April 7, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:27
AMB Chas Freeman : Will Iran Get What It Wants?
Judge Andrew Napolitano and Ambassador Chaz Freeman dissect a failed April 2026 military operation in Iran, revealing discrepancies suggesting a cover for uranium theft rather than a colonel's rescue. Freeman condemns the targeting of power plants as war crimes under Geneva Conventions, noting collateral risks to Kuwait's water supply amidst 250 assassinations under the "obliteration doctrine." While Mark Levin urges nuclear use, the ambassador argues the conflict failed to achieve regime change or secure materials, inadvertently lifting oil sanctions and incentivizing diplomacy by admitting military failure. Ultimately, the war has not liberated the Iranian people but merely shifted regional leverage without securing strategic objectives. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Illegitimate Use of Force00:06:19
Undeclared wars are commonplace.
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 Tuesday, April 7th, 2026.
Ambassador Chaz Freeman joins us now.
Ambassador, thank you very much.
Always a pleasure to chat with you.
We now know from internal sources, not from CIA leaks, that the weekend rescue of an as yet unnamed colonel, not as the pilot, but in the rear of a jet.
Was the unexpectedly happy ending of an enormous undertaking that went wrong?
We know that the colonel was commanding an effort to invade and capture the nuclear enriched material at Isfahar.
The government, of course, wants us to think that the colonel was shot down in another place and he just happened to be a colonel looking to see how his lieutenant was flying.
I don't know who's going to believe that.
What's your take on all of this?
Reminding you is that you were once.
The Deputy Secretary of Defense.
I was Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Yes, I think it's pretty obvious that the scale of the operation, the number of troops involved and so forth, was vastly in excess of what would have been normally amounted to retrieve a downed pilot, or in this case, a weapons officer from an F 15 that had been shot down.
And I think basically we had tremendous success, for which we should all be grateful and proud of our military for achieving it, retrieving this injured man from an apparent hiding place in a cleft in the mountains.
But it's pretty clear that the operation used the recovery of that pilot as a cover for a much larger purpose, which was.
To identify, locate, and steal, take, I guess, the enriched uranium that we believe was stored in Isfahan or somewhere near it.
And it didn't go terribly well.
We did get the pilot, the weapons officer back, which, as I said, is quite an achievement, and we should be justly happy over that.
But the rest of it went badly awry with the destruction of a number of aircraft.
Casualties.
And by the way, it is quite apparent if you talk to people in the region, as I have done recently, that there is a massive cover up of the number of American dead and wounded in this operation.
I don't think we have an accounting for what actually happened in those terms on this particular operation.
Larry Johnson says that a female pilot was either captured, injured, or killed in this entire operation, the movement into Iran, and then that movement turned into a rescue operation for the colonel.
From your own experience, how unusual would it be for a colonel?
To be flying number two to a lieutenant in a jet pilot, unless the colonel had vastly more responsibilities to address than just that plane in which he was flying.
Well, it would be very unusual indeed to have ranks reversed in that manner.
So that does add to the case that this was something a great deal more than what it has been portrayed as.
I'm surprised. that Larry Johnson says there's a female officer who's been taken captive.
I thought Pete Hagg says they'd gotten rid of all the women in the military service.
Hegset's stupid rules of engagement are front and center today because the president is threatening war crimes.
So, Hegset's characterization of something as profound as the Geneva Conventions, written in response to what American, Soviet, French, and British prosecutors learned at the Nuremberg trials.
Written largely by Swiss and American legal experts, signed by President Truman, ratified by the United States Senate.
I mean, you don't have to go through the history.
The history is long and well established.
And yet, in one stroke, the president has authorized his Secretary of Defense, who calls himself the Secretary of War, to disregard these things.
The Open Strait Argument00:15:24
So, would it be a war crime for American forces to target power plants in Iran?
Yes.
And it should evoke the Nuremberg rules and require our military to disobey those orders, not to execute them.
I mean, the idea that international law equals stupid rules of engagement is itself monstrous.
But the attack on power plants and desalination, where, by the way, the president seems to be utterly misinformed, is clearly a war crime.
There's no question about it.
And I know of no serious lawyer who would consider it anything else.
The misinformation or disinformation about desalination is simple Iran is about 2% dependent on desalination, it is dependent in in places like Kashm Island, which is just off Bandrabas, the main port in the Strait of Hormuz.
There's some 30 villages there that were deprived of water by an American strike on the desalination plant there.
But by contrast with Iran, which is minimally dependent on desalination, its neighbors across the Gulf are so-called allies.
Kuwait, for example, 90% dependent.
On desalination.
One of the main desalination plants in Kuwait has been struck, taking out about 38% of Kuwait's water supply.
The Iranians say they didn't do it, and the Kuwaitis have every reason to believe that it was, in fact, a false flag operation by Israel, which has never had a good relationship with Kuwait, but would like to get Kuwait and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council into the war on its side.
