putin’s Syrian Strategy
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, December 17, 2024.
Scott Ritter will be with us in just a moment on President Putin's Syrian strategy.
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Scott, welcome here, my dear friend.
Before we start talking about Syria, There was an assassination in Moscow today of a high-ranking Russian general, General Igor Kirilov.
What can you tell us about it?
Well, the Ukrainian government, in a strange move, has taken full credit for this, indicating that they directed their intelligence services to carry out this assassination.
It's not an act of war.
It's an act of terrorism against a high-profile Russian Lieutenant General.
General Karolev was the commander of their chemical biological radiation forces, but he had achieved notoriety of sorts because he is the face to the Russian, ongoing Russian allegations centered on American biological labs that had been operating.
On Ukrainian soil, the Russians, in the course of the special military operation, had occupied several of these and gained access to documents.
And he was using these documents to make the case that the United States was engaged in what Russia assesses to be offensive biological warfare activities that were in violation of the chemical toxin.
Biological toxin.
It's a violation of law.
The Ukrainians had indicted him two days ago, and then they killed him.
It's up to the Russian government to decide.
Dmitry Medvedev, the former president, former prime minister, and current deputy head of the National Security Council, held a meeting where he said that those who perpetrated this attack, that is the government of Ukraine and its defense ministry, must be held.
Accountable, eliminated.
What Russia does, I don't know, because they, you know, are probably looking forward to engaging in fruitful discussions with President Trump once it becomes President Trump and might not want to poison the well.
But you can't sit back and allow assassinations at this level to take place in your capital.
How can they take place?
Well, I wouldn't say collaborators on the inside.
I would say that, you know, Russia, contrary to popular belief, is not a police state.
The FSB has tremendous resources to investigate after the fact, and I'm sure that they will, in short notice, find out, you know, who the individual or individuals are who perpetrated this.
You know, it's not a police state.
When you enter Moscow, you do have relatively free reign to travel and move about.
And there is an extensive Ukrainian community in Moscow, Russian community, and many of them may be disaffected with the Putin regime and operate as a sleeper cell.
They can do the surveillance, get patterns of life reports back.
You know, smuggling the material.
We saw they were able to bring in an assassin to kill Darya Dugina and Tatarsky.
And I'm sure that they were able to bring somebody in who was able to, after establishing a pattern of life activity with this general, position a scooter nearby with explosives and that was remotely detonated at the appropriate time, killing him and his advisor.
This isn't impossible.
You're not going to be able to prevent things of this nature, even with a crackdown.
But what you can do is deter them from happening again, and you do that by ensuring that the consequences of such actions are so extreme that nobody would ever want to do it again.
I mean, this is shades of the Mossad, really.
Scott, is there a military purpose to killing a general who's not engaged in battle and not commanding troops at the time of his death, but rather is exiting his home to go to work in the morning?
No, it's an act of terrorism, pure and simple.
Let me put it this way, just so your audience understands.
If the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or one of his deputies was leaving their home this morning to go to work, A bomb placed in his garbage can went off and killed him in his aid.
Would you expect the President of the United States to sit back and do nothing?
Especially if we found out, for instance, it was done by an adversarial nation, we can call it.
Let's say it was done by Mexican cartels.
Do you think right now, hours later, we wouldn't be bombing those cartels into oblivion?
I don't think the Americans understand.
What happened here because we projected into Russia, but try and project it back into us and something of this scale happening, you know darn well what we'd be doing.
And that's the situation that Russia faces right now.
This was an act of terrorism, an assassination of a senior military general, high-profile military general, done by an adversarial nation, not for military impact, but for political and terrorist impact.
Does Syria still exist today as a geopolitical entity?
No.
The nation of Syria has been eradicated.
It's gone.
As we speak, Israel is occupying land, not only in the Golan Heights, but projecting up towards Damascus and south in Daraa to control that area of the border.
Turkey has its proxies in total control of most of the rest of Syria.
