Judging Freedom - Americans Must Choose - Endless Wars_ w_Col Doug Macgregor

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, April 5, 2023. It's about 10 after 4 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Colonel McGregor is with us now. Colonel, since last we spoke, the United States or the FBI arrested a guy by the name of Sergei Chukasov, who it says was masquerading as a Brazilian soccer player, but really was a KGB agent or an FSB agent. And the FSB arrested Evan Kershkovitz, a fellow New Jeran of mine, a Wall Street Journal reporter, there he is,

who just happened to have written a piece on the front page of the Wall Street Journal about the negative effect of sanctions. I guess he really meant the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline on the Russian economy. Is this the new diplomacy, arrest for arrest, kidnap for kidnap, between the United States and Russia? Well, it certainly is reminiscent of the Cold War. During the Cold War, we frequently would pick up someone that we were convinced was a Soviet agent. Most of the time they were, but not always, and essentially use them as trading material so that someone that the Soviets had picked up could be freed in some sort of exchange. I don't know if that's the case this time around, but perhaps it is. But the thing to keep in mind is that this Wall Street Journal is very anti-Russian and extremely neoconservative in its outlook. It certainly doesn't bear any

resemblance to the Wall Street Journal I grew up with. And as a result, they're not very sympathetic to the Wall Street Journal and its owners, and of course the owner is Rupert Murdoch. And I don't know that anyone has said anything about it other than I think Tucker mentioned it on his program that this man had been apprehended. Now, he was a long, long way from Moscow, and I have no idea what he was doing. He was within striking distance of some Russian military installation. And theoretically, he was trying to write a story on what the impact

was on Russia of the war and whether or not its industries were actually producing and so forth. Whatever was the case, he was picked up. And I don't think the Russians are going to be very sympathetic. Do the Russians respect journalistic rights? Does he have some sort of immunity because he's a bona fide journalist for a bona fide American media outlet, albeit one that is anti-Russian? Well, you can be a bona fide Russian journalist with all the right credentials. And if you are seen photographing or visiting Virginia, say in the vicinity of Norfolk, and we are in a state of war, I think we would pick the man up. So the thing that has to be brought in mind is the Russians are at war.

And under those circumstances, it's very foolish to go near any military installation. And that's why I say if we were at war and we saw people nosing around submarine pens up in Puget Sound or a large Air Force base in Florida, we would pick them up right away. So Jack Devine, and we'll run a clip from him a little later on, says that the Central Intelligence Agency does not use American journalists to do its dirty work, only foreign journalists. Is it inconceivable that Mr. Hershkowitz was working for American intelligence? You know, I simply don't know. What I do know is that he would probably willingly turn over any information he found to the CIA

because he's very hostile to Russia, just as the CIA is doing everything in its power to keep this operation going in any way, shape, or form it can. It's trying to shape domestic opinion. We know that. It creates the narratives that are widespread inside the United States on everything right now connected to Russia. So does he work for them? In theory, no. Does that make any difference under the circumstances? Again, Russia is at war. This is an American journalist. He is somewhere close to or en route to a Russian military installation. He's going to get picked up. Got it. Got it. What is the status

of all of the tanks that everybody was all agog about, about a month or so ago, the German Leopards and the American Abrams. Have they arrived? Are they on their way there? What is the likelihood that they will tip the scales ever so slightly in favor of the Ukrainians? Well, as far as I know, the numbers of American M1 series tanks have not arrived. I don't know when they're going to show up, but they're certainly in the process of being readied for use by the Ukrainians. The Leopards have shown up, as have some of the other pieces of equipment,

and of course the Bradleys. They're not really tanks. That's an armored fighting vehicle, but it does have a 25-millimeter chain gun on it that's very lethal. I don't know if they also are going to equip them with tow missiles. That's also a lethal missile under the right circumstances. I think what people are discovering is that the Russians have a number of missiles. One of them is called the Coronet, and this Coronet missile can be fired from 5,000 meters away or potentially even further. It's self-guiding.

