Judging Freedom - AMB Chas Freeman: Why Israel is Isolated

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

AMB Chas Freeman: Why Israel is IsolatedSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, October 3rd, 2024. Ambassador Charles Freeman joins us today. Ambassador, we've missed you. Welcome back to the show. I'm happy that you're here. Thank you. to address some of the more recent events. TASS reports this morning that Moscow warned Prime Minister Netanyahu against invading Lebanon. At the same time, the Russian ambassador sent out a message to Russian citizens in Israel that they should consider leaving immediately. And at the same time, President Putin declined to take a telephone call from Prime Minister Netanyahu, about which he was rather animated and concerned.

What do you make of these events? Well, Israel has become the most hated country on the planet. And we saw with the walkout on Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly, that it is an international pariah. Nobody wants to be seen in its company. And this is now affecting even Russia. 20% of Israelis are Russian. And so this is quite a development. Russia has been very careful to maintain a balanced relationship with Israel, but I think it's become too costly now in terms of international opinion and Russia's relations with other countries in the region. Israel's activities breach every principle of international law, offend human decency, and yet are backed by the United States.

And so the question of U.S.-Russian rivalry enters into this as well. But I think this is a significant development. It is not the Russian style to refuse communication. When they do that, they're sending a serious message. Did Russian, this is another report from, not from TASS, but from the Times of India, that Israel hit too close for comfort when it was attacking Lebanon to Russian naval vessels in

the Mediterranean? That I don't know. But I would note that the exchanges of fire are very one-sided. That is to say, on the one hand, Hezbollah and Iran both have targeted military targets, intelligence targets, and have been very careful not to go after Israeli civilians. And this is illustrated by the fact, I believe, that in the recent Iranian missile attack reprisal against Israel, one Palestinian was killed by shrapnel from what we don't know, might have been an Iranian missile, might have been an interceptor from Israel, and two Israelis were injured. But that's a remarkable thing when you compare it with the massacres, the mass murders that Israel is conducting in Lebanon. So Israel doesn't seem to be very careful about

where it aims at all. And it may well have breached a Russian red line in Lebanon. TASS has also reported that the Russian Navy neutralized some of the Israeli missiles aimed at Lebanon. What would that tell you? Russian missiles shooting down Israeli missiles over Lebanon from Russian naval vessels. Well, that's news to me. I had not heard that. That is something very significant if it happened. It matches the U.S. Navy's shooting down of Iranian missiles. U.S. naval vessels fired standard missiles to intercept the incoming Iranian missiles. But this is an indication of a return in a way

to the Soviet-US-Russian confrontations that characterized the Cold War, when Israel repeatedly brought the world to the brink of a nuclear exchange over Middle East issues. The rivalry is now not limited to Ukraine, obviously. It is now apparent in the Middle East. And I would say that, you know, Russian efforts to defend Lebanon will garner a great deal of approval and support internationally, just as our willingness to defend Israel against the consequences of its provocations costs us heavily. So let's play this out, Ambassador. Iran attacks Israel.

Israel uses its political and financial cloud to get the United States to attack Iran or do something negative to Iran beyond the sanctions. Does Russia enter the fray? Before you answer, I'm sure you know that in three weeks' time, Russia and Iran are scheduled to sign very publicly a joint defense pact. Right. Now, the Russians and Iran, who are our traditional enemies, have made up and are mutually supportive because they share a concern about the opposition of the United States.

I think Russia is now being drawn into a concern about Israel in the American media or on the part of the American government. by Hezbollah in Iran and the indiscriminate attacks on Lebanese as well as Palestinian and Yemeni civilian targets by Israel. But Iran conducted a very restrained, limited reprisal. It fired 180 or perhaps 200 missiles at Israel. Many of them got through. We have not seen reports of the damage on the ground, although if you watch the video coverage of the missiles when they were entering Israeli airspace, you could see explosions on the ground. The Western press and the United States seem to be helping Israel to cover up whatever damage was done on the ground.

More importantly, Iran conducted a brief raid and then called it off and said, this is, we've done what we need to do, no more. This is a clear signal that Iran does not want a wider war. On the contrary, Israel does want a wider war, and it has ignored every caution from the United States and apparently from Russia as well as other countries to limit its depredations against its neighbors and the Palestinian population under its control.

So we face a problem. We have people in the United States who are arguing for all-out support of Israel in an attack on Iran. We have a government in Israel that wants an attack on Iran, not just by itself, but it will do what it can to draw us into a war with Iran, because it believes that this moment is when it can finally achieve regional hegemony for Israel with American support and destroy and produce regime change in Iran. And Israel, for some reason, doesn't seem to realize that it is not facing malign individuals or groups. It is facing affronted, offended, persecuted, and vulnerable groups who are opposed to Zionism. It's not that the Iranians are, you know, genetically programmed to be anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli, but Israel is attacking them. So Israel has been given an opening to call it off.

And I'm reminded of the observation by Mahatma Gandhi, who said, you know, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and pretty soon everybody's blind and has no teeth. That's the path we're on. Here's former UN Ambassador John Bolton. Now, he is one of the more bellicose, maybe the most bellicose of the neocons. He's a little more sober in his choice of words than Senator Graham. And he is, of course, the former national security advisor to President Trump, who publicly dismissed him after about a year or so. They were a very odd couple in my view. Nevertheless, here he is last night beating the drums for war. Cut number six. It's very likely that the nuclear program could be a

target for several reasons. First, this is something that Prime Minister Netanyahu, beyond any other Israeli politician, has recognized as the existential threat for Israel. And I think people should understand that with now 300-some ballistic missiles having been fired at Israel since April, they have to worry that the next time they see a ballistic missile aimed at them, it could contain a nuclear weapon under a nose cone. So that is a motivation to solve the nuclear problem now. Does Iran have the ability to deliver nuclear material in a weapon? And what would the consequences be if the United States did, as Ambassador Bolton is suggesting? Iran, the judgment of all of the intelligence

agencies that have examined this, including Assad in Israel and the CIA in the United States, is that Iran has achieved something close to nuclear latency, meaning it has the ability on fairly short notice to fabricate a bomb. Clearly it has a very effective ballistic missile force. So it could put those two together. That is not impossible to imagine. But Iran has not built a nuclear weapon in part because of religious scruples. And if you don't believe that, remember that during the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam Hussein in Iraq was attacking Iranians

with chemical weapons on the battlefield, the Republican, sorry, the Revolutionary Guard in Iran petitioned the Ayatollah for the development of chemical weapons for Iran. And they were refused on the grounds that weapons of mass destruction are religiously unacceptable. They are forbidden in Islam. Now that's the Iranian position. It has not changed. Great irony is that Iran just elected a new president,

a moderate, someone whose agenda was to reach out to the West and bring Iran back into the world. He was willing to talk with the United States about the nuclear program, to restore the JCPOA, the nuclear deal that enabled the control of the Iranian nuclear program. That was something Mr. Bolton opposed, which was ended by President Trump when he was in office. President Biden promised to restore it. He did not. And there is no international control at all on Iranian nuclear programs. Here, there's a fundamental point that Mr. Bolton never seems to have understood when he was ambassador to the UN without having been confirmed by the Senate, I might add.

It is far more effective to reduce threats with negotiation and agreement, to eliminate threats with diplomacy, to get rid of the threats than it is to attack the enemy with weapons, where you don't know what the result of a war will be. And it's always costly and blood and treasure, no matter how successful it might be. And finally, we come to the point that nobody that I know who is militarily literate believes that you could, in fact, take out the Iranian nuclear program effectively. It is deep underground. It is widely dispersed. As we know, in the end, if you were to destroy it, they could reconstitute it because it's in the brains of their nuclear scientists.

I think this is dangerous nonsense, and I hope no one listens to it other than you and me. So how much damage was inflicted by the Iranian missiles that were aimed at Israeli military and intelligence targets? No, the Israeli preparation. Sorry. I think there is a, thank you, Ambassador. I think there's a large military base in the middle of the desert. I forget the name of it. And that was targeted. And according to Scott Ritter, was heavily hit. Well, it is Israeli policy not to allow any reporting on the battle damage they have suffered.

So we don't really know. Normally, the Israeli press is very free, very vigorous in its reporting of events. It puts ours to shame, frankly, but it is muzzled by order of the military. Professor Gilbert Doctorow, earlier today on this program, had a very interesting analysis, and I had not heard this from anyone else, and I wonder if you'd comment on it. He likened Israel's attack of

