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July 4, 2022 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
26:11
Scott Ritter: 'Two-Front War: Biden's Mouth is Writing Checks the US Military Can't Cash'

Former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and former UN chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter appears at the RPI Houston conference with a blistering critique of the Biden Administration's Ukraine policy. Get your tickets to the next Ron Paul Institute Conference here: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/june/23/anatomy-of-a-police-state/

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Time Text
Checks Your Body Can't Cash 00:03:31
Thank you very much, Daniel, for the introduction.
Thanks for the old person ramp.
Had this conference been held about 10 years ago, I would have just hopped up on stage.
But I want to thank Dr. Paul for having me here.
Thank you, Dan.
Dan, I do have a problem with you.
You put me at a table with Mr. Giraldi, and you suckered me into believing that I was with somebody that could lower my language standards.
I want to apologize to Gary and Nina and Joe, your very important sponsors, for anything I might have said there.
I didn't realize you were so important.
And to the people out last night that were very courteous and stopped and talked to me, that third beer was not a good idea.
But I'm very happy to be here.
I'm going to start off by a little bit of theatrics because the topic here is writing checks your body can't cash.
Where did I get that line from?
I got that line from a movie that came out 30-some odd years ago, Top Gun.
And it's a great movie.
When Top Gun came out, I was going through flight school, Marine Corps aviator, and I went and saw that movie.
That was my movie.
And there's a great scene in there, a guy named CAG, because you're NAVR pilots, you don't have real names.
You have Maverick and Cav and Goose and Iceman.
My name was Sleepy, but I won't tell you that one.
We got a scene where CAG, the carrier air group commander, is chewing out Maverick.
And he said, son, your ego is writing checks your body can't cash.
I love that line because that pretty much defined my military career.
Everywhere I went, I would have people say, Ritter, your brain's writing checks, your body can't cash.
You got to tone it down a little bit.
But the reason why I bring that up is here we are today taking a look at what's going on in the world, and we have a president who likes to believe he's Maverick.
One of the reasons why I put these glasses on is that, oh, Joe likes to wear these kind of glasses.
He's an aviator.
He doesn't fly.
He's never served.
He hasn't done any of that.
But he puts them on because Joe thinks he's an aviator.
Joe thinks he's Maverick.
Well, Joe, I'm here to tell you, your ego is writing checks, America's body can't cash.
And that's just a statement of fact.
The first check that we're being asked to cash right now deals with Ukraine.
It's a very dangerous situation.
Daniel hit it right on the head.
We're not just talking about a transformative moment in geopolitical history in Europe.
We're talking about if this thing goes south, we don't wake up tomorrow.
And I want to re-emphasize that, ladies and gentlemen, because somehow today, in 2022, we have forgotten the lessons that I knew when I was in the military in the 1980s, that thermonuclear war is a reality.
And it's a reality that means the end of humanity, all humanity.
And it's not going to be instantaneous.
It will be for some people who get the 500,000 degree suntan, you know, flash, boom, you're done.
But for the most of us, it's going to be a very lingering death.
Fight to Bleed Russia Dry 00:15:08
Starvation, radiation.
It ain't going to be pretty, but it will be terminal for everybody.
So we need to take this seriously.
You can joke about Joe Biden, you know, because sometimes it appears he is a joke.
But he's the commander-in-chief of the United States of America, our country.
He's a man who has taken an oath that many here have taken to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
He's the commander-in-chief of our military.
And he's got us involved in some things right now in Europe that are very worrisome.
Let's talk about why we're doing what we're doing in Europe.
There's this organization called NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed in 1949 during the Cold War, ostensibly a defensive alliance.
At one time, it was.
At one time, it was a legitimate defensive alliance, I'm sorry, whose purpose was to protect Europe from the potential of any Soviet aggression and aggression from Eastern European countries who we believe wanted to gobble up the rest of Europe.
They had no such designs.
NATO was always premised on a false assumption, but that doesn't matter.
NATO existed, it was there for a reason, and it served as the foundation of America's engagement in Europe for decades.
1992, the Soviet Union went away.
Actually, it went away in December of 1991.