Israel is also mounting quite an extensive disinformation campaign alleging that the Saudis are aligned with the United Arab Emirates, the UAE, in arguing for doubling down on this war.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Of course, everyone in the Gulf is concerned, not just about the immediate consequences of the spread of this war, not just about the obvious retaliation against their power plants.
that Iran will carry out if we actually go through with our criminal intention in striking Iranian power plants.
But they're also concerned, they're much more concerned about the long term.
And the UAE, for example, argues that, well, no outcome to this war that leaves Iranian abilities to attack the Gulf countries intact is acceptable.
But there is no outcome to this war that would not leave Iran capable of that.
So there's a certain logic here that is developing.
There are rumors, perhaps false, that Qatar has joined China, India, Japan, and others, Turkey, in working out an arrangement with Iran to allow its exports to go through the Strait of Hormuz.
Apparently, if that is the case, if those discussions are going on, they're not complete because two Qatari gas carriers natural gas carriers made for the strait and then turned around, obviously not allowed to pass through it.
So there's a lot going on under the surface.
But I think people in the region are beginning to focus on the long term and they don't like what they see as the consequences.
Let's go back to the events of the weekend and let's assume, for the sake of this conversation, that in the Isfahar facility was a substantial amount of Iran's enriched uranium material.
Is it now safe now that the Iranians know what the Americans would do in an effort to get it?
Is this project now off the table?
Well, the project is obviously not off the table.
Quite the contrary, the effort to cripple the Iranian nuclear program has, in fact, galvanized it.
Iran will now build a nuclear weapon and put it on a missile capable of striking Israel.
And eventually, it will probably build an ICBM to deliver it to us, just as North Korea did, and for the same reasons.
So, this is the only way.
You can apparently survive in a world where international law does not inhibit aggression and where even standards of decency are ignored.
I mean, we are looking at the extension to Iran of military doctrines developed by Israel, now adopted by us in Gaza, in southern Lebanon.
And that is a doctrine which Dan Steinbach, a critic of Zionism, has justly called the obliteration doctrine the idea that you don't.
seek a political solution to problems through persuading your adversary to negotiate, you simply murder your adversary.
So we have some 250 Israel claims that has assassinated some 250 senior Iranian officials.
One wonders if 250 Israeli officials were assassinated by Iran, whether they would consider that morally justifiable as retribution or as simply another instance of, quote, anti-Semitism, unquote.
Mm-hmm.
I'm going to play a clip for you, put together originally by my friend and colleague, Tucker Carlson, and edited somewhat by Chris.
This includes a horrific statement by Mark Levin urging the President of the United States to use nuclear weapons on Iran.
And of course, Tucker's inimitable.
Surgical response to what Mark Levin said.
But some of the things that Levin said and the president's encouragement of Americans to watch Levin's show is horrifying.
This is about a minute and a half long.
It's riveting.
You got to sort of hope to keep your breakfast down while we listen to Mr. Levin.
But here we go, Chris, number seven.
The Battle of Okinawa, 50,000 plus casualties, over 12,000, nearly 13,000 killed on that island, which is what convinced Truman that we would lose a million men if we didn't drop the atomic bombs that we did.
This is a war, a peace mission to stop nuclear weapons that can blow away millions of Americans.
Embedded in there is something you need to know.
It's an argument that is being test driven, and since no one To our knowledge, just push back against it, may be in full operation.
Now, it's an argument for nuclear weapons.
Here's what he said Nearly 10% of all casualties in the Second World War happened at the Battle of the Bulge, which, of course, at the end of the war.
The Battle of Okinawa, 50,000 casualties, nearly 13,000 killed on that island, which is what convinced Truman, Harry Truman, the then president in 1945, we'd lose a million men if we didn't drop the atomic bombs that we did.
Did you hear that?
That's Mark Levin's counsel to Our sitting president, Donald Trump, right now, you are looking at a choice between the catastrophic loss of your troops in a ground war or the use of nuclear weapons, which, in a sense, if you think about it, just think about it for a second, is actually an act of peace.
It's an act of peace.
The most humane thing you could do is to end this now with nuclear weapons.
That's the case Mark Levin is making to the president, who just last week recommended that all Americans watch Mark Levin's show.
Okay.
This is not like crazy dot connecting here.
This is one to one.
This is really obvious where we're moving.
And again, we're moving toward the use of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, possibly nuclear weapons.
What do you think, Ambassador?
Well, that is truly horrifying.
I'm sorry to say that it's part of the process of deliberate erosion of what was called the nuclear allergy, the recognition that another use of nuclear weapons would open their use, open the possibility that they would become a regular feature of warfare.
And in the context of Iran, there are two obvious issues.
One is, of course, that Nobody really is arguing for a ground war, unlike Japan, which attacked us at Pearl Harbor.
Iran has not attacked us.
In fact, if you go back and look for evidences of Iranian attacks on Americans, you have to go back to the early mid 80s to find anything.
We have had incidents in the United States, including, for example, the Lebanese man in Michigan who attacked a synagogue, which are called inspired by Hezbollah or Iran.
