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April 15, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:38
Will Israel Escalate?

After an unprecedented Iranian response to Israel's attack on its embassy in Syria, pressure is building for Israel to retaliate against the retaliation. Biden officials are panicking at the thought of a wider Mideast war in election season. What happens next? Also today, a US General admits the truth about Russia's war in Ukraine; after two years of US government lies.

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Escalation At The Embassy 00:14:43
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
How are you, Dr. Paul?
Are you resting?
Did you recover from our weekend?
No, we did, but we had a good weekend.
We had a great weekend.
Lots of people come and lots of people.
You know, most of them agreed with this.
Yeah, that was nice.
But we need more people agreeing in this country that peace is better than war.
And we want to talk about that because these past week or so and discussing always what's Israel going to do?
You know, are they going to retaliate?
And what will the Iranians do?
Because somebody attacked their embassy.
It was a big deal.
And the markets were shaky.
The oil prices were up.
And there was a lot of concern about what was coming.
It turned out that if anything, there's at least in the air a brief pause of it being totally out of control.
And of course, that's what we still worry about is the fact that there will be escalation.
And, you know, I have this sense, it's not a very scientific sense of what's going on.
But it seems like the people who are more likely to escalate this thing are American war hawks versus some of the people, even some of the people in the Biden administration, and certainly even in Iran.
But I'm assuming, though, that there's still a lot of people that agree with our war hawks that live in Israel.
So there's the contention and there is the concern that there will be escalation eventually because, you know, it's something that's been going on for a long time and an embassy had been bombed.
It's not a plaything that they're dealing with.
And here's one title on anti-war.
It says, Biden tells Netanyahu, U.S. won't support attack on Iran.
So if that's the case, you know, what are they going to do?
And, you know, in spite of the fighting and hatred between these two factions that's going on for a long, long time, one of the factors that people are dealing with as well is the immediacy of our political climate in this country.
You know, a presidential election coming up, and there's a lot of lying going on about the candidates and a lot of court cases going on.
So this is all important.
So the way this appears is very important.
And if they are making the big decisions of escalation or will the Hawks win and really get what they are looking for or whether it'll just say settle down.
But there's been no reassurance that all of a sudden there'll be a ceasefire for a while.
They talk about it in a way there's a little less of that going on, but they're not very serious about it.
And the big question is, though, what are the countries going to do immediately, today, tomorrow, and the next day?
Will there be escalation?
Because there are factions that want it.
There are other factions that would like to see a little bit of common sense.
And there's a lot of factors involved.
And I think it would be difficult to predict what will happen to all the players in this.
And besides, if you even get it right, oh yes, we think what Israel will do or what we will do depends on what is the reaction to that.
So it's ongoing.
It's still a mess because there's not enough sincere talk about stopping.
And I keep thinking, why do these things continue?
And I watched all that nonsense in the 60s, and they kept, they talk a little bit, but they always went back with more troops, more fighting.
And in this case, our case is there's more and more money.
And I think that they depend on us, and it's going to be hard for us to walk away from it.
But Biden here, he's telling them, you know, you better watch out.
U.S. won't support an attack on Iran.
And I think there are some people truly are in favor of that.
That's in the Biden administration.
But right now, I think the warmongers are the ones that have to be watched.
Yeah, the timeline is important to this whole thing.
We've talked about it on the show before.
But, you know, Iran has been attacking Syria and hitting Iranian military officials in Syria for a long time with impunity.
There's never been a retaliation from Iran to Israel for the attacks that Israel has perpetrated on Iran through Syria.
But this was a different one because the Israelis hit, as you say, a diplomatic compound in Syria, in Damascus, and that upped the stakes.
And that upped the stakes according to even to international law.
If you take out someone's embassy, then a retaliation is considered self-defense.
So they put Iran into a situation where they had to retaliate in some way.
What were they going to do?
What would the response be?
This timeline, and Iran responded over the weekend on Saturday night, as we were sitting there enjoying our post-conference discussion.
They didn't have the decency to wait until I was back in front of the computer so I could read about it.
I had to hear about it from Chris, who saw it on his phone.
Nevertheless, this is what happened.
There was a retaliation by Iran against Israel for hitting Iran's embassy.
But the neoconser tried to distort it.
Oh, this is an unprecedented act of Iranian aggression against Israel.
No, that's not the case.
You know, they say fool around and find out.
You shouldn't attack other people's embassies.
With that said, it was fascinating, you know, just to look at the attack itself, the retaliation, because it was obviously very calibrated.
They did send a lot of missiles.
A lot of missiles were shot down.
So Israel can kind of claim a victory.
We shot 90%, they say 99% of the missiles down.
Not a single person was killed, which is certainly a lot more careful than Israel has been in Gaza.
Nevertheless, they did hit a couple of military bases.
They were the bases that Iran claimed had been involved in the attack on Iranian embassy in Damascus.
So that was basically justified.
And apparently they hit an intelligence compound in the Golan Heights.
So it's interesting to see the distortion in our media, but it's also, like you say, interesting.
We wonder what's going to happen next.
Right.
You know, when I saw this headline, I thought, well, Netanyahu telling Netanyahu that U.S. won't support him if he escalates the war.
And I thought, well, somebody would like to calm things down a little bit.
But then I got to thinking, what difference does that make?
This is a stunted propaganda because it hasn't changed The degree of hatred between the factions and it hasn't diminished our enthusiasm for continuing to do what we're doing.
So if we don't support the attack on Iran, do you think the dollars will quit?
No, it's likely the dollars are going to go up.
They're getting ready to pass out more money.
How about intelligence gathering?
Are we all of a sudden going to give up on our whole gathering and deny it to them?
No, that's not going to happen.
Will the weapons stop flowing in?
Hardly.
Even if they're looking for another appropriation, I suspect it will all continue.
But in the meantime, you know, they'll say, you know, they're playing this game of saying, well, the United States won't even support an attack.
And this is for negotiation purposes.
But it just goes, it goes along with what our concern is, is how do you gauge and how do you decide what the escalation will be like?
And is it going to happen?
What can we do to change it?
And then you have this mixed bags where in the United States, the division between the warmongers and the ones who would argue for peace, you know, it's a better debate now than we've had in a while.
So there are some people who sincerely think enough is enough.
We don't need any.
And that's one of the reasons why there's chaos in the Congress right now.
People worry about the chaos.
But if the chaos is a faction that's growing, they're saying, why don't we use a little more common sense in our foreign policy?
I'm all for it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, let's put on that first clip just so people can know.
Dave DeCamp did a good write-up, as always, on anti-war.com about it.
And as Dr. Paul mentioned, Biden tells Netanyahu U.S. won't support attack on Iran.
And I think what they're saying here is basically, okay, now when you were on the receiving end of these missiles, we took out a lot of them.
The U.S., the U.K., and Jordan.
They gave Israel an enormous amount of support to take out these missiles.
We were very actively involved in doing that.
But what they're saying here, I think, is, look, we came, we defended you, but there's a difference between defending you against incoming missiles in the situation and assisting in you retaliating against the retaliation of Iran.
And I think that's what they're signaling to them.
And you could say, on the one hand, it's probably the first smart foreign policy move the Biden administration has done.
Maybe there were one or two other ones, but it's a smart one.
But on the other one, it's smart for a different reason because, yeah, they love Israel.
Yeah, they love all this stuff.
But the one thing they love above all is power.
And they're looking at coming into an election season, a tightly contested election, where if a full war breaks out, America is going to be looking at $10 a gallon gas.
The entire Middle East region is going to be shut down.
You're not going to do any oil.
There's nothing.
Shipping is going to be gone.
The economy, which you believe, I think probably rightly is on the edge at this point.
Inflation's out of control.
It seems like any little straw being pulled out is going to be the last straw.
And so I think in the interest of remaining in power, they're also desperate to keep this thing under wraps.
Yes, and we probably will not know exactly what's going to happen for a few more days.
But the markets are shaky.
They're worried about it because the breakout can affect the price of oil.
It can affect the price of everything.
There's going to be more spending.
This is always used to build the power.
And that is that right now where they thought they would never get things appropriated, because I think the people will eventually roll over with more money.
And right now, there's a Speaker of the House, although he has credentials of when he wasn't a Speaker, of being a fiscal conservative and a more sensible voter.
But right now, I think he's shifting gears a little bit.
And therefore, the money will be available.
It's just a matter of when and how much.
And yet, sometimes the escalation comes regardless.
They think that we don't want to escalate.
Some won't do it.
But then somebody, then there is an accident, there's an incident, another one, and then the escalation comes about anyway.
Yeah, it's really the old neocon saying, never let a crisis go to waste.
And if you can, let's skip ahead to that when we're talking about Speaker Johnson, if you can, that clip about him.
There we go.
Speaker Johnson says House will vote on more Israel aid this week.
So again, it's never let a crisis go to waste.
The question is, is it going to bring that $95 billion bill back to the floor?
He was interviewed on Fox News over the weekend where he said, it's critically important that we stand by our ally Israel.
We should not be dictating their strategy or calling for new elections.
They're fighting for their very existence, and it's never been more important for us to stand with them.
Now, the middle one we agree with, we shouldn't be dictating their elections or anything, but we also shouldn't be backstopping them with all this money when we don't seem to have any money.
But he's clearly using this as an excuse to get members of Congress to get down to the floor and vote for this money for Israel.
And it's also being used for a good example why some want to get rid of this speaker.
There's a proposal there, and it still may happen because it's such a contradiction, you know, going from one position to another, which sort of bewilders us.
We think you're supposed to, you know, speak the truth as you best know it and work in that direction and don't flip-flop and don't be inconsistent in what we do and say.
But anyway, it's going on.
And I think the money will always flow.
Because if it's not approved by the Congress, that never stopped them from anything.
See, there's a lot of secrecy goes on on how they take care of their friends in power.
Yes, absolutely.
So we'll see.
I mean, we've talked about it on the show that this is not popular.
Sending money to Israel is not popular even among Republicans, certainly not among Democrats.
But, you know, as I mentioned in our conference over the weekend, you know, here's Speaker Johnson, who was the deciding tie-breaking vote on whether or not the government should seek a warrant before it spies on us.
And he came down on the wrong side.
He said, yeah, when I was on judiciary, I saw thousands and thousands of FBI violations of our Constitution.
But then they took me behind closed doors and gave me a classified briefing, and I realized how important it was.
Important, but was he invited to believe the truth?
Where was he on truth?
Yeah, yeah.
In a way, he's saying, all these other things that I believed why we shouldn't be doing it.
That must have been a lie.
So he finally heard the truth.
Then, of course, I think that was a time that you reminded people about the experience of our friend Walter Jones.
Russia's Paradox 00:08:34
Because he supported the Mideastern wars.
And then it finally dawned on him, all the briefings were lies.
And I remember telling him, I said, well, Walter, one of the reasons that he asked me, he says, how did you know not to do this?
I said, I stay away from the briefings.
I said, once I knew that it was just propaganda, I wasn't interested in it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Don't get confused with the facts.
Yeah.
Well, I want to just play one clip because I saw it just before the show.
And this, I think, perfectly encapsulates the hypocrisy of the U.S. and the U.K. Here's David Cameron, former prime minister.
He's the foreign secretary, foreign minister of the UK.
And he's appearing on the BBC and he's saying how what a bunch of savages the Iranians are because they attacked Israel.
And the reporter surprises him with actually a pretty good journalistic question.
Let's listen in.
And I think the whole world can see all these countries that have somehow wondered, well, you know, what is the true nature of Iran?
It's there in black and white.
What would Britain do if a hostile nation flattened one of our consulates?
Well, we would take, you know, we would take the very strong action.
And I think the whole world.
We would take very strong action.
Good debater.
Take very strong action.
So there you go.
So we'll see.
Hopefully, I mean, I think that right now both sides can take the win and just go home.
You know, right now.
Israel can say we shot down most of their weapons.
We demonstrated that we can defend our airspace for the most part.
And Iran can say, well, for the first time, we hit Iran and we hit Israel on Israeli territory.
Someone joked on Twitter, this is the first direct flight to Israel from Iran since 1979.