And with it, every reason for NATO to continue to exist.
There was literally no reason for NATO to exist after that, and yet we continued to promote it and not just promote its continued existence, but we promoted its expansion, its redefinition.
And what did it become?
It stopped being an organization that focused on the security of Western Europe, and it started being an organization that talked about expanding European transatlantic power on a global stage, a global platform.
It stopped being a defensive military alliance, and it became an offensive regime change-promoting alliance.
One only needs to look at NATO engagement in Kosovo and Serbia in the 1990s, in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq.
These are not defensive, and with the exception of Kosovo, they don't even deal with Europe.
So, NATO is a problem.
Now, what is NATO?
We call it a military alliance.
Back in the 1980s, 1970s, 1980s, it was truly an alliance of military powers.
The military that the United States had deployed into Europe at that time, over 300,000 men and women, was the finest military the world's ever seen.
A military capable of engaging in large-scale ground combat in Europe and winning.
And I say that because I was one of them.
And I'm telling you right now, if anybody thought they could beat us, they were wrong.
Maybe.
We never got tested, thankfully.
But we were good because we trained, because we were organized, because we were prepared.
But then something happened.
The Cold War went away.
And for the decade of the 90s, we were looking more at the peace dividend from the Cold War than we were at sustaining our military supremacy, even though we talked a big game, and this is a very important thing.
We talked a very big game.
But we weren't the same.
By 1998, we weren't the same military that existed in 1991.
We were far diminished military.
We barely had enough resources in 2003 to take on a depleted Iraqi military.
We almost ran out of logistics.
A lot of people who study the invasion and occupation of Iraq will know that we had an operational pause before we moved on to Baghdad because we ran out of everything.
And had the Iraqis been half as good as some people thought they were, we might not have won that war in the time frame that we thought.
Was a very close-run thing because we weren't that good anymore.
And then another thing happened after 9-11.
We started getting focused on low-intensity conflict.
We're fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not the kind of wars where you close with and destroy the enemy through firepower maneuver involving hundreds of thousands of troops, tens of thousands of tanks, thousands of aircraft.
We're talking about small unit conflict where patrols are going out of platoon size, company size, maybe of a battalion-sized operation.
We forgot how to fight big war.
We didn't train for it.
And I'm telling you right now, if you don't train for it, you can't do it.
You can't do it.
And we spent 20 years fittering away every advantage we once had, where once no one could stand toe-to-toe with us.
And again, I'm just saying that if somebody was there.
And thank goodness nobody tested us because sometimes being a little too cocky, you pay a little bit of price.
But we were cocky because we were good.
We were good because we trained.
The military that existed, that exists today, is a byproduct of 20 years of neglect.
We do not have a military today that can fight a large-scale ground war in Europe.
We do not have a military today that can fight a large-scale ground war in Europe.
I'll say it one more time because this is important.
We do not have a military today that can fight a large-scale ground war in Europe.
And yet, what is the president positioning us to do?
Fight a large-scale ground war in Europe.
Ladies and gentlemen, if we fight the Russians, we will lose.
We will lose hands down.
It won't even be close.
NATO doesn't exist anymore.
Oh, it's there as an organization.
When I was in, the British had the British Army on the Rhine.
80,000 guys, highly trained.
Today, they barely have 80,000 guys in their entire military.
Ask the Brits to put together a brigade and send it out their island into Europe, they can't do it.
They can't do it.
Ask the French, they can't do it.
Ask the Germans, they can't do it.
No one can do it.
This is why Joseph Burrell, who is the head of foreign policy for the European Union, is freaking out right now because he recognizes the trajectory that Europe's on, which implies the potential for combat with Russia.
And he says Europe cannot beat Russia in a war.
That's an absolute statement of fact.
People talk about the Russian military today.
And if you read our newspapers, you listen to the news, you're thinking these guys are just a bunch of local yokel bumblings.
They can't fight.
They can't do anything right.
Heck, they got beat north of Kiev.
The ghost of Kiev shot down all their airplanes.
Those 13 brave Marines gave them the finger and told them to stick it in their ear.
