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April 7, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:57
AMB. Charles Freeman : Donald and Bibi Need a War
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, April 8th, 2025.
Ambassador Charles Freeman joins us now.
Ambassador, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
Ambassador, what was gained, in your view, militarily by the two weeks of bombings, U.S. bombings in Yemen?
Not very much, if anything.
The Yemenis, quite predictably, have held their ground.
After all, we've been bombing them directly or indirectly for 10 years.
They are indomitable.
They have not halted their land-based blockade of the Red Sea.
Shipping is not going through that passage in any great quantity these days.
And the American Navy, the aircraft carrier and accompanying The ships are under Yemeni attack.
So far, fortunately, without serious consequences.
Have the Yemenis killed any American servicemen or women or seriously damaged any American commercial?
I don't know if there's any American commercial, but you could tell me American commercial or American military vessels.
I think there's been some damage to the vessels, but I'm not aware of anyone being killed.
We're killing people, of course.
But the Yemenis have been very consistent.
They have done this, they say, in response to the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing elsewhere, when those activities were suspended by Israel briefly.
Before Israel decided to break the ceasefire and return to it, the Yemenis suspended their blockade.
So I don't think anybody on our side has been seriously injured.
I think we would hear about it if that happened.
Here's the Secretary of Defense yesterday on this topic.
Let me know what you think.
Cut number three, Chris.
It's been a bad three weeks for the Houthis.
And it's about to get worse.
It's been a devastating campaign, whether it's underground facilities, weapons manufacturing, bunkers, troops in the open, air defense assets.
We are not going to relent.
And it's only to get more unrelenting until the Houthis declare they will stop shooting at our ships.
And we've been very clear, the Iranians as well, they should not continue to provide support to the Houthis.
And that message has been made very clear.
So we have a lot more options.
Well, it's interesting to watch the reactions of the body language of Marco Rubio and Vice President Vance.
I don't think they were convinced by that braggadocio.
And I don't think it can be taken seriously.
Here's the fundamental problem here.
We have a tendency to evaluate.
War in terms of the damage done by bombing.
But the purpose of war is to change the minds of others, as Secretary Hegsath indicated.
And there's no change in the attitude of others.
And there's no indication that relentless bombing is doing anything but running up a bill of over a billion dollars, apparently, for this operation, which is not achieving anything.
And I would add, it is in a cause which the entire world condemns.
That is, in support of genocide in Gaza.
The Houthis are on the right side in this case, in world opinion, and we are not.
I wonder if he even...
I get the exaggeration.
I even get the lying.
But what is he talking about when he says troops in the open?
I mean, the Houthis don't...
Wear military uniforms, as I understand.
I don't know what he means by that.
Pepe Escobar, who was there before, during, and after the bombing, says all they've done is destroyed civilian infrastructure.
Yeah, I think that's basically correct.
There's a common theme here when we go to war with other people who don't have air forces or significant air defense, and that is...
That we describe the enemy as hiding in the ranks of civilians and using human shields.
But the fact is that the civilians in the military are one and the same.
You know, they're armed civilians and all Yemenis are armed.
They always have been.
So I'm not sure what he's talking about either.
Last night he posted on, I don't mean to pounce on him, you know, I've known him for a long time.
We worked together for 10 years.
At Fox, if I were in the Senate, I would have voted against his confirmation, notwithstanding the consequences from the White House, but whatever.
Here's what he said last night on X. Thank you, Mr. President.
Coming soon.
The first trillion dollar Defense Department budget.
Good God, is this something to boast about?
A trillion dollars?
More money for them to waste and not account for?
Well, I can remember a comment by a prominent Republican politician, whom I will not name, who said that our Defense Department should really be renamed the Offense Department, because we don't really have a defense of our homeland in place.
We are on the offensive everywhere.
And the Defense Department budget is not calculated to deal with threats.
It is basically a form of military Keynesianism.
It's treated by the Congress as a jobs program.
That is why when the Defense Department does, on a rare occasion, try to get rid of a weapons system, the congressional representatives from the districts where it is made object and force the Defense Department to accept more of the stuff it doesn't want.
So this is not anything to boast about.
It is, of course, as we all know, not the whole universe of military spending.
On top of the Defense Department budget, there is probably another 40% of military-related spending that is in other budgets.
Department of Energy, various intelligence budgets, dual use programs like the National Air and Space Administration, NASA, the Veterans Administration, which spends $200 billion or more on taking
care of the wounded and disabled from previous wars, and so forth and so on.
So we're spending probably a trillion and a half
I don't think we're getting much security for that.
Will we ever reduce No one seems to know what the exact number is, somewhere between 800 and 900.
Foreign military bases that we have around the world?
Well, there's a question there which unfortunately we may have underscored if indeed we get into a war with Iran, notwithstanding the proposed talks on Saturday in Oman between Mr. Witkoff and the...
Iranian foreign minister, Mr. al-Haqqi, because if we get into a war with Iran, Iran is going to take out at least 10 of our bases in its immediate vicinity.
It has the capability, and we will discover that those bases, while they are in some sense an asset, enable us to project power, are also liabilities, targets, readily accessible to.
Why do we have 90,000 troops in the Middle East?
And how exposed are they?
You just intimated this.
should the United States go to war with Iran?
Well, basically, I'm sorry to say, this is a direct result of our failure to translate the military victory
In desert storm into a security arrangement in the Persian Gulf, we should have found a way to resume our previous practice of offshore balancing.
That is, we had some pre-positioned equipment in the region, we had a token presence, but we configured ourselves to be able to arrive in a time of crisis speedily, which is what we did.
With Desert Shield, the predecessor to Desert Storm.
Instead, we adopted in the Clinton administration an absurd policy of dual containment.
Instead of using Iraq to balance Iran as we had in the past, we decided we would balance against both on behalf of Israel.
That was our policy.
It was declared with no consideration at all in the...
In the broader government at that time by the White House.
And it has been a disaster.
Because ever since then, we have been stuck in the Gulf.
And we are an annoyance to the people on whose territory we camp.
We're just seeing the limitations of this presence with the fact that...
There are now six aerial refueling tankers, which had been in Qatar, in the guttery base called Al Udeid that we use for our operations in the region.
They've all gone to Diego Garcia.
Why? Because they're part of a preparation to attack Iran, and Qatar doesn't want to be part of any such war, nor does anybody else in the Gulf.
So we're there.
In large measure, because we've made policy mistakes.
We have not practiced what General William Tecumseh Sherman advised, which is that the purpose of war is to produce a better peace.
We did not produce a better piece.
Chris, I think you have not
if it's a post for the president.
There it is.
These Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack.
Oops! There will be no attack by these Houthis.
They will never sink our ships again.
Look at them in a circle.
They were gathered for the feast celebrating the end of Ramadan.
This is what Hegseth called troops in the open.
They were no more troops than you or I are.
there were males sitting down to have unarmed males sitting down to have a meal even though there's the circle in there the video is not
What demands has President Trump made on Iran, which our friend Alistair Crook has characterized as impossible to comply with without surrendering sovereignty?
Well, I think Alastair is absolutely correct.
The demands include dismantling all of Iran's missile forces, basically disarming.
This is in pursuit of an Israeli objective of reducing Iran essentially to the status of Syria, which has no ability to defend itself now, and which has only nominal sovereignty.
It can't make decisions on its own.
It is subject to the will of The White House has said that these will be direct talks.
The Iranian foreign ministry has said that they will be indirect talks.
talks, in other words, conducted presumably by an Omani mediator.
I hope they are direct talks because there's no evidence our envoy, Mr. Whitkoff, knows anything at all about Iran or the history of our relationship with it.
So, I think he needs to have a direct experience of contact with the Iranians.
He needs to hear.
Directly from them what their position is, what concessions they are prepared to make and what they are not prepared to make, and thereby achieve a more realistic posture than the one that we have outlined in public, which is essentially an effort to humiliate Iran and,
as Alistair said, strip it of its...
