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March 4, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
33:41
What? German Top Brass Discusses Bombing Russia. With Guest Jim Jatras.

The recent intercepted conversation between senior German military officials, discussing Taurus missile strikes inside of Russia and including the Kerch bridge, has exposed NATO's central role in the Ukraine conflict. And it has taken us further toward WWII. Also today: Why are we airdropping meals in Gaze while airdropping weapons to Israel to kill the people eating the meals? And a word on the Supremes' ruling on Trump.

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Wine and Dine Trump 00:09:37
Happy Monday and welcome to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
Before we start today's show, I want to give you an update on Dr. Paul.
The fact is, he's been suffering from a very unfriendly case of shingles.
If any of you know what it is or have had it, you know it's no fun.
He's on the mend, but he is not in today.
When he feels better, he'll be back on the show.
So it's coming soon, don't worry.
But we have something put together for you anyway today.
And to help us out today, we have a great friend of mine I've known for a very long time, Jim Jatris.
Jim, are you there?
I am here, Daniel.
It's an honor and pleasure to be with you as always.
The man and the beard and the legend.
I love talking to Jim.
Jim has been at several of our conferences in D.C. He's addressed our student seminars.
The great thing that Jim brings other than his bubbly personality is the fact that he has served in both the legislative branch, the executive branch.
He's been a Foreign Service officer.
He has worked in Congress in the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Is that right, Jim?
No, the Senate Republican Policy Committee.
The People's Front of Judea.
Splitter.
So anyway, Jim has great insights.
He's worked around the Beltway for many decades, and now he's a peaceful farmer in Virginia.
But Jim, thanks for joining us today.
There's just a couple of things we want to chew on, I think, that are in the news.
Some things that happened over the weekend.
And in fact, I want to start with something that happened just this morning.
And it's essentially breaking news, depending on how closely you monitor things.
And that is the Supreme Court ruling a unanimous ruling that states cannot remove presidential candidates from the ballot.
Jim, have you seen it, and what are your thoughts on it?
I have seen it.
I haven't had a chance to digest it in detail, but read through it quickly.
I think this was expected.
I think it's good that it was unanimous.
I've been saying all along that plan A for November was to keep Trump off the ballot.
I think there's still a little wiggle room with regard to maybe a state conviction, but I think that wiggle room for the states that want to keep him off the ballot is pretty narrow at this point.
So at this point, I think they're going to resort to plan B, which is to go back to the kind of shenanigans we saw in 2020.
But right now, yeah, I think for what is left of an American constitutional system, this is a very significant development.
It seems like they're getting backed in a corner now.
Everything they try to throw at Trump, and neither of us are Trump fans necessarily.
We love the fact that he has the best enemies being the worst people.
But everything they try to throw at him is not sticking, obviously.
It's rebounding.
It's ricocheting.
But you're right, I think, Jim, that the fact that this was a unanimous decision takes a lot of the wind out of their sails.
It does.
And look, I supported Trump in 2016.
I'm supporting him this year.
I don't have any illusions about him.
There's a lot about him I like.
There's some things I don't like.
I especially, as you say, dislike the people who hate him.
So that's worth something.
And I think one thing he says that's true is that when he says to his adoring fans that it's not so much me that they hate, it's you that they hate.
That's absolutely true.
I mean, there are just a lot of lumpin Americanos out there in flyover country who idolize him.
And for the same reason they idolize him as the orange savior, his detractors hate him as the orange Hitler because of the kind of people who like him.
And unfortunately, I don't think that even if he does win, I think the odds of that are actually rather small, but even if he does win, I don't think he'll be any more successful in changing the course of what is an increasingly dysfunctional remnant or a vestige of a constitutional system.
Yeah, I mean, I liked back in 2016, of course, how he was kind of this frenzied force, you know, that just completely blew Hillary's campaign out of the water by being this kind of frenetic person.