Erdogan, apparently, in a speech to the AKP, his political party, talked about Turkey's historical opportunity to reverse the bad outcome after the end of World War I, where Turkey lost control of the Vilyets,
the cities, the regions of Aleppo, Raqqa, Hama, and Damascus.
And it appears that Turkey is going to be controlling What we currently call Syria today, but the Syrian nation that existed under Bashar al-Assad's presidency is gone.
And how much land have the Israelis stolen?
Ambassador Murray told us this morning it's more than three times the size of the Gaza Strip.
Yeah, I haven't done the measurements on it, but I wouldn't dispute his figures.
And I don't know if the Israelis are finished in their territorial acquisition.
I don't think people understand the totality of the geopolitical consequences of the collapse of Syria to the axis of resistance.
You know, Israel was on its back feet.
Netanyahu now has emerged.
As a victorious leader, everything he promised that he was going to deliver apparently now has been delivered.
He is saying this is not only the defeat of the Assad regime, but the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran.
This is the end of the Palestinian resistance.
Hamas cannot survive without the axis of resistance supporting them.
So it's the end of the threat of a Palestinian state.
It doesn't matter.
What the world wants, Israel will probably end up depopulating Gaza and eliminating much of the West Bank through more settlements.
This is the establishment of greater Israel, and greater Israel needs more territory, and he'll flex as far as he can.
I do think there's a limit to the expansion of Israel.
Netanyahu doesn't want to snatch Defeat from the jaws of victory, and you could do that by overplaying your hand, but Israel's feeling very confident right now.
Is it a justifiable confidence, or should he be careful what he wishes for?
I think it's a totally justifiable.
I don't see Iran being able to resurrect the land bridge to Lebanon.
Which means that Hezbollah is in a very difficult position where it's probably going to have to turn its resistance forces over to the Lebanese Armed Forces in accordance with Security Council resolutions.
And then Hezbollah as a political party will have to meld into The political scene without the weight of its militia behind them.
They don't have a leader as capable of Hassan Nasrallah.
There is a competing Shia political party, the Amal, there.
And it will be a diminishment of Hezbollah.
And moreover, by eliminating the Hezbollah militia, which was basically the equivalent of the armed forces of The cocked pistol that Iran used to be able to have pointed at Israel's head is gone.
And this diminishes Iran's ability now to influence what's going on in the region.
They now have lost Syria and Lebanon.
And so Iran is in a much weakened position, again, at a time when we have a president coming in who is prepared to deal decisively with Iran's.
So, Israel is very much in the catbird seat here.
The wild card is Turkey and what Turkey is going to do.
But I think Turkey is going to be very happy with getting back territories that it felt unjustly lost at the end of World War I and focus on this, which is a major victory for Erdogan and less on creating a conflict with Israel.
How does the United States play its cards as an ally of Turkey and as an ally of the Kurds, bearing in mind the bitter animosity between Erdogan's Turkey and the Kurdish people?
The Kurds will be betrayed as we always betray them.
Unfortunately for the Kurds, this is a historical reality.
America has never been true friends of the Kurdish people.
We used the Kurds for our political...
We needed the Kurds to have a base in Syria to facilitate the anti-Assad strategies that we had to help suppress ISIS, although I have to laugh at the notion of suppressing ISIS since we have an al-Qaeda,
ISIS, jihadi in control of Syria right now, Jolani.
So it just makes no sense.
He has a $10 million bounty on his head still by the United States.
A $10 million bounty from the State Department on his head and runs or ran an organization denominated as a terrorist organization, which means if you provide material assistance to it, you can be indicted, even though obviously the CIA provided material assistance to it.
You can't make it up.
Well, no, but we can.
Remember the Kurds that we support, Judge?
Or the YPG, which is an affiliation of the PKK, which is a terrorist organization recognized by the United States, Turkey, and others.
And how did we deal with that?
We renamed them.