Yeah, it'd be better to declare a ceasefire, at least to the election, and let the two candidates have a debate.
Let them have a debate every week on this policy.
But no shooting.
Peace in our time, at least for a few months.
And Iran had plenty more weapons.
They used some very slow drones.
They didn't use, as far as I know, any of their supposed hypersonic weapons.
They didn't exhaust their supply.
Where on the other hand, the U.S. almost nearly exhausted.
We've told Zelensky we don't have anything left to send you.
We can't send you anything.
It just doesn't exist out there.
And the other issue is that Israelis spent about a billion dollars that they don't have because their economy is in shambles.
War is not good for the economy, despite what some Keynesians will say.
So they're in a bind here.
They don't need this to go further.
And we don't have the weapons, even if we wanted to, to sit there and intercept thousands of Iranian missiles every day.
Right.
You're ready to go on to another little factor here.
More lies, yes.
More lies being exposed.
Yes, right.
You know, the U.S. general, a U.S. general says Russia's military is bigger than before the Ukraine invasion.
But remember the story that this was, they didn't admit that NATO was the invader and the precipitator of the war and the coup and the whole works.
But they said that we will before it is bigger than before Ukraine.
But remember, they were reassuring us that Russia wasn't all that powerful.
I think Ukraine can take them.
So that was the proposal.
But it found out that that was not exactly it.
And right now they've discovered that Ukraine is a sushi risk of losing war the UK ex-general.
Now that's the thing.
And I think the Ukrainian, matter of fact, that's general acceptance now in the public.
They aren't as blunt as we are about it, but I think they've all admitted they can't do it, especially if they don't get weapons.
And you know, this is one way the market can work.
They run out of money and they run out of weapons, so they have to maybe take a pause.
Yeah, I think there's general panic in Washington because I think they all believed each other's lies about this.
Oh, Ukraine is winning.
It's going to be an easy run.
We're killing all the Russians.
We're removing the threat of Russia.
Russia's almost out of missiles.
We've talked about it for the past year and a half or so, constantly, over and over.
Well, the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe for NATO, Christopher General Christopher Cavioli, he appeared before Congress this last week and he said, well, it's actually not true.
Russia is 15% stronger than when the war started, 15% stronger.
They're not losing everything.
And so they're sort of in a bind because they've been pushing this propaganda for so long.
The weak Russia, the weak Russia, they've already lost.
And so America is saying, okay, that's fine.
Why do we have to send them any more money?
If they've already won, why send more money?
So now they're sort of caught in this lie that we've got to show that they're actually pretty strong and they are winning because otherwise we're not going to get the money and that's what it's about.
See, what really needs to be done is the coup ought to be canceled.
But the coup occurred in 2014, and that was NATO and U.S. going in and changing.
And because you might say, well, why don't they have a referendum?
You know, there are a lot of Russians that have lived there, and there's a mixture of Latin, and that is true.
In eastern Ukraine, there are a lot of Russians.
And they did have a referendum, and they had a vote, and then that's when we had to throw the leader of that country out.
And so it's hard to cancel a coup, but that really is the answer.
And I think it's going to be there.
I think the Russians are going to probably be successful because they try to paint Russia as Hitler, you know, taking over more Hitler than even Stalin, because Stalin, Russia has a history of having been abused by their neighbors and people from afar.
And that's what's going on right now.
So I think that they are really, you know, at a position where this would be a good time to.
I think the way it's probably going to end is that eastern Ukraine is going to, you know, probably be in agreement and it's going to go back with Russia.
But that, and I think Russia would live with that, but I don't think NATO will live with that because NATO wants to be in their door.
And right now, they're next door to Russia because who controls Ukraine right now?
Russia has part of it, but NATO has the rest.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Well, this whole admission by General Cavioli really exposes the lie that we've been hearing all the time.
As they've claimed, well, Russia has lost 300,000 troops, and Ukraine has only lost 30,000 troops.
And that's what they say.
That's the official line.
So if that's true, how is it possible that Russia losing 10 times more troops is stronger than they were when they started, and Ukraine losing one-tenth of the number of troops is weaker and is losing.