You know, no, guys, the Russians are some of the finest, most professional troops in the world.
Why?
Because in the 20 years that we were squandering our resources hunting down goat herders and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were focused on fighting us.
Not because they want to fight us, but because we were promulgating policies that were pushing them into a corner where they had no choice to fight us in 2008, Russia fought a short five-day war with Georgia.
It was a Russian victory, but it was a close-run thing because the Georgians had been trained for a number of years by U.S. Marines and their small unit tactics were outstanding.
And the Russians went in there and they were getting waxed to small unit level.
The Georgians were shooting, moving, communicating, outmaneuvering, outflanking, moving, moving, moving.
And the Russians were like, what the heck's going on here?
We're slow and lumbering.
They had to bring in their artillery, their armor, and just grind it through.
And they beat them.
But they realized we got a problem here because that's a small army trained to NATO standards.
If we went up against a big army trained in NATO standards, we get waxed.
So they changed the whole way they did business.
And we saw that from 2008 to 2014.
Remember 2014, Crimea?
Little green men?
Well, the little green men were the new face of the Russian army.
Professional, not conscripts, contract soldiers.
We call them volunteers in America.
They call them contracts.
They're a little bit more honest.
It's about money.
How am I going to make some money?
Join the military, become a professional.
70% of the Russian military today is composed of contract soldiers.
They're very, very good at what they do.
It's not just at the small unit level.
In 2016, again, because of our policies, what did Russia do?
They brought back Cold War-era units, the 1st Guards Tank Army, the 20th Combined Arms Army.
These were units that used to exist during the Cold War whose sole purpose was to punch through NATO lines, get into NATO rear areas, and annihilate everything.
Large-scale ground combat.
And the Russians brought these units back, breathed new life into them, gave them new equipment.
They're there.
The Russians today are organized to fight large-scale ground combat in Europe.
And when I say organized to fight, that means organized to win.
How do we know this?
Well, we see it right now, ladies and gentlemen.
You can talk about the Ukrainians all you want.
I'll tell you this.
Not only were they one of the largest militaries in Europe, they were one of the best equipped militaries in Europe, one of the best trained militaries in Europe, one of the most competent militaries in Europe.
This is the Ukrainian army I'm talking about.
Ukrainian army was capable of defeating, hands down, any army in NATO, besides the United States.
Maybe the Turks.
But everybody else, Ukrainians would wax them.
They're that good.
And yet Russia is crushing them.
Crushing them.
That doesn't mean that Russia's not taking losses.
Man, when you step into the ring with a heavyweight fighter, he's going to hit you.
He's going to hit you hard.
And if you're not careful, he's going to knock you out.
And Ukrainians are fully capable of delivering some heavy blows, and they have.
The Russians aren't perfect.
They have made mistakes and they have paid a price.
But the sign of a professional organization is your ability to adapt and overcome.
And the Russians have adapted and they've overcome.
Today, we have people saying the Russian army officers aren't that good.
Their army's not that good.
The battalion commanders that the Russians have on the ground in Ukraine today are the finest battalion commanders the world has ever seen.
These guys are doing miracles.
America's battalion commanders would do well to study what these guys are doing, how you lead from the front, sustain combat operations for 100 days, and you get better, not worse.
That's sign of a professional.
The Russians are winning, hands down, and they are going to win, hands down.
There's nothing that can happen to stop this.
Nothing.
But there's a problem.
We can make the cost for Russia very high.
We make it so high that it actually becomes painful.
And if we make it too high, then we have what we call a game-changing moment.
And we're on the verge of reaching that.
We're providing Russia, frightening the Ukrainians with weapons that are not going to change the outcome of the war.
They are not.
High Mars is not going to change the outcome of the war.
The M777A2 with its Excalibur round is not going to change the outcome of the war.
Even if they get the harpoon anti-shipping missile, it's not going to change the outcome of the war.
But what it will do is kill Russians.
And it will kill Russians in large numbers.
And this will make it more difficult for Russia to win its victory in a reasonable timeframe.
It'll drag this conflict out.
Now, Russia will win, but the price that will be paid by Russia will be very high, and the price paid by Ukraine will be even higher.