But it almost feels like after four years of a very frenetic, dysfunctional Biden administration, you'd almost want someone boring, maybe like a George Bush Sr., you know, George Herbert Walker Bush or something to take.
I wouldn't go that far, Daniel.
As long as we're going to go with chaos, let's go full-tailed here.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it'll be interesting.
I think I would feel better.
I don't know how you feel, Jim, but I would feel better if Trump were able to admit some of his mistakes.
I mean, I just don't think his something about his psyche, he's not capable of doing that.
If he would have said, look, I had some bone-headed people working for me last time.
They messed me up.
I'm going to be a lot more careful.
I'm going to vet everyone through Jim Jadras and Doug McGregor and make sure we get the right people in.
I mean, I think we could all feel better.
But, I mean, I think you're right.
The Biden administration has bungle things.
And that's too kind of a word, in fact, because that implies that somehow they meant well.
I don't think they did mean well.
But they've destroyed the country, I think, for the past four years so much that people are really desperately ready for anything.
Well, almost anything.
Not Nikki Haley, but anything after this debate.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
You'll recall back when Trump won 2016, there were some of us who thought maybe, hey, maybe this is going to go somewhere.
Maybe it's even worth serving in the administration.
And all I can think of is, you know, the fact that the Heritage Foundation and the Bush retreads got hold of his administration very early on and made it impossible for outsiders really to get in.
All I can say is, thank God I dodged that bullet.
I don't look good in orange.
You look what happened to Michael Flynn.
Anybody who was a Trump loyalist or wanted to change the course of the American government besides the kind of people he got was putting his head through a noose.
And I don't expect he'll be any better this time.
I don't think he'll pick the same bad people if he manages to win.
He'll pick different bad people if he manages to win.
And of course, I think that chaos, if he does win, will make 2020 and the BLM and Antifa riots look like a picnic.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think you're right.
And, you know, really, I mean, you hit the nail on the head, and I'm beating this dead horse.
I'm using a lot of old cliches, but is that the neocons will divide into two camps, the camp that hates him and the camp that likes him.
We've already seen that embrace.
You talked about heritage, their heritage.
There are plenty of other people, and we could name names.
I'm thinking of a few right now, who are neocons, who will embrace him because on one hand, they want to attack him, but on the other hand, they want to wine and dine him.
So no matter what happens, they will have the power.
And it's tough.
I remember what our mutual friend Doug McGregor said to me once at lunch.
We just don't have any people, you know, and they have all the people.
He's not going to look outside.
I think he even said once, he said, when I got into town, I realized I don't know anybody here.
And that's just a sad fact.
There are no good people, I think, left inside the beltway, at least any that are sort of on the A-list of people.
Oh, let's get this guy.
He's an expert.
An expert at what?
Of messing things up.
Exactly right.
I think Trump had the tendency, especially with his affinity for, oh, the generals love me, to pick foreign policy and national security people like he was picking lawyers or hotel managers or something.
I'll just get the best.
Well, you know, it doesn't work that way.
You know, the fact is, you and I both know several dozen people that could do very, very competent jobs in changing the course of American policy.
But, you know, as you say, they're not going to be on the A-list so much because they didn't end up as assistant secretary of that or undersecretary of that or and so forth because they weren't part of the machine.
They were the people that, you know, as you know, like, well, people like Ron Paul, who tried to work within the system as much as they could, but really did not get their hands on the levers of power, couldn't get the Fed audited and so forth.
And so, you know, I think those people exist, but they're just not going to make the list even in a second Trump administration.
And even if they did, the system, and you and I have both been in it, we spend a lot of time in it.
The system itself is so arcane and so difficult to maneuver.
And we saw during the Trump administration itself with people like Vindman, who basically are traitors.
They betrayed their country, but they could do it with impunity, the things they didn't tell Trump and did anyway.
So even if there was Assistant Secretary of State Jim Jotris, all of the other people in the real deep state are going to be pulling all the levers.
You're going to be running around like a chicken with his head cut off.
Exactly right.
And I think mentioning Vindman is case in point.
He was at the NSC, Trump's NSC.
You had Maria Yomanovich, the ambassador, who was the Obama ambassador that he then kept on the job.
He appointed Kurt Volcker as his special envoy for Ukraine.
I mean, a lot of what has come up to blow up in his face during his term in office, including his impeachment, were people he put into power or were put into power by the people he put into power.
Risky Moves in Ukraine Conflict 00:15:35
And did he even know that?
And, you know, so I don't, and like you said, he doesn't have the humility to say, I messed this up.
And to tell the truth, Daniel, you know, short of deputizing 2,000 special marshals and parachuting them into Langley and taking over the place and saying, what the hell is going on over here?
I don't know that any American president can really change things, which is why, as you've noted, when I speak to, when I try to depress the young people at the Rum Paul Institute conference, that somehow voting in good policy is going to change things.
I really don't think so.
I think we're going to have to go through some very, very difficult times in this country in the very, very near future.
I think that time is getting really short.
And then at the end of that, we'll see if something, some humpty-dumpty can be put back together again.
Yeah, I think that's about right, Jim.
Well, let's move on to a couple of the things that we've noticed over the weekend.
And this is going to be an experiment because I want to put up a before they do that, the first thing we're going to talk about is this leak in Germany.
Now, if you've been watching the news over the weekend, essentially, I'll give you the shorthand of it.
Some very senior German military defense officials were having a conversation, wide-ranging, I think it's 30-some minutes long, a long conversation about, among other things, the delivery of these tourist missiles to Ukraine.
Taurus missiles are very powerful.
They can be very long-range.
They can strike deeply within Russia.
And the discussion ranged from striking deeply within Russia to using them to strike the Kerch Bridge and how many it might take to take it out and how they might target it.
This was leaked.
Presumably, it was leaked to Simonian, the head of RT, and she released it, I think, on Friday.
Apparently, It was listened into by the Russian intelligence services.
Jim, what was your first reaction when you heard this leak was coming out?
My first reaction was, how much are the Germans going to take?
I mean, it's bad enough that we've destroyed their economy with Nord Stream and so forth.
Are they really going to remain so passive that they're going to see their country destroyed militarily?
I mean, how much further down this road to direct involvement in the Ukraine war are people in Germany and even the German military going to passively tolerate while these maniacs in Washington fraud marsh them into something that's going to continue the destruction of their country.
Yeah, and I think as several Russian officials said, you've already tried this before.
You've already tried bombing us in Germany.
It didn't work out very well the last time.
And that might explain some of the pushback that we're seeing from Chancellor Schultz in Germany.
I think the first thing he said adamantly, which is that we will not be delivering tourist missiles.
Now, other people that we both know and like, people like Alexander Mercurius, he believes that they've already been delivered, which may well be the case, maybe even behind Schultz's back.
But he's at least vocally saying, we're not going to give the tourists.
It's not going to happen.
That's one thing that will irritate the dead enders here in the U.S. and elsewhere.
The other is interesting that he said, I believe, this morning that he believes Assange should not be extradited to the U.S. because he doesn't think he'll get a fair trial here.
That is a pretty, normally you'd say that's not such a big deal, but for a client state like Germany, it's become a client state like Germany, to say something like, it does feel like a little bit of pushback.
But Schultz is looking at least pathetic and weak, having all of this going on apparently behind his back.
Yeah, it's well, maybe if he doesn't have any sense of self-preservation for his country, he might have one for his own political future.
At some point, maybe he feels he needs to push back a little bit.
Of course, I don't know how much Germany really has to say about what happens to Assange.
His country is not directly involved.
You know, the other thing that was mentioned, this conversation between these two generals, is evidently the understanding that there are NATO personnel, Americans, Germans, others, Brits, obviously, on the ground already in Ukraine in some kind of a plausibly deniable circumstance as contractors, but really are very likely to be active duty people who've been seconded to the Ukrainians in some kind of fictional capacity.