We now call them the Syrian Democratic Forces.
So I'm sure at some point in time, we will be able to go in and rename HTS, and we'll call it the Syrian National...
And Jolani, you know, is wearing a suit instead of his jihadi and his beheading knife will be put away for the moment.
We are hypocrites and we'll make compromises like this.
But I don't see him long for power.
This was accidental.
He wasn't supposed to take Damascus.
He was supposed to stop at the M4 highway.
Nobody anticipated the collapse of the Syrian army.
Not him, not the Russians, not the Iranians, not the United States, not Turkey, not anybody.
When he rolled into Damascus, he did that on his own, and everybody's been playing catch-up ever since.
But eventually, the powers that will be, he's not going to be there for long, because he can't.
I mean, you can't have an al-Qaeda operative as the head of a government over what used to be called the...
What would he actually be the head of, given the Israeli and Turkey division of Syria into their own lands?
Well, I mean, I think what you're probably going to see is that it's going to be difficult for Turkey to directly annex these lands.
I think what Turkey is going to do over a period of time is turn them into sort of a protectorate.
And they will get...
You know, they will get a status, and then what Turkey will do is seek to promote autonomy, and that at the appropriate time, Turkey will seek the whole referendum that will then absorb these territories.
I don't see Turkey turning around and just doing a land grab right now, but we are looking at a process that could drag out for a decade or so before Turkey begins to start acquiring.
But again, Erdogan has articulated in a He sees Raqqa, which is the area to the east of Aleppo, where Kurds are.
He sees that becoming a Turkish protectorate territory.
Aleppo and Idlib, both where Turkey has raised its flag.
Hama, the historical center of Assyria and down to Damascus.
There's that old Chinese curse, or at least what's alleged to be a Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times.
Without a doubt, we live in interesting times.
How has al-Julani become a media darling?
The CIA did this.
He has been...
The Turks have been propping him up and building him up as a leader, but when this offensive began, you had a CNN crew come in and do this interview.
It's a purely scripted interview, carefully coordinated between CNN and the CIA together with the Turks.
It's like a PR campaign.
You're just going to basically redefine this guy.
He's going to get a new identity.
I used to behead people, but that was my bad boy phase.
I'm in my good boy phase now.
He is what he is.
Al-Qaeda is Al-Qaeda.
You're never going to change who he is or what he is.
He's a beheader.
But he's being changed into something different by the CIA to sell this to the American people.
Because the American people thought about this for a moment.
This guy has the blood of Americans on his hands.
And yet, we're going to let him be the head of Syria.
He has a $10 million bounty on us, but for a reason.
For a reason.
We didn't just come up and do it.
I mean, Hassan bin Laden had a $27 million bounty.
This guy's got $10 million.
He's not small fish.
And yet, here he is.
He's the head of Syria, and we've got this whole make good.
Look at the British.
The British arrested Richard Medhurst and others for daring to tweet things about, you know, Hmm.
What Becomes of Iran now.
What do they do?
They're confronting a new American president who was determined to disrupt their development of nuclear weapons, a newly emboldened Netanyahu.
Iran may very well be America's next war of choice.
Well, I'm hoping that it's not.
In the West, in the United States especially, we tend to denigrate the concept of Iranian democracy.
But Iran is a democratic state.
It's run differently than ours.
You know, we don't have political parties and, I mean, they don't have political parties and, you know, the DNC and RNC doing the money thing and AIPAC controlling it.
You know, they have different power centers.
They have the Guardian Council that runs all the candidates through in terms of their ability to govern from an Islamic perspective.
But you also have to pass through the Expediency Council, the Assembly of Experts and the consultations that are had with the Supreme Leader about What direction do they want this country to go?
Because it is, after all, a theocracy with a heavy democratic presence.
This president passed through all those wickets, and this is a reformist president.
And the reason why he got elected is because the powers that be recognize that there is a growing desire inside Iran for reform, meaningful reform, not just economic but social.