The man's family had been wiped out a couple of days earlier by the Israelis, and I think that's utterly preposterous.
But in any event, we are planning a major, we are engaged in a major nuclear modernization with a view to fighting a nuclear war with China.
And China has responded by building its own much more massive nuclear force and adopting our doctrine of mutual assured destruction.
So, the direction of this is going wrong.
And the fact that someone could seriously argue that circumstances in the Persian Gulf justify the first use since World War II of nuclear weapons against a population which is entirely innocent,
in which we, in fact, claimed initially we were arriving to enable them to struggle for their freedom against a government that we don't like and they don't like.
So this is really just utterly unacceptable.
And the fact that the president would urge that Americans watch such stuff is a mark of how low we have fallen morally in this country.
What has this war achieved so far for Trump?
Regime change?
No.
Confiscation or destruction of nuclear materials?
No.
Confiscation or removal of ballistic missiles?
No.
Open Hormuz as it was before the war?
No.
What has Trump achieved?
Well, he's actually enabled Iran to achieve some things.
First of all, we've lifted the Sanctions on Iranian oil exports, which has been a long term objective of the Iranians.
Second, we have in effect recognized or acknowledged Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.
We're not going through it.
The president has said he understands that we can't open it militarily, we need to find some other way to do it.
His preferred course evidently follows his own experience as a real estate mogul in New York.
That is, he learned two things in that earlier experience.
One, that if you have Roy Cohn as a kind of attack dog, one of the most despicable human beings ever to walk the planet, you can achieve deals through coercion.
You don't have to be nice.
You apply every dirty trick you can think of.
And if you are resisted, you resort to the courts to bankrupt your opponent.
The second thing he learned was that if you fail, which he did on numerous occasions, six bankruptcies, you go bankrupt, you declare bankruptcy, you walk away with no obligations.
So what he seems to be doing now is a combination of these things.
One, and I want to mention, if I could, one of the consequences of saying, on the one hand, we can't open the strait militarily, you must find a way to do that.
On the other hand, The reality is that the countries in the Gulf, the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia can't survive without access to that strait for their exports and imports.
So basically, what he said is a syllogism.
You know, okay, I recognize everybody is dependent on that strait.
It needs to be open somehow.
Okay, I can't do it militarily.
You can do it diplomatically.
You can make a deal with Iran.
They're willing to do a deal.
If you get rid of the American forces on your territory, they will provide you with a code to allow your ships through, and you won't have a problem.
You just pay a fee in Iranian rials or Chinese currency, and you're clear.
So, three, you damn well better do a negotiated deal with Iran.
Inadvertently, by threatening the use of force in this context, he has incentivized everyone to employ diplomacy to solve a problem he admits he can't solve.
Wow.
Why We Hear Bombs00:03:16
Here's an interesting montage of someone you know and I doubt you got along with, Paul Wolfowitz.
There's a name out of the past.
And President Trump, Chris, cut number 11.
The Iranian people, when they don't hear bombs go off, they're upset.
They want to hear bombs because they want to be free.
They are just unanimous in their hope that we will help to liberate Iraq.
These are Arabs, 23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators.
The notion that we're going to earn more enemies by going in and getting rid of what every Arab knows is one of the worst tyrants, and they have many governing them, is just nonsense.
To the contrary, we'll have millions of people witnessing on our behalf.
It'll be a great step forward.
How profoundly erroneous it was.
Well, I can't believe it.
I think we can be quite sure that the intelligence community.
Did advise the president that he's utterly wrong about in his thesis that somehow or other bombing people leads them to embrace you rather than hate you.
And in the case of Iran, much like the case of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, there may be many people who fear and loathe both the leader and the system.
But if you attack their homeland, They care more about that than they do about the regime.
We have discredited that notion thoroughly.
There was a huge effort.
The president even admits that we tried to get weapons to the violent protesters against the Iranian government.
That effort, which was Mossad also discussed openly, failed.
That is to say, protests engineered by Our Secretary of the Treasury, who claims credit for crashing the Iranian currency, were turned violent by agents of influence whom we armed.
And that didn't work.
So there's absolutely no basis for imagining that Iranians, much as many of them may admire the United States as it used to be, would want us to come in and take over or would want to capitulate to the United States.
There's going to be a negotiation of some sort at the end of this.
That's the normal way wars end.
That is how the defeated are reconciled to their defeat.
At the moment, it does not look like the defeated will be Iran.
It looks like it could be us.
Ambassador, thank you very much.
Tough, tough days, dark days, and probably going to get darker.
Who knows what Trump will do next?
I just hope he doesn't listen to that character.
And thank you for your patience in listening to him.
All the best to you, Ambassador.
Tough Days Ahead00:00:24
Thank you for what you do, Judge.
Thank you.
Coming up later today, if you're watching us live in 34 minutes at 9 o'clock this morning, Professor John Mearsheimer at 10 o'clock this morning, Colonel Bill Astori at 2 this afternoon, Matt Ho at 3 this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwadkowski.