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April 6, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
30:55
Scott Ritter : Is US War with Iran Imminent ?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, April 7th, 2025.
Scott Ritter joins us now.
Scott, before we get to war, the imminence, likelihood or not, of war between the United States and Iran, General Cavoli recently testified before Congress praising I don't know what is to be gained by this.
Is there any basis for such a statement?
We'll run the clip for you in just a minute.
I mean, I watched it, and I watched his testimony.
I think Kavoli, and I don't mean to denigrate him, but he is part of The pro-Ukraine establishment.
And he is committed to the cause of supporting Ukraine.
And right now, the most important thing for the Ukrainians is to have U.S. support continue.
Political support, financial support, military support.
In order to do that, you have to shape perceptions that Ukraine is a worthy recipient of this support.
You need to reverse the narrative of Ukraine floundering, Ukraine losing, Ukraine being defeated catastrophically, incursed, etc.
And so I think this is what Kavoli's statements are.
He is cherry-picking specific events and trying to create a unifying narrative that is positive in nature so that the Trump administration cannot just willy-nilly I think this
is a very political statement made by a general.
Chris, cut number 10, please.
Since then, you know the trajectory, sir.
They went from being basically Minutemen with javelins stopping a Russian invasion to being an organized force that is increasingly able to generate force.
In a reliable and predictable fashion, very difficult to do, especially on the fly.
It's taken a couple of years to get it going.
And they've developed a defense industry that is producing many of their own munitions right now.
In fact, I would say they're the world leaders in one-way attack drone technology.
World leaders in one-way attack drone technology.
What does that mean?
This is the FPV, or first-person viewpoint drones.
These are the...
Kamikaze drones that we see, the very inexpensive quad copters that have an RPG warhead or some explosive device attached to it with an impact fuse mechanism and a camera,
and they fly out there and they're hunting down the people.
If you look at the videos, these are the ones you see chasing people around.
Challenge General Kavoli and say, oh, the Russians are pretty good at it, too.
But I'm not going to denigrate the Ukrainians.
There are many places on the Russian battlefield today, on the Ukrainian-Russian battlefield, where the Russians cannot advance because the Ukrainians have flooded it with hundreds of these drones.
I mean, there's videos out there that show, you know, Russian armored vehicles making a move forward.
And literally in the span of...
100 meters, they're hit by 2530 of these FPV drones.
You know, the Ukrainians flood the zone.
Now, the Russians are coming up with tactics to counter that, which focus on not so much shooting down the drone as finding the drone operator.
And the Russians become more and more capable in hunting down and killing the Ukrainian drone operations team.
But Kavoli has a point there.
The Ukrainians are...
You know, definitely in the top five, I'd say in the top two of this.
I will take umbrage at his depiction of the Ukrainian army and being Minutemen and today this.
I remind General Cavoli, and he knows this very well, that the United States and NATO took over the training of the Ukrainian military back in 2015.
We established the big training facilities in western Ukraine from 2015 until 2022.
We brag ourselves that we trained a battalion of Ukrainians every 55 days to NATO standards to move east to kill Russians.
We've been doing that since 2015.
So it's a little disingenuous for General Cavoli to erase that.
That history, to pretend that the Ukrainians started from scratch at the beginning of the war, Minutemen with javelins.
No, they were NATO-trained, NATO-equipped, NATO-standard military force then, which is one of the reasons why they were able to have the successes on the battlefield that they did have.
What is the status of the invasion in Kursk?
And is the United States intelligence community still targeting Russians and helping the Ukrainians aim at them?
I mean, the status is the Ukrainians are holding on to some...
If you take a look at the map, you'll have, you know, a line, then you have this pocket.
And the Ukrainians are dug into that pocket now, and the Russians are in the business of digging them out.
The Russians have also been instructed that you don't just stop at the border with Ukraine, that you have to push on through and create a buffer zone.
So what we're seeing right now is the Russians steadily moving forward, slaughtering the Ukrainians.
I mean, this is really...
It's mass murder, what's happening.
