March 2, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
35:17
Alastair Crooke : Trump's Dangerous War of Choice
Alastair Crooke exposes how Trump’s December 2025 Mar-a-Lago meeting secretly launched a "fraudulent" U.S.-Iran war, dismissing negotiations as a ruse to lure Iran into complacency. The assassination of its revered Supreme Leader triggered mass Iranian retaliation—Dubai missile strikes on CIA bases and Trump-linked assets, Hezbollah attacks on Tel Aviv, and three U.S. aircraft shot down—exposing the myth of American air superiority. With Gulf states’ interceptors exhausted and Iran deploying hypersonic warheads, Crooke warns the conflict risks spiraling into a dollar-hegemony crisis, as Washington’s real motives lie in appeasing Zionist donors and sabotaging BRICS. Unseen Russian-Chinese aid, like Beidou satellite targeting, now bolsters Iran’s defenses, while Saudi Aramco and U.S. bases face escalating threats—leaving Trump trapped between domestic backlash and a war with no exit strategy. [Automatically generated summary]
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, March 2nd, 2026.
Aleister Crook will be here with us in just a moment on Donald Trump's dangerous war of choice.
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Alistair, good day to you, my friend, and welcome here.
Israeli Missile Escalation00:15:40
What a weekend we've just had.
I want to go back to the beginning with you, if I could.
Do we now know when the decision to commence this war was made?
Surely it wasn't made at the last minute.
No, we know clearly, and this has been reported in the Israeli press quite extensively.
It was made at that meeting at Mar-a-Lago at the end of the 29th of December.
It was made there.
And indeed, what the Israeli press say, the date, or at least the week in which the war would start was set then too.
This is what the Israeli press are telling us, that the week that it would start, I mean the week in which it has started, was set also at that time.
Is it fair to say that the negotiations between the United States and Iran were a fraud, a subterfuge, a deception to lull the Iranians for the second time in eight months into a false sense of security?
Exactly.
And that was part of the exercise.
And I think Rubio was supposed to travel.
There was also the set up of the meetings with Witcott, Witcoff and Kushner and Amman that were supposed to resume the negotiations on Monday, just as we saw in the previous occasion last June.
And so all of that was entirely deceit.
Big picture.
How dangerous for the United States?
How dangerous for the region?
How dangerous for Israel is this war?
There is a great danger that it's just enlarging out of control.
It is moving out of control.
So there is a great danger now that it is moving.
We can see particularly the assassination of the supreme leader, who is the second most leader, majah, in Shi'islam, after he's in number two after Sistani, Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf.
But he is the second.
He was a much loved figure.
And what it has done is create a firestorm amongst the Shi everywhere.
And what we are seeing are the consequences of that.
There have been big attacks over the weekend on the American embassy in Baghdad, storming it, protests.
It's been very violent against the embassy in the green zone.
The whole green zone is under attack by Iraqi Shi.
In Pakistan, the consulate was attacked by Shi From Pakistan.
We see what's happening in particularly Bahrain.
So, in fact, the first regime change possibly may occur in Bahrain rather than Iran.
Bahrain is between 70 and 80 percent Shi', but ruled by a Sunni Sunni leadership, an emir, king, whatever you would like to call him, and a security force which is also totally Sunni, a defensive protection force around him.
And there have been massive demonstrations and attempts to crack down on the protests.
But it has a long history of having been very closely associated with Iran.
It was part of the Persian Empire.
It's 80%.
There are large swathes of that part of the coastline which have been essentially incorporated or were part of Iran for many years.
And now there is this big push in Bahrain.
We see what's happened to Dubai.
We've seen it's even in Cyprus, the Iranians have attacked the base in Cyprus.
But what you have is a huge rising.
I haven't really mentioned, but most importantly, in Iraq.
There's been the attacks on Iyabul, on the air defenses of America in Iraq are being the response to the killing of the Supreme Leader.
It's created a huge firestorm outside the country and created a huge wave of support for him in the country.
Tehran has just been packed, absolutely packed with mourners at his death.
Quite extraordinary.
And also partly because I think it's pretty plain now that the Supreme Leader, he was in his home.
And I've seen the house, at least if that's the house, the compound that he was killed in, I think it probably is.
It's a very simple building, just next to some woods.
And it is not luxurious or lavish.
It's just a very simple, straightforward building.
He was a man, a very humble, humble man, and he had elected to work and to continue.
So he was at his desk in his office when he was killed at 8:30 that morning.
And people in Hua say, well, how stupid.
I mean, why did they leave him there?
Why wasn't he in some sort of protective position, some deep, if you like, bunker somewhere?
Well, because he chose not to be.