And for all the people that say we have the little Ukrainian flag on our thing, we've identified ourselves, go to hell.
Because if you care, if you care about the Ukrainian people, if you give a damn about humanity, then you'd want this war to be over today.
Because all that's going to happen between now and the inevitable termination of this conflict is tens of thousands of Ukrainians are going to die.
Ukrainian infrastructure will be destroyed.
But that's not even the worst that can happen.
The worst can happen is when Russia decides that America has gone too far.
You see, this is not a war that's being fought in Ukraine.
It's a special military operation.
You should probably look into what that means.
It means that Russia is carrying out pretty much a punitive police action to punish Ukraine for eight years of violence inflicted on the Russian population of the Donbass.
This was not a war of conquest.
This was not a war of domination.
Yes, they did some things in Kiev to shape the battlefield, but the primary objective is to close with and destroy 60 to 100,000 Ukrainian troops that were threatening Donbass.
And the Russians are achieving that as we speak.
But the price that they're paying is very high.
And we're treating as if it's a war.
We have a defense secretary who has said that the purpose of the United States is basically to bleed Russia dry, to achieve a strategic victory by making the Russians pay such a heavy price that they are no longer able to threaten Europe.
Well, if you're a Russian listening to that, what are you thinking?
Okay?
No.
Guys, let me just remind you of the name.
Qasim Suleimani, you remember that name?
Qasim Suleimani was the Iranian general who provided weapons and training and assistance to Iraqi insurgents while we were occupying their country.
And he is credited with killing 500 to 600 American soldiers as part of this.
And we hate him so much.
We hate him so much that we assassinated him.
We held a grudge and we killed him.
Well, you know what?
We are Qasim Suleimani now.
We are doing what Qasim Suleimani did to us, but this time we're doing it to the Russians, and they're paying an even heavier price.
We are creating bitterness, anger, resentment in Russia.
And at some point, they're going to cross the line, and they're going to fire missiles outside of Ukraine into American targets, into NATO targets.
And now we're talking a real war, one that we won't win.
Joe Biden?
You're writing checks.
The American body can't cash.
That's a statement of fact.
And I'll lead with this, because I was talking about a two-front war.
As bad as Russia is, there's this other place on the other side of the world called Taiwan.
And it's going to get worse.
You know, Americans, we tend to believe our own propaganda sometimes.
And right now, we have the media, if you read it, they're saying that the United States is trying to teach Taiwan the lesson of Ukraine.
As Bad As Russia Is 00:07:17
I wish they would, because the lesson of Ukraine is you're going to get your butts kicked if you take on the Chinese.
That's the real lesson.
Your economy is going to be destroyed.
Your nation will collapse.
You're going to lose hundreds of thousands of people.
That's the real lesson.
But no, the lesson is if you fight hard and you fight early and you inflict a lot of casualties, the Chinese can't win and they're going to back off and they might even be deterred against attacking.
The problem with this thinking is just like we don't know Russia, and I think you hit it 100% correct.
I mean, I've talked about this in the past, how the American political machinery right now is advised by some of the most ignorant people about Russia.
I call them the Putin whisperers, people who think they know Putin.
They've never met Putin, but they've written PhD thesis on how bad Putin is.
And they believe their own propaganda, and we make policy based upon an absolute dearth of knowledge of Russia and what the reality is.
Well, if there's a nation that we don't understand as much as Russia, it's called China.
We don't understand China at all.
We think that China is a weak nation.
We think China can be intimidated.
We think China's economy is not as strong as the Chinese like to believe it is, even though over the past 15 years, China has three successive five-year plans that have brought 300 million people out of poverty into the middle class.
Hell, we got 300,000 people, of 300 million people in America, and we can't get half that number out of poverty.
And yet, we have the superior economy?
No, the Chinese are serious.
The other thing the Chinese have been doing is the same thing Russia's did: watching us, listening to us, observing us, studying us.
And they've built a military that is impressive indeed.
It's not combat tested because the Chinese are pretty smart.
They don't go to war.
They believe in a strong economy.