Ukrainians have shown a proclivity to defend in place until they die, and unfortunately, that's what they're doing in these tree lines, in these villages, in these fortified positions.
The Russians are just basically taking them down position by position in a very methodical fashion, a meat grinder operation that's killing...
Thousands of Ukrainians and the Russians are continuing to press forward.
It's not cheap.
The Russians are losing people as well.
I mentioned the armored vehicles that are getting sworn by these FPV drones and the Ukrainians are mass producing these drones and they are getting these units out to the battlefield and where they get these units out there, there is a period of time where the Russians,
their entire operation comes to a halt because you literally can't move without being Having one of these FPV drones come at you, and it's like a swarm of angry hornets, except these stings kill.
Is the RUS Intel still targeting Russians and telling the Ukrainians at whom and at what to aim and shoot?
I don't know.
To be honest, I don't know.
What I can say is this.
The Ukrainians anticipated that the US would be cutting intelligence, and the US intelligence providers anticipated that they wouldn't be able to provide the good stuff.
And so what the US did with Ukraine leading up to this was to create workarounds, commercially available imagery to replace American imagery, communication systems, analytical templates that allow The,
you know, targeting to continue to a degree.
So instead of, you know, let's say with the U.S., you get the 100% solution.
It's never 100%.
I'm just throwing that number out there arbitrarily.
With the workaround, what you're getting is about the 88% solution, meaning it's still good.
And I think that's what's happening right now is that the Ukrainians are employing a workaround developed with the intelligence, U.S. intelligence community that allows them to get any percent of what they would normally get.
But they're not getting the real good stuff from the United States, but they've learned to work around.
I mean, I can't really say that because I'm not on the targeting staff.
You know, clearly, the approach taken by U.S. Central Command is that we are in a campaign mode, meaning that we're not expecting to deliver the knockout blow every day, that we're bombing targets which are designed to be,
you know, in their cumulative impact to be either a deterrent or a disabling hootie.
I don't think we understand the totality of the Hootie capabilities, just like during the Gulf War, even though we diverted over 2,400.
Individual aircraft strike sorties into Western Iraq, even though we deployed two Delta Force squadrons, the British deployed two and a half SAS squadrons.
These are commandos on the ground.
Not a single launcher was destroyed.
Not a single missile was destroyed because we never understood what the Iraqis were doing.
I would say that we have a similar lack of clarity about the Houthi.
And what backs me up is that the Houthi continue to launch, that what we're doing is not having a debilitating impact on I think we're at the stage in the game where CENTCOM needs to re-evaluate what they're doing.
We're running out of precision-guided munitions.
We're expending a whole bunch of munitions by some counts over a billion dollars worth.
These are hard to produce.
We're expending them quicker than we're replacing them.
More importantly, we're expending them against a target set that, in the grand scheme of things, We shouldn't be absorbing this much precision-guided munitions.
You know, we would need these, for instance, if we're going to have a big shooting war with Iran.
We would need these if we're going to be fighting the Chinese over Taiwan.
And we're depleting our stocks going after the Houthi in an unsuccessful so-far effort.
Both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump have some self-inflicted domestic ones.
Netanyahu's are criminal, Trump's are economic.
I'm wondering if, I'm going to use the favorite line of our mutual friend Gerald Salanti, when all else fails, they take you to war.
I wonder if, as we are taping this segment, and as it's airing live, while Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump are meeting in the Oval Office, if they're not planning and plotting a war on Iran.
How imminent do you believe a war on Iran, Israel plus the U.S. against Iran, is?
Well, there's no doubt in my mind that the Israelis are going to make a very forceful case for accelerating a military strike against Iran, if for no other reason to provide domestic political diversion to the trials and tribulations of Benjamin Netanyahu.
But the fact is the United States isn't looking for a fight with Iran.
And we see the evidence accumulating on a daily basis.
The Trump administration has said up front that it's not looking for a broader conflict in the Middle East.
Now, let's for a moment hold our nose at the Houthi issue and also hold our nose over what's going on in Gaza.
The big war would be the war with Iran.
This would make the other two pale in comparison.