Gaza and Israel's attack of Lebanon, totally paid for by the United States to Ukraine's resistance of Russia. His argument is that as the United States is using Ukraine as a battering ram, as a vassal state, as a vessel, if you will, with which to attack Russia, the United States is using Israel. Now, over here, we've always been of the belief it's the other way around, that the tail is Joe Biden and the dog is Benjamin Netanyahu, so to speak, that Netanyahu actually has more say over this than Joe Biden does, but Dr. O sees it differently. What do you think about this theory? Well, I don't agree with Doctorow on this point. It is indeed the fact that we are following Israel,

and Israel is not following us. Israel has done us no favors. It has thoroughly discredited itself and us. It has cost us a great deal of money, but more important, it has cost us global prestige and influence. And we look impotent. Joe Biden, our president, repeatedly tells Israel not to do things. They go ahead and do them. This is the longstanding pattern. That was the pattern with George W. Bush, for example. Don't come into Jenin, and Ariel Sharon then did, and so forth and so on. So we are being discredited in many ways, morally, of course, because we have supported genocide. murder in Lebanon and assassinations and acts of terrorism like state terrorism, like the Pager and walkie-talkie explosions. But we are also losing prestige in terms of credibility in our ability to lead. We clearly have no such ability. Israel has erased our influence in the Middle East.

I don't know of any country there now that is happy with our actions. People in the region are realists. They recognize that we are militarily powerful, but we are diplomatically now essentially disarmed. If we don't restrain the Israelis, will the Russians? I think they will take the Russian warnings more seriously, in part because the Russians have a much better diplomatic hand to play, and in part because that's something new. As Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly said, the United States, in his view, is easy to manipulate. He shall nothing but contempt for us. I think he has more respect for Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov. And of course the Russians are in Syria with their fleet and apparently now prepared to help defend Lebanon. Now the one thing that the Russians could do that would be

devastating for Israel, which relies almost entirely on its air force and its technological superiority to conduct its barbarous attacks on places like Lebanon is to provide air defense to the Lebanese and the Syrians. I wonder if that's not in the offing. Well, we know or we have strong evidence of the Russians providing air defense to the Iranians. Yes. So that is a Russian pattern. But whatever you think of Prime Minister Netanyahu, he must have gotten the message when President

Putin wouldn't take his phone call and the Russian ambassador in Tel Aviv said go home. Now, Professor Doctorow points out that many of those Russians are super rich and at odds legally with the Putin government and will never go home. But that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about safety. He's not talking about chasing people back to Russia

so that they can be prosecuted. Am I right? That is correct. And one of the underreported phenomena since October 7, the year of warfare against the Palestinians, is people have reported on the fatigue of the Israeli reservists who've served for a very long time in the army to conduct these atrocities and the PTSD that they suffer. But what is underreported is the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have left Israel because they no longer feel secure there.

They no longer have confidence that their country can survive. They dislike intensely the suspensions of judicial independence and intrusions into the rule of law, and the endless lies of their own government, and so they've left. And it's entirely possible that if some portion of that 20% of Israelis who are Russian-born were to be able to leave for somewhere else, I don't know where they would go, maybe somewhere in Latin America, that they will leave. Ambassador, you're a former diplomat as well as a former official of the Defense Department. Why doesn't Secretary of State Blinken speak to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov?

Why don't American diplomats engage with Iranian diplomats? Well, I have to say that Antony Blinken has established a record as the most inept Secretary of State in our recent history. He's not offensive in the manner that Pompeo was, but I have yet to discover a single achievement of him. He has a valedictory article in Foreign Affairs, which I confess I have yet to read, so perhaps he will identify a few things that he has accomplished. But this is part of a pattern. We don't talk. He was trained as a congressional staffer. He was a very good domestic spin doctor for Senator Biden. He was put in the position of Secretary of State. He has no significant diplomatic experience. He's no evidence that he actually understands that diplomacy involves establishment of personal rapport with people that you disagree with

and reasoning with them to persuade them that they should see the world as you do and that their interests coincide with yours. So he doesn't talk to Moscow. He has not done that for his entire term. He does not talk to the Chinese, or he does so very seldom. And basically, he lectures rather than listens. He doesn't talk to Iran. We've done nothing about North Korea under his leadership, despite the fact that they now constitute an increasingly formidable nuclear threat to the United States. And so, you know, your question is essentially answers itself. He's had no habit of talking to anybody, still less the Russians.

Ambassador Freeman, thank you very much. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your analysis. These are unpleasant subjects that we discuss, but you clarify them. And I know the audience and I know I are deeply appreciative. Thank you, my dear friend. I hope you can come back and visit with us again next week. Be happy to do that.

Thank you. You as well, Ambassador. Coming up at 1 o'clock this afternoon, Max Blumenthal. At 2 o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. At 3 o'clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer,

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!