Do people have any sense of how dangerous that is?
And you're right.
It's quite possible that the German bureaucracy is hiding from Schultz that there are taurus missiles.
And of course, every time he draws the line in the sand and the Americans do the same thing.
Oh, we're not going to send this.
Remember what Biden himself said.
If we send, I forget which weapon system it was, that I think might have been the F-16s, that, well, we're talking about World War III there.
Well, I guess we'll send those weapons after all.
So, you know, I think all this points back, Daniel, is to the fact that, and, you know, with the Tucker interview with Putin, where he still left the door open for negotiations, I still wonder, do the Russians still get it?
Yeah.
When it comes to the kind of people they're dealing with over here, are they still waiting for the Godot?
They're still waiting for the rational interlocutor who can make a deal with them despite overwhelming abundant evidence that that can't happen.
These are just not the kind of people who can make any kind of rational deal and be trusted to keep it.
Yeah, it certainly seems that way.
I mean, you can imagine, remember, the U.S. had a panic attack, what, about a year ago, when we thought a Chinese balloon was floating over our country.
Can you imagine if we'd intercepted Russian officials?
We were at war, for example, and it was a proxy war.
We heard Russian officials talking about, well, let's sneak a nuke into Mexico and unleash it in the U.S. or even any kind of missile.
I mean, it would imagine what America would do.
We would be diving under our desks.
But somehow this is expected to be normal.
But you're so right, Jim, because all along it's been, well, Putin's bluffing.
Putin's bluffing.
He'll never go into Ukraine.
He's bluffing.
Now, I didn't think he would go in, but it wasn't because I thought he was bluffing.
I thought that he was just too conservative.
As you said, he's taken so much, and I would think that he would, I thought that he wouldn't go in because of that.
But at some point, you get to the point where he's not bluffing, and he hasn't really shown himself to be a bluffer on this.
No, and I'm a bit of a dissenter from a lot of people who point out the discussions that were at Istanbul in, I think it was April of 2022.
They said, oh, peace could have come very early.
They almost had a deal there, and it was all initialed, and Ukraine was going to be neutral, and this, that.
You know, I don't know why people would have trusted such a deal not to turn out just to be another Minsk III type agreement that would buy Kiev some time to further build up Ukraine's forces and so forth and continue the war under circumstances and the Russians like Charlie Brown kicking the football say, what?
They lied to us again?
So again, I'm just skeptical of all this.
I don't know how much dealings you've had with Russians.
They tend to have this kind of annoying sense of normalcy when it comes to assessing their opposite numbers on their so-called partners.
And well, we'll see.
I mean, at this point, I think that even the most rah-rah-rah supporters of Kiev realize that they're on the ropes.
But I can't help but think that they're going to look for some way to pull a rabbit out of the hat in some way that continues the escalation and it takes us into very dangerous territory.
And I think this conversation between these two Germans indicates the lack of reality and gravity when it comes to what we're actually facing.
Yeah, I mean, just the talk of, I mean, we heard it from Macron last week, the talk of sending troops in.
Of course, the little Baltic states were saying, yeah, this is great.
Let's do it.
You know, and the rest of Europe was in a panic.
But as you say, find out that we already have them there.
Well, I don't know.
I even have a theory, because you know how Trevor's the French are, that maybe what he was trying to do was elicit exactly this kind of response was the other countries would say, no, no, no, we do not want to be part of this.
And that's what he was actually trying to do.
But I don't know.
Is he actually that clever?
I don't know.
Yeah, anyone else, it might be, but Macron, it's hard to know.
Well, the other interesting thing, Jim, is, you know, there's the conversation.
It's explosive, almost literally explosive conversation about let's nuke the Kerch Bridge.
Let's not nuke.
Let's blow up the bridge.
Let's blow it up inside Russia.
Not yet.