Trump, you know, although having said that, said that the Iranians have to make some changes.
He talks about the maximum pressure campaign to get Iran to yield, not just on the issue of nuclear capabilities, but also on ballistic missiles and support to the Houthi, support to other regional actors.
And then he sent a very aggressive letter to the Iranian leadership that was rejected by the Iranians.
Now, there's a couple ways to look at this.
One, this is just ham-fisted diplomacy.
Two, it's a very clever move because I think Trump realizes that direct negotiations between the United States and Iran are impossible.
Trump likes to be in control of negotiations, and the Iranians are just not going to allow him to take control.
And to dictate, you know, the pace, the content and the outcome.
But Trump also realizes a void of negotiations.
There will be a war that he doesn't want to fight.
And so what he did is he opened the door for, you know, what they call third party negotiations.
And the Iranians turned around and said, we're open to that.
We're ready to meet with.
You know, third parties, but not the United States.
We won't meet with the United States directly until which time the United States softens its tune.
But the United States isn't going to soften its tune until there's a deal to be made.
And Trump further opened the door by saying, all I'm interested in is nuclear.
You resolve the nuclear issue, and we can talk about lifting sanctions and getting Iran back into, you know, the family of nations.
And what has happened?
This week, Russia and China...
Are going to be meeting with the Iranians to talk about the nuclear issue.
Furthermore, the Director General of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, is going to be going to Iran to talk about the nuclear issue.
The negotiations that Trump says had to happen to satisfy the United States are taking place, but they're being done through third parties, through Russia, through China.
Through the IAEA.
I think we're actually on a path towards conflict avoidance, as opposed to simply being the rubber stamp for further Israeli aggression.
Are you saying that Donald will tell Bibi, no, we're not going to help you attack Iran?
Well, he's told him that before, straight up.
And that's the official policy of the United States.
It's been that during...
The previous Trump administration, it's that during the Biden administration.
We're not here to go to war for Israel.
The Houthi conflict, even though technically it's about Israel, because it could be solved in Israel, it's about international shipping.
The justification for what we're doing against the Houthi can be separated from the Israeli context.
But with Iran, we have...
I've told the Israelis over and over and over again that we're not going to facilitate your attack against Iran.
That if you want to bomb them, you're on your own.
But the Israelis know that they can't succeed without American involvement.
And Trump has said, we're not doing that unless there's a reason.
And that reason has been articulated now as Iran being a nuclear weapons threshold state.
And if Iran doesn't resolve that issue...
If Iran refuses to cooperate to find a way to get rid of its 60% enriched uranium and the advanced centrifuges that can turn that into, you know, physical material is sufficient for three to five bombs within a period of weeks.
Not my assessment.
It is my assessment.
But these are statements made by senior Iranian officials.
I mean, the Iranians have dug their own grave here by committing to being a nuclear weapons threshold state.
That's unacceptable, both in terms of the, you know, the letter and...
What did the American intelligence assessment recently say about Iran and nuclear weapons?
That they haven't been working on ones since 2007?
What the U.S. intelligence community said is that there is no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.
They said that the 2007 intelligence estimate that says that Iran stopped its nuclear program in 2003 is still valid.
That means that whatever we thought we identified in 2003 as being an organized effort to build a nuclear weapon, that was dismantled.
That's the assessment.
The other part of the assessment is that the Iranian leadership has made a political decision not to have a nuclear weapon.
Both these statements are true.
What I'm saying...
Which is also true, is that Iran is a nuclear threshold state, because there are things that you can do within the framework of the NPT that take you right up to the cusp of being a nuclear weapons state without being in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
For instance, the accumulation of 60% enriched uranium, which is one enrichment cycle away from being weapons-grade uranium, is not prohibited under the NPT.
But Iran has no viable justification under its identified peaceful nuclear energy program for the existence of 60% enriched uranium.
There's no reason for it to exist other than being one step away from weapons grade.
That means that Iran is admitting that it has it here because if need be, they can convert it into weapons-grade uranium.
That's unacceptable.
That's not something that the NPT can tolerate.
The United States won't tolerate it.