And he made a decision early on that he's not seeking confrontation.
This is a different president than President Raisi, who died in a helicopter accident last May.
This is a president that is openly seeking to reestablish relations with the West.
This is a man who has gone on record saying that he was opposed to the...
Operation True Promise 2, the Iranian ballistic missile attack against Israel, that he didn't want it to go on because he was in the midst of discussions, negotiations with the European Union about lifting sanctions.
And this attack happened and those discussions ended.
He's not happy with the aggressive posture taken by previous administration of Raisi and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command.
So in many ways, he may view this setback in Syria as an opportunity.
To pave the way for meaningful discussion with the United States about how to exchange Iran's nuclear program for the lifting of sanctions and the normalization of relations.
Maybe not diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran.
That's a little too much of an ask.
But basically for the United States to back away from its policy of regime change.
Donald Trump has said this in the lead up.
To his election, he said, I'm not seeking regime change.
I'm seeking the betterment of relations, normal economic relations.
And I think there's a window of opportunity now for this.
And this new president is empowered by the fact that the IRGC is on its back feet, having suffered this setback in Syria.
And I don't think there's an appetite for a Full-scale war with either Israel or the United States or both.
I think the Iranian people have said, we want peace.
We want better economic opportunities.
And that can only come with the sanctions being lifted.
And what you need to do to lift those sanctions, you probably need to do.
And that could be the better deal.
Remember, when Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA back in 2018, he didn't say, I'm doing this because I want to take down Iran.
He said, it's a bad deal.
I'm looking for a better deal.
I think we have a window of opportunity for Iran and the United States to negotiate a better deal.
Will the appetite that Netanyahu has to destroy parts of Iran, whether it's their nuclear capability or their government or whatever he wants to destroy, is that exacerbated or will he dial it back?
I think if the United States can eliminate Iran's nuclear program through negotiations, basically, you know, what Trump would probably seek is a JCPOA without the sunset clauses.
The sunset clauses are those clauses that took Iran from a controlled environment that kept them one year away from a breakout scenario where they could have nuclear weapons.
Today, they're literally three to five days from having a nuclear...
Well, why should Israel have nuclear weapons and not Iran?
You know, that's a good question, but that's a reality that complicates this.
You're not going to get Israel to agree for a quid pro quid.
You know, there was a window of opportunity.
If Syria hadn't fallen and Netanyahu was in a political bind and his government collapses, it appears it was on the way to before this miracle.
You know, and then a new Israeli government came in and...
They had to work towards a Palestinian state under pressure from the world.
There may have been an opportunity to get the normalization of relations between Israel and the rest of the Arab world for trading the Israeli nuclear program with the Iranian program, etc.
But today, Israel is in too strong of a position.
They're going to get everything they want from the Arab world because the Arab world always caves.
And they don't have to give this up.
But what you can do is, because it's a force of deterrence, By eliminating Iranian nuclear program, you can make the Israeli nuclear capability moot, meaning there's no reason for it to exist and you can maybe try to deal with it at a later time.
But I think right now what needs to happen is a new nuclear deal that permanently puts in conditions that keep Iran from breaking out a one-year scenario.
They're going to have to dismantle many of these centrifuges, allow very stringent inspections.
I imagine to turn this into a treaty that's ratifiable before the U.S. Senate, that many of these inspectors will have to be American citizens, something the Iranians have said they won't accept.
But I think we're dealing with a new reality right now because, as I remind people, when Donald Trump was president, he not only changed the...
Nuclear posture of the United States to one that embraced the concept of nuclear preemption, but he changed the employment plan specifically to adapt capabilities for a nuclear war against Iran.
So we are locked, cocked, and ready to go for a nuclear war with Iran, and the president who made that part of our policy is coming back into power, and he has said, I'm taking out the Iranian nuclear program.
So if I'm an Iranian president, I have two choices.
I can either ask the Supreme Leader to make the political decision that we become a nuclear power.
