All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 23, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:30
[SPECIAL] Matt Hoh : On the Futility of War
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
We know the history of military conflict in Afghanistan.
Long years of floundering and ultimate failure.
We're not gonna repeat that mistake.
2002, Donald Rumsfeld dictates out a memo saying, How are we gonna get out of Afghanistan?
And he ends it with one word.
Help, exclamation point.
Completely at odds with what the public have been told.
Privately, people who are saying this war was a total disaster.
But we offered anonymity to people who couldn't speak the truth publicly.
We were never going to proceed.
This isn't gonna work.
The White House says we're winning the war, but in these interviews it's clear we're not winning.
We are winning winning.
Winning this war.
What officials were under pressure to report only good news?
This goal is achievable.
But people knew the war could not be won.
Every measurable activity is failing.
*music*
We're spending 300 million dollars a day for 20 years.
25% is being stolen in it.
It's ending up in the hands of the insurgents.
Corruption, bribery, stealing.
And the embassy said, Oh, don't go down that road.
Don't go down that road.
How about fixing the problem?
There was this exaggeration after exaggeration of what we accomplished, and it went all the way up to the president.
We have liberated village after village.
We broke the Taliban's momentum.
We are winning responsibly, deliberately and safely.
They're lying to you.
They didn't care about what the reality of this war was.
They cared about whether or not their narrative is going to be upset by somebody speaking to the press.
Sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.
I don't want to be quoted on this.
I don't want to be quoted on this.
I don't want to be quoted on this.
And we'll talk to you about that uh fascinating, captivating uh film that you're uh involved with soon.
But before we get to it, and before we get to the futility of war, particularly uh the futility of the war in Afghanistan, your thoughts on the now near universal recognition of a Palestinian state.
Is this substantive or just performative?
I I like Judge Russell, it's great to be back with you.
It's it's good to see you and listening to you these last six months.
Uh all my colleagues as well.
Um I think Al is here.
Put it the best in a bit of a deadpan, uh dry, dark humor sort of way, with their headline.
Uh, a hundred and eight years after the Balfour Declaration, Britain recognizes Palestine.
You know, almost like an uh an onion uh type of satirical headline there.
Um, you know, I I think that's the reality of this.
For me, uh, I know others feel it has some weight, some merit.
Um, and I'm sure it does.
It is a slap in the face to the Israelis, but it is ultimately to me performative in many ways.
It plays into what the Israelis and many Americans and some Europeans want.
They want Fortress Israel, they want us versus them.
Uh, the idea of the world ganging up on Israel the world recognizing the enemy of the Israeli people, the Palestinians as a state, well, that fits into their cosmic or universal or or biblical understanding of the world in which they live as well as their obligations and their responsibilities.
So if anything, you know, one concrete thing that might come out of this is the annexation of the West Bank or Judah and Samaria, as uh you know the United States government in Israel calls it.
And so you know you have that type of uh aspect where uh is this going to play into the hands of those who just want to further escalate the situation as well as view uh the idea of a fortress Israel,
Israel against the world, of course, with the United States backing it as what is necessary in order to keep pace or to keep constant with the way the world order is supposed to be based upon biblical history, right?
I mean, so uh for me that that's what I come back to.
And of course the reality is it doesn't do anything, anything for the dozens of Palestinians murdered today by Israel, the dozens that were murdered yesterday, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm really in a place where I don't think uh anything will occur with Gaza other than the completion of the Israeli and the American plan for it.
And that for those of us who are invested in this who care about this, we have to start doing something about the West Bank now.
It's already a bit too late for that, but because what has happened in Gaza will happen in the West Bank, it won't look exactly as it did in Gaza, but it certainly will be very similar to the genocide we've seen in the last couple of years in Gaza.
Does the Netanyahu regime follow any moral standards or any acceptable body of international law?
No, I certainly know body of international law and their moral standards are their own again in line with their biblical understanding of who they are of the world of history uh the the the cosmic or universal ecology uh in which they exist uh so more morality wise for them it makes perfect sense you know this is a supremacist uh uh uh uh religious religious uh religious esque political agenda Zionism uh you know this is
the violence or action aspect of apartheid that we're seeing carried out here this is ethnic cleansing all based upon racial and religious superiority so within that there is a set of moral morality a set of codes that enforces uh the foundation that these people believe in why what they're doing is right and just and ultimately ordained by God.
So uh to them, yes, there is a morality but for those of us who are witnessing this uh there is nothing nothing moral about what's happening even if you can't understand why they're pursuing it well there's really no Palestinian no Palestine left to save is there I fear Judge that's the case with Gaza that we are going to be for the next couple of years witnessing the continual degradation of the people of Palestine in Gaza that we'll
talking about this next September, September after.
The whole plan is, as we've seen it laid out, they're very clear, they're overt about this, they're not hiding anything.
Push the Palestinians into concentration camps, into these tight little places.
Amawasi on the coast there, which many people are probably familiar with because that's supposedly the safe zone, even though Israel bombs it every day.
But there are a million people in Amaswi.
To understand how
a Maswi is it's for those of you who've been to Washington DC it's roughly I believe uh uh nine kilometers square so three kilometers by three kilometers or what's that 1.7 1.8 miles by 1.8 miles something like that right nine kilometers square that is the same space as from the capital through the Lincoln Memorial and tuck in the White House Browns you've got a million people living
in tents getting bombed every day on the coast With no water and no food, and that's where Israel wants them all to go to.
And so that's the plan.
We see the plan.
And eventually, maybe it's so bad that these people make a break through Egypt, or maybe something happens and Jordan lets them in, or maybe these ships show up and take them all to Madagascar to Ecuador or someplace like that.
That's the plan.
That's the hope that underlines this plan, this American-Israeli plan for Gaza, that will be carried out.
And if it just five years from now, they're still bombing people every day in these concentration camps in Israel.
Well, so be it.
You know, that's we know we didn't we didn't fulfill it the way we exactly wanted to, but it's good enough.
We've gotten most of Gaza and we've made the Gaza problem, the Gaza nuisance, into yeah, it's a drag, but it's something that we can manage.
And of course, the Israelis for the Israelis, uh, this includes Lebanon, includes Syria, includes Iran.
Their chief goal, their main objective has always been the West Bank.
And so we see as Israel pushes into Lebanon, they want to create a safe zone, they're going to destroy villages in Lebanon do that.
They say they've taken control over the southern third of Syria.
Uh, well, of course, issues with what we've seen happen with Iran.
All that is what would be called a shaping operation to make to get things in place, to get things in order so that when they begin the annexation of the West Bank, those problems or those potential problems that could emanate from those places are no longer there.
And of course, the West Bank, again, has always been their chief principal objective.
And so I think we'll we've already seen the annexation begin.
When I was there a year ago, you could see that the annexation was beginning.
But I think in the next few years, uh, what they will do is begin that annexation in the West Bank uh in fervor.
Uh, you'll see essentially Gaza-like operations in the rural parts, the destruction of the villages, the genocide, the cleansing of the people.
Uh, they've already put forward plans that say roughly only five Palestinian cities will exist, and those cities will just basically become besieged and they'll be left to die on the vine, and the door will be open to go into Jordan.
And again, the hope will be that these people take that exit.
And I believe that will be the plan that the Israelis and the Americans will carry out for the West Bank.
And we'll so we will see this.
We will have plenty of talk about, Judge, uh, for years to come, unless something changes.
And God help me, I don't know what that is, though.
Why did we fight the war in Afghanistan?
Oh gosh, Judge, that's a that's a long complicated question.
I mean, there are so many reasons for that war.
The way I like to describe it is say there's a family that has a favorite restaurant, and the father likes to go there because he likes the steaks, the mom likes the fish, uh, the son, the waitresses are good looking, so the son likes to go there.
There are so many compelling reasons, none of them good reasons, but compelling reasons for the war in Afghanistan to continue it, particularly in the months following 9-11.