Israel won't tolerate it.
But I believe Trump is looking for a negotiated way out of this mess.
And the important thing is Iran seems to be looking for one as well.
Didn't President Trump also demand that Iran get rid of or dismantle certain long-range missiles?
He did, but then he softened it.
This is what I'm saying, that one of the indicators that Trump seems to be looking for a viable negotiated settlement is that he is backed off of every demand save the nuclear.
He recently made a statement at a press conference where he said, no, all we're looking for is the nuclear.
Well, if all we're looking for is the nuclear, it shouldn't be a problem.
But if Trump wants them to abandon the concept of sovereignty to the point where they can't defend themselves, and they have not far from them a maniac who slaughtered 50,000 Palestinians and now wants to start slaughtering Iranians...
Why would they give up offensive ballistic missiles?
They're not going to, and Trump understands that, and that's why he's backed off on that.
The United States is no longer formally asking for, as a condition to the end of this crisis, Iran to dismantle its ballistic missile capabilities.
Trump has committed that his sole focus right now is the nuclear issue.
If Trump changes his mind...
And Netanyahu persuades Trump to aid an Israeli attack on Iran militarily.
Do you expect that Beijing and Moscow would sit back and watch or they would do something about it?
Well, again, I'm not here to speak on behalf of either Russia or China.
They're sovereign nations that get to make their own foreign policy.
Both in terms of historic precedent and in terms of existing treaty relationships, neither Russia nor China is in a position to provide meaningful military assistance to Iran.
Neither one has the forces capable of being projected in a sustainable fashion into the conflict.
China definitely doesn't have anything that they can bring to bear on this.
Russia is, of course, knee-deep and chest-deep in Ukraine and, you know, literally has –
Doesn't have the ability or the desire to divert resources to Iran.
This is why I think both Russia and China are meeting with the Iranians saying, look, there's nothing we can do here.
If you wave this red flag in front of the American bull, he is going to gore you to death.
So what we need to do is get this red flag out of your hand.
And I think that's the direction we're heading.
If Trump listens to his golf buddy Lindsey Graham, please, Lord, don't, but it could happen.
He's listened to him in the past and attacks Iranian oil refineries.
Won't that have a radically negative effect on China?
Absolutely. This will be for China and India and Europe.
This will be devastating to global energy security.
The Chinese, who are extremely dependent upon Saudi oil and oil coming from the Middle East, will be devastated.
Their economy will literally cease to function.
The same thing with India.
They desperately need this oil.
Europe would be in the entire world.
I think the two places that would probably walk away relatively...
Even though there would be some negative downside, would be the United States and Russia, both of whom are virtually self-sufficient when it comes to energy production.
But the United States is more thoroughly integrated into the global energy economy than Russia is.
And so we would pay a heavy price, too, with high energy prices, at least until we found a way to separate ourselves from that.
And then there's just the cascading impact that has on just about every aspect of Yeah, this would be horrible for China.
It's the last thing they want, which is, again, remember, for the first time, the Chinese now are actively involved in working with the Iranians to resolve critical aspects of the nuclear standoff between the United States and Iran.
China has been involved in the past.
Of course, they're part of the JCPOA.
But China always sort of took a supporting role, a back seat.
Here, China's taking a leading role.
And I think that's reflective of the fact that they understand the consequences of failure here.
Do you think that Prime Minister Netanyahu is ruthless or desperate enough to wage a major assault on Iran alone without the United States military supporting him?
No, I think that would be suicidal for him.
As our good friend, or at least my good friend, Professor Mirandi, has pointed out, Iran is sitting on 3,000 to 5,000 rockets, ballistic missiles, that can be used to destroy Israel,
literally, as well as regional bases, regional oil production, American bases in the region.
Israel lacks the capacity to launch a decapitating blow, a knockout blow.
They can't do any of this.
And the other thing that happens is if Israel attempts a strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure and they use conventional weapons, they won't be able to destroy it.
Which means now, as the Iranians have said, you hit our nuclear sites, we will build the bomb.
Which means now Israel's in danger of existential...