And he said a little while ago, he said very clearly, he said, look, I am 86.
I am half crippled.
I have a certain dignity.
But that dignity was, it is the dignity that you, the Iranian people, have given me.
And so I fully accept to offer my life to the people of Iran.
So in other words, he elected.
Perhaps he thought he was serving better the Iranian people that he was martyred in this way.
And it certainly changed the paradigm completely.
The sense of anger, the calls for revenge crossed Tehran in the last few days.
I mean, people are just calling for revenge, really angry.
So it's, you know, far from having laid the seeds for people to take over the government.
I mean, I don't know how people come up with these ideas.
He was a religious leader.
What did American political and military planners think they were accomplishing by murdering a religious leader?
They thought, I mean, you know, this is, I mean, this mindset is sort of completely embedded in Israel and in parts of the Washington elite, that people hated him.
But they, I mean, they obviously have never been to Iran or they just talk to exiles that sort of fled with the Shah living in Europe and America.
But he is much admired.
He's a very humble, very intelligent and very astute man.
And he's much loved by the Iranians.
And so now they have a martyr and he is a martyr.
He clearly elected to stay where he could be easily found by the, it wasn't some great coup of the intelligence services.
He was at home.
His little granddaughter was killed too.
His little three-year-old granddaughter and his son and his daughter-in-law all killed at the house.
So he was not hiding from in fear of an American attack.
He was just continuing his job.
And did Benjamin Netanyahu was in Berlin?
We don't know.
I think he's actually, I think his plane is in Berlin.
I don't know where the family are, and I don't know the result of it, but the Iranians have said that they fired one of their most advanced missiles at Netanyahu and where he was or they believed he was early this morning.
And they have not given any indication. of whether he survived the attack or not.
Probably he did.
We don't know.
We haven't seen him since.
But anyway, I mean, these are the consequences of ill-thought out actions, killing the supreme leader.
You know, I mean, what did they expect?
Of course they're going to get a result of this sort.
And the attempt to sort of simply eliminate the leadership cada of Iran, kill them en masse.
I mean, Israeli just, you know, barbaric.
It's going back to the sort of Middle Ages or before.
I mean, you can't, you know, it's just, it doesn't produce the results that they expected.
It's been a catastrophic mistake.
The two big errors of, you know, everyone in Washington thinks the Israeli intelligence, they're so good.
I mean, Trump says often, I mean, you know, they're so good.
The Israelis do this so well and everything.
Well, it's been mistake, three mistakes in a row from the Israeli intelligence.
The first one going back to June, and they thought, you know, that they could simply do a decapitation and that would collapse this house of cards, as they called it, of Iran.
They were quite sure that when they attacked then, that the hull would fall.
Then they instituted in January this contrived uprising to make it look as if the state was about to fall.
And then now they have encouraged Trump another decapitation strike, including the leader of the state, and thinking that somehow there was a sort of organic mass of Iranians who were just gasping for freedom and gasping to become part of the American project in the region,
only to find that millions of them are on the street calling for revenge and that it set off a firestorm across the region against American embassies and bases in the region.
And Trump is in a terrible bind now because already we see in this period the Gulf states have now run out of their intercept missiles, their defense missiles.
They've run out of them and also even in Israel, I don't know how many, of course, it's classified information they've been using, but I mean, we can see from videos with incoming Iranian missiles coming in, they are using 12, 8, 10 intercept missiles for each incoming missile.
And the incoming missiles are now using variable steering or at least variable ability to move.
And so they are avoiding being struck down by these missiles.
But it's meaning that the Israelis are using more and more missiles.
We don't know how many have been used, but we are getting through them and they are getting through the tomahawks.
You remember I said at the beginning before the war had started that on the destroyers, maybe they had 600 tomahawks, five, four, 600 tomahawks.
Well, they've been using about 10 or 20% of those because it's tomahawks that are hitting these targets in Iran.
It is not, there's a very misleading language used about how Israel and the United States are bombing Tehran.
They're not, if you mean by bombing Tehran, that aircraft are flying over Tehran dropping bombs or B-2s are overflying Tehran and dropping bombs.
It's not the case.
There has been no evidence of any overflight by American or Israeli aircraft into Iranian airspace in this conflict.
None.
In fact, what we see is signs of aircraft having been shot down.
an American one.
Three have been, they say it was friendly far.
In Kuwait, three American planes were shot down there.
Whether it was friendly far or whether it was the Iranians locking on to the missiles as they took off from Kuwait and firing at them, I don't know.
No one can really make that clear.
But look at what's happened in this short period.
All the drones, the unmanned, if you like, aircraft that have flown into Iranian airspace, 22 have been shot down, 22, including their latest drones.