You know, following 9-11, of course, uh the political uh realities for the George W. Bush administration, he had to take some type of military action.
Now, Al-Qaeda at that point, according to the FBI, was between 200 and 400 people worldwide.
So, does anyone think the invasion of a country that's been at war at that point in 2001, they've been at war for 25 years essentially, it would be a good idea to jump into the middle of a civil war.
But that's what we chose to do because that's what seemed to be the best thing politically for the Americans.
And then once that began, uh, whether it was the neoconservatives, uh, people like Zamek Khalazad, right?
Paul Wolfowitz, others who dominated the George W. Bush forum policy uh uh uh uh apparatus, uh, their uh their chance to see the their theories tested out for real.
Because remember, this is following the end of the cold war, and this is following the the publication, Judge of two really important books in the 90s Sam Huntington's uh Clash of Civilizations and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, which weren't things that predicted weren't books that predicted what Washington would think.
It was telling us what Washington was thinking.
The people in Washington, DC saw that they have won the Cold War, saw that our system was victorious, saw that we now have primacy and we could do whatever we want, not just address threats, but we could make history.
And so Afghanistan for the neoconservatives became a testbed to prove that.
And then of course, there's all the other more mundane but equally sickening and important reasons, such as the amount of money made off of the Afghan war.
Uh, You know, like in the clip, you you hear me say there, we spent 300 million dollars a day for 20 years on the Afghan war.
A lot of people got very, very wealthy.
So that inertia, right?
That and then it became an issue as well for the U.S. military.
We have lost the war on Iraq.
So what does Barack Obama do?
He escalates the war in Afghanistan.
This gives the U.S. military a chance to get a win because nobody's going to give the US military credit for Iraq, right?
That was Secretary of Defense Bob Gates.
Uh, that was his, as far as I understand, his primary reason for backing the surge in Afghanistan was to give the United States military a chance to make up for Iraq, right?
I mean, so you had all these different reasons that were percolating through Washington, DC that made it a good idea to go in, a good idea to stay, a good idea to escalate.
And of course, why we never got out was because President Obama simply didn't want to take the political risk of pulling troops out of a Muslim nation when there could be a Muslim guy who detonates a car bomb in Times Square.
So we're stay there the entire time out of domestic political concerns, and that's how it becomes America's longest war, ends up costing over uh two trillion dollars directly, uh, three and a half trillion dollars when you count the long-term costs of the war, whether it be continuing to pay for the debt we inherited from that war or paying for health care for guys like me, you know, it's gonna be three and a half trillion dollars for that war.
2,500 American soldiers were killed, at least 2,000 American contractors were killed, uh, the tens of thousands who were wounded.
And then of course, I even mentioned the horror that has befallen the Afghan people.
Uh the the what they went through those 20 years, and the fact that they're now saddled again with the Taliban.
Uh, you mean so uh the the reasons were uh were were all selfish, they were all greedy, they were all vingorious, uh, and they were multiple, and they all converged on a point that this makes sense for us to stay, even though we're losing, even though there's no chance for us to win, even though this hurts us in a myriad of ways, we're bankrupting ourselves, we're hurting our own people.
We're still waiting for the blowback that should come from that war, right?
So, yeah.
I'm going to um play another clip, uh, this one featuring you, but this movie is called The Body of Lies.
It premieres today, September 23rd on Paramount Plus.
It's Matt and his colleagues investigating America's 20-year war in Afghanistan and how the public was materially and substantially lied to by the government.
Chris.
Hold it up, come on, go, go, come on, come on.
Right there.
Hold it up, come on, go, officials were under pressure to report only good news.
So you've look on the latest assessment report, and you see, well, that district, it's colored that we control it.
But you go out to these small little outposts, and they're being a lieutenant, you know.
So a kid who's 23, 24, 25 years old, he'd have 30 or 40 American troops, maybe about the same amount of number of Afghan troops, maybe less.
And you'd ask them, what part of this district do you control?
And they'd say, I can control what's in the line of sight of my machine guns.
You know, that'd be a you'd hear that over and over and over again.