Once you sight the target, you can essentially fire and forget it. And if that warhead reaches a tank, any tank, it will destroy the tank. It doesn't make any difference what it is. So that is something that I guess people are now beginning to notice because the Coronet missiles were used against Leopard tanks in Syria. And people should be very concerned about that. Again, this is something I think other analysts have said. It's not an individual weapon system. It's not the arrival of 200 tanks or 500 tanks that are going to make any difference. It's the integration of various types of equipment, tanks, armored

fighting vehicles, various missile carriers, air defense, air and missile defense. For instance, there's a 30 millimeter automatic cannon linked to radar that's excellent, that's produced by Ryan Mattel. I would say you'd probably need a couple of hundred of them on the battlefield just to protect yourself from all the various unmanned aerial systems. So the bottom line is, no, this isn't going to change anything. Do the tanks have some sort of weaponry or equipment in their skin, for lack of a better word, a lay phrase, to neutralize the weaponry that attacks them? Well, they have what you would call active versus passive defense. An active defense system can be all sorts of things.

It can be small explosives embedded in ceramic and metal tile that is applied on the outside of the tank's armor. There are different kinds of this thing. You actually can put radar on the tank itself that detects an incoming missile. All of this stuff exists. The problem is twofold. First of all, most of that active equipment only works once. In other words, once you've struck the tank once, you don't have that protection anymore.

In other words, you get a direct hit. If you strike it twice, you may get something more, but then you're essentially naked. It only gets you through a couple of initial fights. Secondly, we don't have anything right now to deal with what I would call top attack. In other words, a missile that comes in and strikes on top of the turret. This has been a threat for a long time.

In other words, it comes in and it dives down on the top of the turret where the armor is thin. The Israelis are looking at a number of very innovative ways to change that that can be integrated into future armored fighting vehicles. Do the Russians have missiles that will do that? Oh, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. By the way, so do the Germans. And they have not released any of those.

We've been working on those. And I think we have some, if they're not already fielded in the U.S. military, and they may or may not be, I don't know. They certainly are in development. These are the new threats that are changing the nature of warfare. This is what effectively robs you of your mobility on the battlefield, and it robs you of your ability to use all of this armor that historically we've relied on to come to terms with the enemy, to go right in and kill the enemy at close range.

It's not going to be solved quickly. It's sort of like World War I, when suddenly people discovered machine guns, artillery, mines, and barbed wire, and trenches, and the maneuver stopped. We're in a similar conundrum. It won't last forever, and we're going to have to find a way through it. But the bottom line is we're not really prepared for it. The head of the Wagner Group has proclaimed that Bakhmut has fallen. President Zelensky has not refuted that. It seems to me, as a lay person in the military world, 10,000 miles away, that it's safe to say that Bakhmut has fallen. Do you have any intel on this? Well, a couple of things. First of all,

Prigozhin made a number of interesting remarks. That's the head of the Wagner Group. Of the Wagner Group, right. And Prigozhin said something that many of us have suspected was the case for months, but now we've had it from the horse's mouth, and I think it's probably true. And that is that Sorovikin, the general that was brought in in the early fall, late summer last year, to change the command structure and the way the Russians were operating, decided to turn Bakhmut into what it became, a bloodbath, a meat grinder. So they were deliberately leaving Bakhmut partially surrounded, and in the hopes that more and more and more Ukrainian forces would be poured into it that could be systematically destroyed. That's the way it looked to me for a

long time. And is that the way it worked out? Yes, absolutely. It's been brilliant for the Russians. This is the best thing that could have possibly happened to them. And one of the things that people don't understand is, well, why didn't they just cut this off and be done with it? Why aren't they doing that? Well, there's a reason. Because if your enemy comes to you, and I just described the battlefield that we're on now, which is not very favorable or friendly to large maneuver forces.