Do you know if Marco Rubio does any of this negotiating or is he just the...
Figurehead to attend these formal occasions and Witkoff does the negotiating because people on this show, you, Alistair Crook, Colonel McGregor, Scott Ritter, while wishing Witkoff well,
have all been seriously critical of his basic ignorance of the history and of the geopolitics with which he is dealing.
Well, so far he has a batting average of zero.
I mean, he tried to arrange some sort of ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
That failed.
Israel did not honor that.
He's tried to entice the Russians into a ceasefire in Ukraine, despite the fact that...
We're basically calling for a ceasefire as Ukraine loses, which is not attractive to the Russians.
And we're only talking about a ceasefire, not about the broader issues that brought about this conflict there.
Now he's going to go to talk to Iran, presumably in Oman.
I don't know that Mario Rubio will be tagging along with him in this case.
I'm not sure.
But anyway, he's up against people with deep diplomatic experience and a very great knowledge of history and the record of interactions between the United States and their own government.
And while he's obviously a very intelligent fellow and very good at real estate transactions, that is not what he's engaged in here.
So there's an issue, and I would add that as this is going on, Mario Rubio's State Department is being gutted of talent, stripped of it.
A good example is a junior officer, a lawyer who joined the Foreign Service, our diplomatic service, four years ago has now been put in charge of all personnel decisions there.
in a position which is normally occupied by someone with years of experience.
This is a travesty, really.
So he doesn't have a support from the government.
The government is basically incapacitating itself as we speak, and the consequence is amateur hour does not have the benefit of seasoned advice.
Here's President Trump yesterday in the Oval Office saying a bad day for Iran could come if they won't sit down and talk with us.
Is the United States, under your leadership, ready to take military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear program and remove this threat?
I think if the talks aren't successful with Iran, I think Iran is going to be in great danger.
And I hate to say it.
weapon. You know, it's not a complicated formula.
Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
That's all there is.
You can't have it.
Right now we have countries that have nuclear power that shouldn't have it.
But I'm sure we'll be able to negotiate out of that, too, as part of this later on down the line.
But Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
And if the talks are successful,
I actually think it'll be a very bad day for Iran.
While saying that there are other countries that shouldn't have a nuclear power, seated next to the prime minister of a country which stole its nuclear know-how from the United States and illegally possesses nuclear power,
Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Well, that's not the only irony in these comments.
The National Intelligence Assessment.
Which came out a couple of weeks ago, once again reaffirmed that Iran does not appear to have a nuclear bomb program.
No decision by Iran is in evidence to pursue that.
What Iran is doing is pursuing nuclear latency, not building a bomb.
I agree that should be a matter of concern, but it's absurd to imagine that it has nothing to do with the nuclear weapons that Israel possesses.
Is it likely that Mossad is telling Prime Minister Netanyahu what the American intelligence community is telling President Trump, which is that the Iranians haven't had,
nor have they been working on since 2007, offensive nuclear capability?
Oh, I'm sure they are.
They have been doing that.
There's no daylight between Mossad and the CIA on this issue that I'm aware of.
And I would note that I was asked when I was ambassador to Saudi Arabia in probably 1992, which is quite a long time ago, I was asked to go brief the Crown Prince that Iran was two years away from a nuclear weapon.
I did that.
But many more years than two have gone by, and it still doesn't have a nuclear weapon.
I wonder if the initial question to President Trump was a plant.
Is the United States, under your leadership, ready to take military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear program and remove this threat?
There is no program, there is no threat, according to the CIA, and now you're telling me also according to Mossad.
Right. I don't know who asked that question, but it sounded like an Israeli journalist.
They were in a joint meeting with a press conference with the Israeli prime minister and the United States president.
I don't know who asked the question, but I think it was definitely planted, and it's part of this propaganda that has dominated our policies in the Middle East, in which the perpetrator is portrayed as the victim, the victim is portrayed as a perpetrator.
Various positions are attributed to other parties when they don't have them.