And you saw the impossibility of the tasks put to the US and NATO troops.
Sometimes the truth is so precious, it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.
I don't want to be quoted on this.
Did George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump know the truth?
Or was it kept from them?
That's a that's a really good question, Judge.
I I don't know about Bush.
Uh, I believe Obama understood it generally.
If you go and you look at what Bob Woodward reported about the decision making uh in Barack Obama's first year in office when the U.S. escalates the war, we can't forget how big of an escalation that was.
We went from having about 30,000 American troops, about 15 or 20,000 NATO troops, and uh roughly about uh 30, 40,000 contractors in Afghanistan in January of 2009 when Barack Obama comes into office, a year and a half,
there's 100,000 American troops, 40, 40 or 45,000 NATO troops, and 100,000 American contractors, many of them American, um, all working for the U.S., uh, were spending 120 billion dollars a year on the war at that point.
So we put a Barack Obama put a quarter million man army into Afghanistan and lost.
Now he in Wilbur's reporting, he pushes back on that plan very much.
And he gets seems as if he's boxed in, that he has no support.
And I I know this.
I know when when I would when I resigned, so people who aren't familiar with me, I was in Afghanistan in 09 during that escalation of the war.
I left, I resigned in protest over the escalation.
I got to know a lot of people who were also against it, which was pretty much everyone besides top senior leadership who all had their own reasons for wanting to see the war escalated, right?
Um, Hillary Clinton wanted to see it escalated because it was good politically, right?
Showed that when she wasn't in 2016, she'd be the Secretary of State and oversaw the United States win in Afghanistan, right?
Also, why she's so uh uh such a cheerleader for uh Libya and then for Syria.
I explained about Bob Gates before earlier.
Of course, generals uh like Dan Petra uh uh David Petraeus and Dan uh uh stan the crystal, uh, their vainglory as we know of them speaks entirely for why they want to see a war like that escalated.
And so I'd hear from the ambassador to Afghanistan, special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
So the president's civilian advisor on this at that time it was Richard Holbrook, the American ambassador was Carl Eichenberry, a former three-star American general who commanded in Afghanistan, you know, and they would say to me stuff like, Look, Matt, we go in there and we're not allowed to talk.
It's just a cheerleading squad for the escalation.
They're all so imbued with this idea of counterinsurgency and how we learned the lessons of Iraq and that this time are going to get it right.
And so in Woodward's reporting, he see he reports how Obama pushes back.
He says you talk about this counter Obama paraphrase him.
You you talk about this counterinsurgency and you say it's worked, but you can't show me anywhere it has worked.
And so Obama essentially gets boxed in.
And what's left out of Woodward's reporting, which is really important, I think that what the absence is critical, is any political conversation about the war.
So Woodward, if Woodward is reporting stuff that's classified in that book.
He's in the secure uh uh, you know, uh the tanks, as they were called, the secure uh uh conference rooms, right?
Uh, while these discussions are being had, but but where's the conversations between Obama and his chief of staff, Rammanuel, or his senior political advisor David Axelrot?
And we know though, through other reporting, as well as include, you know, this is why Obama leans so heavily into the drone strikes.
That again, as I said before, right?
If Mr. President, if you pull troops out of Afghanistan and a bomb goes off in LA, they're gonna blame you for it, and you're not gonna win in 2012, right?
And so that's that's what occurs, I think, to push the president at that time to make a decision he may not have wanted to make.
Now, I also know that the information that he was receiving was nothing like what I was saying, what others like me were saying, uh, what anyone you talk to who've been over there was saying, uh, you know, and I know this because Chuck Hagel, who became the Secretary of Defense, former senator, uh, former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I had to go in to the president's intelligence advisory board, which Hegel, along with former Senator Dave Borin chaired.
And the president's intelligence advisory board does exactly that.
Supposed to look at the information that the president's receiving and is this honest, real information that he's getting, or is it biased?
Is it political?
And that's what Hegel and Bourne wanted to know.
They they had me in there, I had to testify to them.