So, you know, the air system, the air defense system, by which I mean the radar system, the overall targeting system, and the ability to fire missiles in defense against attacks clearly are working.
Wow.
Iran's Challenge to American Hegemony00:15:20
Has the Trump administration been able to articulate, the president used this word several times, probably because his lawyers told him it's in the statute.
Has the Trump administration articulated what imminent danger Iran posed to the security of the United States, which necessitated this type of an attack at this very moment?
No, because he couldn't.
Because he's framed it entirely simply that these were thugs and murderers.
And that's what he called the supreme leader and the leadership.
He called them thugs and murderers, and therefore they had to be stopped and killed.
And so he can't.
I mean, he can't claim, you know, that this was in any sense then a threat to the United States.
Yes, Rubio made some, I think, bizarre comments.
Yes, it was quite true what Trump said, that Iran was preparing ICBMs, ballistic intercontinental ballistic missiles that was going to attack the United States.
That's just nonsense.
I mean, it's actually just really childish to say such things.
But I suppose it does get taken up and does get believed by many people.
But of course not.
There was no threat to the United States.
Iran doesn't have, doesn't threaten the United States, doesn't have a nuclear weapon, doesn't have ICBMs that can attack the United States.
It is not a threat to the United States.
As I see it, the Trump administration had two motivations.
The first is to please its Zionist masters and overlords, whether they're in Tel Aviv or whether they're the wealthy donor class here in the United States.
And the second is to do some damage to BRICS because of the terrible fear that Scott Besant and people in the American financial elite have that the dollar will no longer be the standard for payments around the world.
How do you view the ultimate motivations here?
I think you're absolutely right in this last case.
This is what the motivation is ultimately about.
It's a much bigger war that we're engaged in, and it's a war against China, against Russia, and against Iran as a pivotal node in the BRICS structure.
And so, you know, all of these things are interlinked.
The trade war is absolutely essential.
The tariffs are essential for the United States to preserve its situation, the dollar, against the problems they have with the debt.
In other words, the tariffs were supposed to bring in the revenues that would defray some of the excessive debt and the budget deficit.
And so the tariffs were one element of it, but the tariffs depend and entirely hang on the fact of the dollar hegemony.
They are dependent.
They are interlinked.
It's dollar hegemony that gives America the ability to sanction states and to tariff them.
But dollar hegemony also hangs on military power or the myth that America military is invulnerable, that it is the only that it can enforce on any state to accept dollar dominance.
So I think those three things come together.
And this is what it is about, is really to try and preserve the hegemony and to try and preserve the ability to coerce states to do what Mr. Trump wants in terms of investing in America, in terms of providing funds for America, because the balance, if you like, the balance of debt is becoming critical.
And of course, what he has done with this attack has made that really into a crisis.
Already oil price is now, I read, 30 to 40% higher since the Hormos was shut.
And then, and Hormos is now shot.
But also the attacks in the Gulf states on not the Gulf states themselves.
Iran has made it clear it's not attacking the Gulf states per se, but their provision of bases to America and to the military and to CIA, that it is those bases that are being attacked by Iran, but not the Gulf states themselves.
But the consequences are clear.
You know, the whole idea of the Gulf as this, you know, money center, tourist center, sun center, fun and relaxation center is bust.
I don't think it'll come back very easily from what I've been seeing.
People pouring out of Dubai, desperately trying to cross the desert to Oman to get a plane out.
All these, I mean, it's really changed the whole process.
So I think there's going to be an enormous financial consequences from that 8.30 in the morning attack on the Supreme Leader in terms when the markets open and I'm sure there will be consequences there.
The oil price and also gas incidentally because gas prices are already shooting up for Europe because much of the gas passes through the Hormos too.
And that and so also the Iranians have attacked economic targets in places like Dubai.
Not, if you like, ordinary economic targets, but in Dubai, Trump and his family have a number of investments.
And there's an investment, one of the hotels was the sort of center, I believe, of his investment empire.
The CIA also had a base in another hotel.
Those hotels have been on fire and have burnt out.
So we are seeing a really massive response.
And now, of course, others are joining in.
Hezbollah has started firing missiles in Tel Aviv.
And so they have joined in the attacks.
The Iraqis have been attacking air defense systems in both in Erbil and in Iraq and American bases there.
And so I think we're going to see heavy damage done to both property and possibly to lives as well as a consequence.
I mean, you know, I think mentioned before in this program, this could easily spread into something, a regional conflict.
It's starting to become like that.
Saudi Arabia is threatening to enter the conflict.
I don't think that that's very plausible, but because also Aramco has been the oil, if you like, facilities of Saudi Arabia.