It's something that also affects our position in our policies in Ukraine, where much has been attributed to the Russians that they have never indicated they intended.
And so we're in a sort of Alice in Wonderland world these days in which, you know, Nothing is true and everything is plausible.
What is your guess as to what Prime Minister Netanyahu asked of President Trump in the two or three hours of their meeting before that joint press conference in the Oval Office?
Not about tariffs, but about war.
Well, I think military equipment is always high on the Israeli list.
I'm sure they talked about an attack on Iran.
That could be implied by what President Trump said in Mr. Netanyahu's presence.
But Mr. Netanyahu has nothing to complain about in terms of what the Trump administration is giving him.
We have an Israel-first policy, not an America-first policy in the Middle East.
We are doing Israel's bidding.
And as we speak, Judge, Israel has stepped up its bombing of Lebanon, Syria, and of course it is in control of about 50% of Gaza, and it's visibly and vocally carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
And in fact, to our great shame, our president agrees with this.
He sees Gaza as a real estate development opportunity rather than as a place.
Which has been a sort of concentration camp run by Israel, from which Israel now proposes to evict the inmates.
Right, right.
Yesterday, he referred again to the beautiful Gaza strip, not to aggravate you, but here is President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Well, you know how I feel about the Gaza Strip.
I think it's an incredible piece of important real estate.
The level of death on the Gaza Strip is just incredible.
And I've said it.
I don't understand why Israel ever gave it up.
Israel owned it.
It wasn't this man, so I can say it.
He wouldn't have given it up.
I know him very well.
There's no way.
They took oceanfront property and they gave it to people for peace.
How did that work out?
Not good.
They gave it away for good intention and it didn't work out that way.
I think what the president talked about is first of all to give people a choice.
Gaza, Gazans were closed in.
Any other place, including in arenas of battle, I mean whether it's Ukraine or Syria or any other place, people could leave.
Gaza was the only place where they locked them in.
We didn't lock them in.
They're locked in.
And what is wrong with giving people a choice?
Now, we've been talking, including over lunch, about some countries, I won't go into them right now, that are saying, you know, if Gazans want to leave, we want to take them in.
And I think this is the right thing to do.
You know, it's going to take years to rebuild Gaza.
In the meantime, people can have an option.
The President has a vision.
Countries are responding to that vision.
We're working on it.
I hope we'll have good news for you.
That is indeed stomach-turning, because it's a total distortion of history, and it basically aligns our president with genocide and ethnic cleansing.
That is now US policy, inspired by Mr. Netanyahu.
Giving people a choice is not what is happening.
People are being slaughtered.
And if they want to flee, we will apparently allow them.
And this business about other countries wanting to take people from Gaza, I wonder who they are.
I have not heard any such thing.
Well, there's a reason he won't give you a name, because there are no other countries.
What a perverse understanding of Gaza that the Israelis gave it to the Palestinians.
The Israelis stole The Palestinian land and the Palestinians fled to Gaza.
All right, this goes on and on and on, Ambassador.
I don't know, the last subject matter, how close do you think we are for war?
It's apparent that with the new Secretary of Defense and with the President wedded to Netanyahu at his hip, that we are preparing for war against Iran.
Yes, and I think Doug McGregor's analogy is absolutely correct.
He has compared this to the Austro-Hungarian Empire's ultimatum to Serbia after the Grand Duke was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914.
That ultimatum was not intended to produce a negotiation or a compromise.
It was intended to justify a declaration of war.
So when Serbia accepted nine of the ten Demands made by the Austrians.
The Austrians saw their refusal to accept the 10th as justification for an attack, which set off World War I, a horror that has unfortunately been repeated on several occasions since.
Thank you, Ambassador.
No matter what we talk about, it's a pleasure to be the beneficiary of your knowledge and your analysis.
Deeply appreciated.
Look forward to seeing you again next week.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Coming up later today at 1.30 this afternoon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
At 2 o'clock, Aaron Mate.
And at 3 o'clock, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.
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