That'd be the next one.
But there's another discussion happening, which is about the leak itself.
So, you know, Schultz and the German press didn't say, oh my God, what are these guys talking about?
This is nuts.
They're saying, how did they get this information?
And here's this is a classic example.
I did a couple of clip of quick clips.
I don't know if we can do this technically.
Let's put that first one on.
So this is from The Guardian.
No, no, this is from the Washington Times.
I don't know how hard it is.
Oh, here we go.
German defense minister said leaked audio is part of Russia's information war against the West.
Here they're caught with their hands in the cookie jar, Jim, and they're blaming the whole thing on Russia's information war.
I don't know if you saw that headline, but what do you make of that?
How dare you tell us?
How dare you tell us what our sleazy leaders are up to in private.
You know, it is amazing.
But as you know, there have been other instances in the past where something has been leaked out either directly from the agencies in question, the government in question, or via the Russians through their intelligence capabilities.
And the issue isn't ever what's the content?
What kind of crazy people do we have in charge, but rather, who let the cat out of the bag?
Who's telling, who's taddle-tailing on us?
Yeah.
And so, you know, it's just, it's CYA, basically.
Yeah.
I mean, Nordstream was almost that, essentially, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And here we have the Danes and the Swedish after, what, a year or so of investigation.
Shutting it down.
Yeah.
Shutting down the investigation, not sharing any of the information.
Gosh, I wonder.
That must mean that Russia did it, right?
Yeah.
Of course.
I'm going to skip ahead, skip that next clip and go to the one where it's the spokesman, the Russian spokesman.
It's a tweet, if we can just skip one if we can.
There we go.
Okay.
So I'm just going to read this out, Jim, because you can't see it.
But this is the Dmitry Peskov.
And this is what he said about the conversation.
He said, we undertook a certain Dimarche, and the German ambassador was invited to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia.
The very conversation of the German officers suggests that plans for attacks on the territory of the Russian Federation are essentially being worked out within the Bundeswehr.
Everything is more than obvious, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peshkov said.
So he makes a good point here.
The fact that they're discussing this means that they are also actively making plans to attack Russia.
It's an obvious thing, but putting it that way makes it all the more chilling.
It is.
And then it gets back to what I was trying to say earlier with throwing the ball back in Moscow's court.
What are they going to do about it?
In other words, again, the way I see this, the longer this conflict goes on, the better the chances that somebody on the Western side, the NATO side, does something irresponsible.
Even I don't think they're crazy enough to launch a war that would inevitably escalate into a nuclear exchange deliberately.
But just because they're evil doesn't mean they're competent.
They may do something by accident that they don't really understand.
And then at that point, when the Russians do respond in a way they didn't anticipate, things may take on a life of their own.
I know the Russians seem to be very, very concerned about not doing something precipitous that would trigger a Western action that could not be controlled.
But they don't seem to be conscious of the alternative danger, which is that by taking a moderate, slow course and one that's still waiting for Godot, have somebody come talk with them, they're actually keeping this window of danger open for a long period of time where somebody will do something that they did not anticipated.
And then at that point, we're off to the races.
Yeah, and it seems like we're getting into that dangerous area with the way they're pushing it now.
Well, I want to end this one section, and I'm going to go on to one other topic, but I want to end, I don't know if you follow Michael Tracy, Jim, on TwitterX, but he's a very insightful person.
I often disagree with him, but he has a very pithy way of putting things, and I think he has a very independent mind.
If we can put up that next tweet, he basically sums up this last week of, he says, just to round up, French president warns of EU ground intervention in Ukraine.
British prime minister confirms UK military personnel on the ground in Ukraine.
German Air Force chief says U.S. military personnel are on the ground in Ukraine assisting with missile launches.
So to me, Jim, it sounds like we are moving closer to that area where some follow-up could end up in a disaster.
Exactly right.
And, you know, I don't know Mike Tracy only slightly, but I respect a lot of the work he does.