They believe that if you don't go to war, you have more money to spend on high-speed trains, good infrastructure, bridges.
They're not perfect.
No one's perfect.
I'm not sitting here saying that I want to live in China.
I don't.
I want to live in this country.
I would just like us to do half the things on the infrastructure that maybe the Chinese have been doing.
Maybe my roads won't have potholes.
Maybe my trains will run on time.
Maybe the subway station, I'm not threatened to die every time I step in by concrete falling off the roof.
These would be nice things to have.
But the other thing that the Chinese are doing is they're serious.
Just like Putin don't bluff.
I mean, that's one big lesson to take away from this thing.
Putin don't bluff.
When Putin says he's going to do something, he's going to do it.
And I think he's proven that.
So when Vedvedev says we're going to strike decision centers, that's Putin speaking.
They don't bluff.
They're going to strike decision centers.
And then we're going to deal with the consequences.
China has said: if you act in a manner which indicates that Taiwan is pursuing a path towards independence, that Taiwan is no longer accepting that it is part of China, that if you seek to improve the military of Taiwan so they are emboldened into believing that they can actually withdraw and withstand a Chinese counter-strike,
then we have no choice but to pursue non-peaceful means of unifying Taiwan.
They didn't just make this up.
I mean, we have this way of thinking in America where we say the Russians and Chinese are very impulsive people.
Very impulsive.
They just knee-jerk reaction to everything.
Putin's been saying this stuff about NATO and stuff since 2000, 2001.
It came to the forefront in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference.
He's repeated it over and over again.
There's nothing new about this.
China in 2005 passed a law, the anti-succession law.
It's linked to their constitution, and it basically says that if Taiwan, that the policy of China is the peaceful reunification of Taiwan.
That's what they want.
And they're willing to bend over backwards to make this happen and be as patient and wait as long as possible.
But the moment Taiwan starts to act in a manner that looks as though they're going to be independent, it will be instantaneous.
China will go in there and they will crush them.
Well, what has happened in the last couple days, ladies and gentlemen?
We have the President of the United States traveling to Asia, where someone says, if China attacks Taiwan, what will America's policy?
Well, we'll defend them.
But what happened to our policy of strategic ambiguity where we were pretending that we weren't going to defend them, so we mollified the Chinese so that the Taiwanese wouldn't act impulsively.
That's out the window.
But that's okay, that's just words.
Words mean nothing.
But then Tammy Duckworth shows up in Taiwan.
She's sponsoring a bill that promises a couple things.
One, to put pre-positioned military hardware on the soil in Taiwan so that American troops can fly in and marry up with this equipment so we can rapidly come to the defense.
This will never happen, ladies and gentlemen.
Why?
Because China will invade Taiwan.
China will invade Taiwan sooner rather than later.
We're not only in danger of getting involved in a war in Europe that we can't win, we're in danger of promulgating a conflict in the Pacific we can't win.
That's a two-front war that we can't win.
We can't win it.
So why are we doing it?
Because we have a commander-in-chief whose mouth has no checks and balances.
We have a population which has been made stupid, I guess, is the most polite word I can, from exposure to a media that's no longer in the business of informing the American people, but entertaining the American people.
You remember that old line, if it bleeds, it leads?
Nothing bleeds more than war.
And there's nothing that the mass media likes more than a war that they can put out there every day, change the narrative, make it horrible, make it, and the American people tune in like the compliant little brain-dead people they are, and they just eat it up because other people are dying, because the Ukrainians are dying, because the Taiwanese are going to be dying.
But let me just give you a news flash.
When we go to war against Russia and we go to war against China, we're going to be dying.
And it's not going to be in small numbers.
This isn't Afghanistan.
This isn't Iraq.
This isn't where a bad week was seven Americans dying.
This is where a bad hour is 5,000 Americans dying.
This is where a bad day is 15,000, 20,000 Americans dying.
This is where a bad week is 60,000 to 80,000 Americans dying.
In conflicts, we can't win unless we go nuclear.
And then nobody wins.
Everybody loses.
Joe Biden, your ego and your mouth are writing checks.
The American body can't cash.
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