If Iran were to deploy nuclear weapons, which means now what?
Israel is going to use nuclear weapons?
Concept of the Israeli nuclear program is to be deniable, to say, no, we don't really have it.
We're not really admitting to it.
To come out and use nuclear weapons would be a radical departure.
It would put the United States in an extraordinarily difficult situation where Israel is violating every law we have on the books, every international law.
They should become the enemy of America, the enemy of the free world.
The political consequences of this, and there's no guarantee that Israel will be able to deliver these weapons the way they want to.
Israel would be foolish to engage Iran on its own because it would lead to the destruction of Israel, which is why Israel needs the United States.
Only the United States has the capability, or at least the potential, to deliver.
A decapitation blow, a blow that can eliminate Iran's nuclear infrastructure on day one, and a blow that could eat into Iran's ballistic missile inventory by collapsing or destroying many of these underground missile factories.
We have sufficient weaponry designed for that purpose.
But again, it would require the United States to break the nuclear taboo that's been in place since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I've said that Russia and China probably won't intervene militarily.
But what will happen is if the United States breaks the nuclear taboo, Russia and China will take advantage of that to maneuver the United States into global isolation.
We will become, by definition, the most evil nation in the world today because we will be guilty of reintroducing weapons that...
The whole world decided it should never again be used.
And now if we use them or we allow the Israelis to use them, we are the bad guys.
But I don't think Trump's thinking in those terms right now.
I think that Trump knows that if he is going to strike Iran, and again, I hope that it doesn't happen, but if he is going to, he has to take out nuclear facilities that can only be taken out by using...
Low-yield American nuclear weapons.
We have 90,000, 90,000 troops in the Middle East.
How vulnerable are they?
If Iran were to launch a preemptive strike and get away with it, meaning that we didn't detect it and preempt their preemption, depending on the force allocation, because remember, Iran wants to keep something in reserve, but if Iran does a preemptive strike, they could do a tremendous amount of damage to...
To Americans, we could lose thousands of Americans.
It could be a death toll worse than Pearl Harbor, a death toll worse than 9 /11.
And why do we have 90,000 troops there?
Well, because we have for many decades viewed the Middle East as one of the critical regions of the world.
You know, we maintain a naval presence in the Persian Gulf.
We continue to maintain the ability to project power into Iraq.
So we have Ford basing in Kuwait.
We have air, you know, a major CENTCOM headquarters, Ford, in Al-Adad Air Base in Qatar.
We have bases throughout Syria and Iraq that we use as part of our anti-ISIS efforts.
You know, we have these facilities in there because we view the Middle East as our backyard.
We've done so, just so you know, this isn't just a purely Trump thing.
This is something that, you know, the Carter Doctrine initiated back in 1979 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Jimmy Carter created what we called the Rapid Deployment Force.
It later morphed into U.S. Central Command.
But we basically said that we will become the police force of this region.
This is one of the reasons why we ended up going to war against Iraq in 1991, because when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, they threatened regional and global energy supplies.
It's not just Iraq, a major oil producer in its own right, suddenly took over Kuwait, making it one of the largest producers.
They threatened the eastern Saudi oil fields, or at least we could.
And initially, George Herbert Walker Bush said it's about the oil.
And when the American people went, no, we ain't going to war for oil.
Then he changed it and said, well, it's really because Saddam Hussein is the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler.
The Americans went, oh, well, then we got to kill Hitler.
But, you know, it was really all about oil.
And that's what it's been about forever.
This is about energy security.
This is about securing.
One of the major oil and gas producing regions of the world, which is absolutely essential for the functioning of the global economy.
And this is why we have American troops there.
Scott Renner, thank you, my dear friend.
I appreciate deeply your vast knowledge and letting me take you all across the board with the questions.
All the best.
We look forward to seeing you again next week.
Okay. Thanks for having me.
You're welcome.
Coming up tomorrow at 8 in the morning, Ambassador Charles Freeman.
At 1.30 in the afternoon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
At 2 o'clock in the afternoon, Aaron Maté.
At 3 in the afternoon tomorrow, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.
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