That has been attacked too.
And some of the platforms in the Hormos, in the Gulf's Persian Gulf area, have been attacked by Iran.
And as I say, I mean, they can do this now because there are no defenses.
The Gulf used all the air defenses they had.
And so you can see signs of Iranian missiles just flying overhead in places like Dubai and no missiles, no defensive missiles because they've all been used up.
And so they are carefully attacking a whole series of bases, military bases, particularly in Bahrain.
As I said, Bahrain is in a very precarious position anyway.
But the fleet there, the American fleet has been under huge systemic damage.
The question, of course, is how long or how can Trump survive this sort of damage?
I mean, what is being happening, to put it very bluntly, is Iran is driving America out of the Gulf.
And that is going to provide a big shock.
I don't think the Americans, from what I've seen, expected such a big, I did say when I think even a week ago, that the Iranians would attack, if you like, American bases, first and foremost, and of course Israel too.
But they would attack American bases.
Well, they are doing that.
And they have plenty.
They have plenty of short-range missiles, short-range drones that they can use for that and keep their more sophisticated weapons for the attacks on Iran.
So these short-range missiles, some of them are old, but now there are no defenses.
They can use them.
And They've been very carefully introducing, first of all, some newer missiles, and they say they have some new missiles.
And we've seen some evidence, one or two evidence of these with cluster munitions as the warheads to hypersonic missiles, which are causing great damage in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem.
There were attacks in Jerusalem too.
So this is what's been unleashed and what will be the effect on Mr. Trump and on the American military establishment on the Pentagon and Hegseth.
I don't know what they will do, but they dug in this.
A day or so ago, Trump said, oh, the Iranians want to speak to me.
The usual language, you know.
Oh, they're dying to talk to us.
They want it.
And I probably will talk to them.
Well, Ali Larijani, who is now deputed to be one of the sort of temporary leaders, has said, we under no circumstances are talking to the United States.
So I don't think there's an easy way out.
I don't see that there is a way that Trump can declare victory and get out.
He says he's destroyed nine ships of the Iranians, so he's destroyed the Navy.
I mean, it's nonsense.
They have many more ships than that.
They were all in dock anyway.
So I don't see that he's got a very easy way out.
So what can he do?
I don't know that he can do very much because Israel's intercept capacity is also being extinguished very rapidly.
Can it last a week?
Can it last two weeks?
We don't know, but it looks as if they will run out of munitions very quickly.
And as I say, at the moment, the Israelis and Americans do not dare to enter Iranian airspace because clearly the Iranians have the ability to target their radars and reach long-range radars and they have the defensive, if you like, missiles, the intercept missiles to attack.
And since the United States has already lost three or four aircraft in these last few days, I imagine they are being very careful.
So all the nonsense we heard from the defense minister in Israel, Cass, saying, oh, we're going to open up total air dominance to the Israel and we are going to have a corridor to Tehran where we dominate the airspace.
It didn't happen, hasn't happened, and I predict it won't happen.
Well, this has been a brilliant, brilliant dissertation and analysis.
I just have one or two more questions before I let you go.
I'm going to guess that the assistance provided to Iran by Russia and China is unseen assistance.
Can you elaborate?
Yes, I think the assistance has come in.
I mean, you know, they are being very careful.
You know, China does not want to be upfront in sort of as an antagonist of the United States.
China prefers, you know, as always, to sort of be in the background and not be seen to be the main antagonist of the United States.
But what they've given them, and I've mentioned it before, they've given them this Beidou system.
And Iran has switched completely in the last few months to this system.
They've given them satellite targeting.
They've given them radars.
I don't know whether they've given them air defense missiles, but that's quite possible too.
And also what we see and the proof of the fact of this evidence is we see Iranian aircraft flying over Tehran.
Proof of Satellite Targeting00:01:41
Well, if there was the ability of the Americans to shoot them down, why haven't they done that?
But you will see MiG-29s and other aircraft fighter aircraft of Iran over Tehran, not of Israel.
So something has changed.
Something has changed quite dramatically.
And I think it is this overall, if you like, battlescape ability that Beidou provides them to target and then to fire intercepts to destroy any aircraft in the area.
We will see.
As I always say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
But that's what we see up to now in the third day of this war.
Aleister Krook, I can't thank you enough.
Has been an extraordinary dissertation on exactly what's going on, very much unlike what you would see in the Western media, but of course, in real time from all of your sources and from publicly available materials where you are.
Thank you, Alistair.
Thank you so much, my dear friend.
We look forward to seeing you next week, but we may have to call on you again this week, depending upon how all of this goes.
All the best to you, my friend.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And we have a full day for you coming up.
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