And the second they announce that, American nuclear weapons will be raining down on Iran.
We're not going to wait for day two.
Not with this president.
Not with Donald Trump.
Or he can say, we can find a way to trade this nuclear capability.
For the best deal possible in terms of getting sanctions lifted, getting our economy back on track, etc.
And I think most rational people would choose the second course of action.
Was the defeat of Syria, was the destruction of Syria a strategic defeat for Russia?
I mean, it complicates Russia's position.
But remember, Russia didn't go into Syria as part of imperial expansion ambitions.
Russia's not the United States.
They didn't invade Syria.
They didn't occupy Syria.
They were invited into Syria to stabilize a situation that threatened the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian government had been since Cold War times.
An ally of Russia, friends of Russia.
Relations had strained somewhat during the post-Cold War period, the 90s, etc.
There was no Russian military of all.
But when the forces of Islamic fundamentalism, including those who are in control of Baghdad today, threatened Damascus back in 2014-2015, Qasem Soleimani,
the head of the Iranian Quds Force, flew to Moscow and met with the Russians.
And said, you have to help us save Bashar al-Assad.
It's in the strategic interests of the region for stability.
And Russia concurred.
They sent this limited expeditionary force who succeeded in their mission.
But since then, you know, their mission can only be defined by that which the Syrian government will tolerate.
And so their mission continued to be to prop up, to defend.
You know, the Syrian government.
Indeed, when the HTS, the Turkish-backed al-Qaeda affiliates launched their offensive on November 27th, the Russian Air Force flew into action and launched very effective airstrikes.
But after a while, it became apparent that the Syrian army just wasn't fighting, and there was no reason to continue supporting that which didn't want to be supported, so the Russians stopped.
Now the question is, what...
What legitimate purpose does the Russian presence have in Syria?
Again, they didn't invade and occupy this.
They don't want to be the unwelcome guests of Syria.
And it appears right now that that's what they've become.
So Russia will withdraw, I believe, the totality of their forces or leave a very small capability.
And this diminishes their position.
But again, their position was never that of where they were using Syria as a...
What is there to stop Netanyahu from capturing as much Syrian territory as he wants?
Nothing.
Just Netanyahu.
It's up to Israel to make a decision how far they want to push this.
Right now, they've got a strategic victory right now.
It's a victory that nobody in Israel had predicted, I believe.
I think this took everybody by surprise.
They weren't ready for the sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad.
And so there's a little bit of a vacuum.
In terms of, you know, policy.
So they're making it up as they go along.
And there's always a tendency to, you know, maybe bite off more than you should when the opportunity presents itself.
But here, some restraint would be advised for Israel.
Get a hold of those.
You know, again, I'm not in favor of this.
Just the opposite.
But if I were advising the Israelis, I'd say pick those strategic points that you think you need to have, Mount Hermon, some of the water basins, and establish your control over that.
But don't go so far as to provoke a conflict with the new Syrian government, Jolani, the Turks, or anybody else.
Don't overplay your hand.
Does any portion of the old Syria remain for al-Jolani to be the head of the government of?
I mean, Damascus and the regions around it?
Well, he controls Idlib.
He controls Aleppo.
He controls Hama, Homs, Damascus.
He controls the vast bulk of that which defines Syria.
The Turks are moving on to Raqqa.
Out west is, you know, is where the Americans are, or out east.
There's some American presidents in Al-Tamf, you know, that are there, but, you know, that's in relatively unpopulated desert territory.
Jolani controls the vast majority of the population centers.
He even controls Latakia, where, you know, it's the Alawite homeland of Bashar al-Assad.
His forces basically control the vast majority of that which we call Syria.
Fascinating conversation, Scotty.
Thank you very much.
I hope we can squeeze one more in before Christmas, even though next week is a short week.
But thanks very much for your time.
All the best.
Okay, thank you.
You're welcome.
Coming up at 3 o 'clock this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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