It doesn't make any sense.
And Cavioli said himself, he said, over the past year, Russia has increased its frontline troop strength from 360 to 470,000 troops.
Well, how is that possible if you lost 300,000?
I'm not a math whiz, but to me, something doesn't add up with those numbers, you know?
Right.
And reality will set in, you know, eventually.
But there's going to be a lot of rough slitting, you know, in the meantime.
Yeah, absolutely.
And as you suggested, here's another piece, though, showing that reality is coming, is breaking through.
And this is Paul Joseph Watson has his piece out.
But you can see pieces like this everywhere in the mainstream.
If you can put that very last clip up, Ukraine is at serious risk of losing the war.
Warren's top ex-general.
This is a UK general who's saying the same thing that Ukraine is seriously risking.
Now, that's always a segue for them to say, but if we send them some more money, they'll start winning again.
But when they've been lying the entire time, it's really hard to believe them, especially when you look at the numbers that Cavioli himself admitted.
You know, they're stronger, they have more troops, whereas Ukraine, they're desperate.
They're desperate for troops.
You've seen videos of them pulling guys off the streets, forcing them to go fight the front line.
Yeah, because it's pretty apparent they're not doing well.
Recharges Batteries 00:04:03
Yeah.
It's also the reason why some people are getting cold feet when they thought, oh, you know, with our help and NATO's help, a lot of this stuff would be ending, and it's not.
So one thing they want to do, though, is continue the process.
And it doesn't phase them because they said, yeah, we need this money, and I know we're up short, but we need to put Taiwan on this list.
We've got to be ready for a war in Taiwan.
At the same time, there's some sensible talk with China right now, which you have a chance to be calling a traitor to our country.
If you even talk to somebody that they've decided that they are not to be talked with and that we're perfect, and as long as they do what we tell them, then it's okay.
But it's a pity too bad that this power mongering and war mongering is so deeply ingrained.
And I saw an interview, a little bit of an interview this morning with one of our least favorite hawk senators that says, we've got to go in there.
We've got to go in there all the time.
Never stop.
Yeah, who's this we?
Well, I'm going to, I think if we're pretty much handling it, I'm just going to close out by thanking our audience and especially thanking, I saw a couple of you guys at the conference who are our regulars on the live stream chat.
And it was great to meet you in person, chat a little bit with you guys.
I hung out with the Michigan boys, some good folks up there.
So thanks for all of you who made the effort to come out to our events.
As our good friend Jacob Hornberger always says, that recharges my batteries.
It really recharges the batteries to talk to folks, to interact.
And it's not easy to travel these days.
So we're glad to have had you at this one.
We're going to do our summer one in Washington, D.C. We're going to get a date nailed down this week and give you that date so you can start making your plans.
And remember, when we say D.C., we mean Dulles.
So you don't have to go into town if you don't want to.
So we look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible as well.
So over you, Dr. Peter.
Very good.
And you know, it is easy to get despondent over what's going on and listening to the news and all the war and the problems that we have.
But there was one characteristic there.
We didn't have a huge meeting there, the conference, but it were hundreds of people there.
And I think I would say 99% were very, very grateful, very, very friendly.
And people really bought into the idea that these meetings are important because they come and learn and meet other people.
And we were so grateful because we found out there's a lot of friends out there.
So it does help us.
It encourages us.
So I do want to express my appreciation for the support that we get because it wouldn't work.
I know that I mentioned at times something Leonard Reed said.
He believed that the numbers aren't everything.
Eventually there's a prevailing attitude that you have to change.
But you don't have to say, well, we have 51% because it invites the thought about democracy.
Get 51%.
You can do whatever you want.
But it's very, very important that a group of people, and many of them represent what I consider an important issue, and that is the remnant, the people who cling to the truth, regardless of whether it's religious truth or economic truth or political truth, that this is very important.
And it's been identified that it exists all the time.
And so when I look out and see those hundreds of people, like at a conference we have, I think they're all in this group.
It makes me feel well about it and good that there is a centrist.
And the numbers are growing, and that's what we're delighted with.
So I want to thank everybody for having tuned into our program today and the support that you have given us.
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