And I think that he's very pithy the way he put that together.
And again, we're just sending a few advisors to Vietnam on what could possibly go wrong.
And here, except it's a nuclear armed state and one that is right on its front doorstep here.
I mean, there's no way these people can prevail.
Now, there are some people who think now that what really they're shooting for is some kind of a frozen conflict, one where the Russians can be tied down and bled white for years on end, no matter if there's a single Ukrainian left or there's any European economy left.
I don't know what they think they're doing, but like we were saying earlier with Trump, he can't admit where he was wrong.
And these people can't admit where they were wrong.
They cannot find some way to climb off out of the tree that they've gotten themselves pushed up into.
Again, I just don't know where this goes unless at some point the Russians decide simply, look, the comedy must end.
We must put an end to this militarily.
And if the other side does something stupid, well, then they do.
But they've got to roll those dice if I were in their shoes.
Yeah, let's not forget these people have dedicated their entire careers to taking out Russia.
People like Newland and Blinken and Sullivan and the others.
Well, let's move on to our last topic because I just wanted to talk to you about this because I find it fascinating, which is what's happening with Gaza and Israel right now.
And all of our viewers hopefully know, hopefully they go beyond the mainstream.
Israeli Militancy: 30,000 Civilians 00:06:48
We know that there have been, and even Austin, Secretary of Defense, said before Congress this past week, 25,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.
There was a horrific scene last week where a bunch of Palestinians were rushing to an aid truck to get some food because they're starving and they were mowed down by the Israelis.
Horrific, horrific scenes.
We know for a fact, obviously, that we give a lot of money to Israel and we give a lot of weapons.
And that's why a lot of the reason we're talking about it.
But, Jim, here is a situation.
The Biden administration seems to be so paralyzed by what's happening there.
The world is disgusted and outraged at what's happening.
And here you have the Biden administration controlling the levers, essentially, of Israel's power with our power of the purse and the power of the bombs, and incapable of doing anything as a famine threatens 2 million people.
So what do the geniuses come up with?
Let's drop 30,000 meals by air onto the ground to feed 2.5 million fishes, starving civilians.
I was thinking of Jesus with the five roads and fishes.
It's not going to work.
Have you ever, you've been a diplomat in diplomatic history, has there ever been a situation where a close American ally refuses to allow humanitarian aid through their territory?
I can't think of one off the top of my head.
I can't say that it didn't happen, but I certainly can't think of it, Casey.
You're right.
30,000 meals.
It's not 30,000 days per person.
That's one meal per day for 30,000 people.
Just a total drop on the bucket.
And you do have to wonder.
I've seen some reference that, well, once these things drop in and people start to gather this food, are the Israelis going to target them?
I don't know.
I mean, it seems pretty clear that the destroy Amalek mentality is pretty strong in the Israeli government right now.
Now, does that mean that they think they could still continue with this operation in Gaza and actually beat Hamas?
Or is it really more aimed at simply clearing the people out of there?
Are they going to try to push them into Egypt?
How are the Egyptians going to handle that?
And, of course, there's more and more talk that the Israelis are going to launch an attack against Hezbollah.
in Lebanon.
You'd think, given how much they've got their hands full in Gaza, both militarily and in terms of the black eye they're taking in terms of the public world perceptions of the operation, they would want to keep that northern front as quiet as possible.
It doesn't seem that that's what they want.
And the only reason I can think that they would want to move forward against Hezbollah is that somehow it's going to drag the United States directly into the conflict.
Yeah, they want us to catch the checks they're writing.
I mean, the Israeli government, I mean, they're almost like the neocons here.
They don't have a way to back up.
When they get into a bad policy, well, let's double down.
Oh, yeah, well, we're going to take on Hezbollah, too.
And we'll take on Iran while we're at it.
Yeah, yeah.
And you have to wonder how much of this comes down to simply the personal politics of people involved.