Why is the president getting stuff that is 180 degrees different than what you're saying and what we're hearing at that time, both Hegel and Bourne were at universities.
What we're hearing from all these captains and majors and lieutenant colonels from the Army and the Marine Corps and the Air Force who are coming through our schools and telling us what's really going on in Afghanistan.
How come that what the president is getting on his desk doesn't resemble at all what you are saying?
And I so I think those two things, the political as well as the deep state, if you want to call it that, the institutional aspects of this.
You know, I mean, these are uh uh these people who are running these institutions, and then the many of them who populate them, the career people in these NASA security institutions.
Um, well, look, I'll just put it this way, Judge.
You'll you you'll be uh I don't know if you saw this or not, but Dave Petraeus uh interviewed Achman uh Al Sharar, the Al Qaeda boss in charge of Syria now.
He interviewed him yesterday in New York at some conference, and among other things, General Petraeus said to Shirah, who used to be al Jalani when he ran the Al-Qaeda ban in uh in Syria.
I'm a big fan of yours.
So that gives you an idea of the type of people we're talking about here who are who who said to whom?
Petraeus said it to Sharar, I am a big fan of yours.
This is a murderous thug who killed Americans who Petraeus fought against.
Right.
This is an al-Qaeda leader who was in U.S. prisons in Iraq for five years for trying to kill American forces.
Who you know, so this is a type of people we have who are in power, right?
And they maintain that privilege, they maintain that access.
You know, they're gonna, I'm sure David Petraeus is on CNN or MSNBC multiple times again this week, right?
So it it's it's you know, it it goes beyond just the momentary aspects.
And that's why I think this film Bodyguard of Lies, and that expression comes from Winston Churchill.
He says, you know, as right as a as they quote Rumsfeld there, saying, you know, in wartime, truth is so precious it must be defended by a bodyguard of lies.
Churchill was talking about, yeah.
So don't say when the D-Day landing is gonna be.
You know, don't say where the D right, like that's the idea, not what these people came to believe that what they were doing was so precious, was so right, was so justifiable that the ends justify the means.
So very similar.
We were talking before about the morality of the Israelis.
The Americans have that same type of morality.
And it's often uh a very selfish, uh self-righteous, vainglorious type of morality, but it's one that they guide themselves on, and upon which they have these supposed principles and values.
I heard you talking to Ray McGovern yesterday, and you asked right about the rules-based order.
And Ray answered that very well.
That was a way, particularly for the Biden administration to justify what they were doing, to give themselves some type of righteousness, to give themselves some type of intellectual and moral credence as to their actions when in fact they were completely contradictory to any type of intellectual or moral integrity.
Right, right.
Matt, we have to go, but we'll pick up this conversation when it's convenient for you, hopefully, uh next week.
Uh, where can people see bodyguard of lies?
Um, Judge, it's on Paramount Plus uh starred streaming today.
So very easy.
Uh, you can if folks who don't have Paramount Plus, you can um do a free trial for a week.
I don't work for Paramount, so feel free to watch it and then get rid of your free trial as far as I'm concerned.
But I also want to give a uh uh I I do want to mention the filmmakers involved, Alex Gibney, the producer, uh uh Dan Krause, the director, Jigsaw Productions is their studio or their production firm.
These are men and women who've been working on this film for more than five years, and they put their heart and soul into it.
And the movie, uh, for a lot of us who are nerds about this, you'll learn things, but you won't be surprised.
But what I'm saying to people is get people who don't know a lot about that war to watch this, because it's an excellent, excellent entry into that war.
But then overall, why we talk about these things?
Why judge you and I and all our colleagues and most of the good folks who are watching this share the Same principles that war is a terrible, terrible decision.
Thank you, Matt.
God bless you.
You look great.
We look forward to seeing you again soon.
All the best.
Thanks, Judge.
And coming up later today on all of this, the futility of war, the slaughter of innocents in Gaza, and the naivete of the Americans in Ukraine at three o'clock, Colonel Karen Kwadkowski at four o'clock,
▲
Export Selection