Netanyahu is trying to save his own skin, both politically and maybe in terms of staying out of jail.
Look at the Biden administration.
They clearly don't know what to do.
Within their own party, they're whipsawed between a lot of big donors, many of whom are Jewish and pro-Israel.
But at the same time, they've got this sort of squad mentality, the Antifa BLM, Afro-Asian Islamic wing of their party that is very much on the other side.
And their party is extremely divided.
Oddly enough, the Republicans, for better or worse, mostly worse, are more united on this because they have some of the same big donors.
At the same time, they've got their evangelical Christian dispensationalist base.
They're even more pro-Israeli than Netanyahu is.
Sure.
So, you know, how this all shakes out, I don't know, but it's not going to be pretty.
Yeah, but I mean, we've mentioned some polls on the show, and maybe it's just wishful thinking, but shows that even among Republicans, I think 59% of Republicans say that we should not be sending military equipment to Israel.
We should not be promoting and prolonging this war.
So I think the numbers of the electorate is with us.
Certainly in the Democratic Party, the electorate is totally against the Biden policy on this.
Nevertheless, it continues.
I want to just do another couple clips, put on the one of Austin.
He was before Congress this past week, and this sort of underscores what I was pointing out.
Yeah, there we go.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Austin, we have delivered approximately 21,000 precision-guided weapons to Israel since October 7th.
Yeah, and they may be precision-guided, but they have precisely destroyed the entirety of Gaza.
And let's go to that next one.
This is the spokesman Miller.
This guy is really a piece of work, man.
I mean, so asked about U.S. leverage to influence Israel's actions, State Department spokesman Miller says, quote, you're going to get a laugh.
Hold on, Jim.
You're going to be laughing out loud.
The United States does not dictate to Israel what it must do, just as we don't dictate to any country what it must do.
Well, you know, he's half right because we don't dictate to Israel.
Israel dictates to us.
So that's probably a half-true statement there.
You know, it's interesting.
Remember all the tall tales about Syria with poison gas and barrel bombs and all that stuff, where I guess you could accuse the Syrian government of indiscriminate bombing of civilians or targeting of civilians.
I guess that they're getting precision-guided weapons.
You can't really accuse the Israelis of indiscriminate targeting.
It would be discriminate targeting.
So it's actually, in some ways, a much more damning indictment.
That's actually a very good point.
The other interesting thing that I read, and I don't have it in front of me, I wish I clipped it, but according to U.S. law, the United States is prohibited from delivering any kind of military assistance to a country that denies humanitarian aid.
So I think there's a lot of laws.
They probably can be bent in this direction.
But it's an awful situation.
And actually, I hate doing this to you back there, but if we can go to that first one with the parachutes, I did want to put this image up.
I'm sorry you can't see it, Jim, but it's another Michael Tracy quote.
Precision-Guided Indictment 00:01:22
If we can go back to that, I'm making everyone jump around.
I apologize for that.
Here we go.
Thank you.
So you can see the parachutes.
Yeah, okay, falling into the ocean for the most part.
And Michael Tracy says, strange that this is how the U.S. military must deliver supplies to a territory under the control of a U.S.-backed client state.
And it is, I mean, it is just, this is an astonishing picture to see, and it's heartbreaking to see.
Yeah, yeah.
And let's be clear, Daniel.
This is a virtue signal.
They know that this is not going to do any good for any appreciable number of people or any percentage of the population.
They're just trying to patting themselves on the back saying, well, we're great humanitarians.
Look what we're doing.
That's all this is.
We'll keep you alive for a couple extra days so the Israelis can kill you after that.
Terrible, terrible.
Anyway, Jim, that's all we have time for today.
I can't thank you enough for joining us with your great insights, your vast experience.
Look forward to seeing you when we do our conference in the summer in D.C.
I hope you'll be with us to cheer those kids up again.
Well, just make sure you take away their belts and shoelaces before I talk to them.
All right, Jim, thanks very much.
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