So you have to infiltrate into this World War I setting. If that's what you're operating on, you're just doing what your enemy wants you to do. And I think Sorovikin was the man behind that, and that's effectively what Prokhorin said. Now, they say that all but a few blocks, something like 11% of the sort of built-up area of Bakhmut is absolutely devoid of Ukrainians, but there's still some left on the edge. And you still have talk, as we talked about the last time when we put the map up, you still have talks of 80,000 troops breaking through in or around or near Bakhmut in some fashion. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, but there's still a lot of talk

about that. So perhaps you leave the door open one more month and let more people, you know, essentially convert themselves into corpses by going in there. We just interviewed Jack Devine just about a half an hour ago. had some comments about the Russians and Bakhmut that either will affect your blood pressure or cause you to have some fun with them. Here's what he said. In the last two months, you were telling me these great wizards of war were saying the Russians have the 300,000 man army and are going to roll right over Ukraine. Here we are, 150,000 troops went in, and they may or may not have taken the town. I mean, he is having a hard time. This is not victory.

Anybody that thinks he's won something, God bless you, but I mean, I don't know how I could hold my head and invade a country and move a few kilometers. So I think he's in trouble. I think he's in serious trouble. That's why there's a fight between the regular military and the Wagner group.

He, of course, to whom he refers is President Putin. Well, Judge, what do you want me to say? I think Jack is entertaining to listen to, but I think he's got a severe problem with cranial rectal defilade. Thanks, Jack, for your interest in national defense. The other thing I would say is,

and this is something else that people aren't paying attention to, but they should right now, the bridges over the Dnieper up in Zaborizhia and further north. These are major bridges that you can drive, you know, 18 wheelers, tanks, anything you want across these bridges over that river. They're all intact. And the Russian citizenry has asked several times, why don't you destroy these and stop those Ukrainians from crossing that river? Well, the Ukrainians aren't crossing the river in very great strength anymore because they've killed most of them. They're trying to put

together this big counterattack. We'll see what comes of it. I have serious doubts that it's going to amount to much. I think it's just going to get a lot of people killed. So why haven't they destroyed those bridges, Judge? Is it Jack Devine's perception that, well, you know, the Russians just aren't very bright. They haven't done their battlefield assessment. They're not acting. Well, I don't agree with that. I think the Russians plan to use those bridges.

Themselves. I mean, what prompted what prompted the ridiculous comments from Jack was my inquiry about Bakhmut falling. And first he denied it. And then he said he had heard the rumors that it fell, and then he said it's just one little town. Well, you and I and the thousands that watch us when you're on this show looked at the map and saw how central and how critical that town is. And now you've told us that the Russian strategy has not only been to secure the town, but to use it as the jaws of death, if I may, for the Ukrainian troops that were foolish enough to be flooded into those jaws.

Well, Ukrainian commanders we know have begged Zelensky to let them get out. They described it exactly as it is, a meat grinder. They were just losing people. We've been through these discussions. The average lifespan for someone new to the front is, what, four hours? This is insane. So I think the Ukrainians knew that. The larger issue, and, you know,

Jack is basically giving you the standard narrative, and that's fine. And everybody's doing that in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post. Every once in a while, a little bit of truth creeps in. But the bottom line is that no one is moving a lot anywhere until the mud goes away. And you try to explain to Americans that this stuff is like slogging your way through 10 feet of slime that sticks everything,

that stops everything. Americans can't even begin to imagine it. The only place I've seen in the United States where you come close to it is in southern Texas, where you have something they call caliche. It's a real thick earth that becomes mud and does something similar but even it pales before what we're dealing with in is this is this unique to ukraine and as this possibly what makes the ukraine earth dirt so fertile for a growing wheat no i think so i think when you have you're talking about what 10 to 15 meters deep in most places this black earth that's very rich that will grow anything. Throw anything in it, it grows. When the Ukrainian military superiors are foolish enough to send their troops into a meat grinder or the jaws of death, does American intel know about this, even military intel?

They warn about it? Or do the Ukrainians do it anyway because of this vain effort to die fighting? Well, now you're moving into an area where, you know, we just don't know. I mean, I'm sure some of your former intelligence officers that you've spoken to can give you a better picture. My experience is that, first of all, if you've already decided what the outcome is going to be, which is the case in Washington, that Russia is going to be defeated, humiliated and driven east out of Ukraine forever and ultimately capitulate and give up Crimea. If you believe that, then a whole lot of things don't work well. And one of those is that you may just ignore what comes up to you that doesn't conform to your preconceived ideas. That's always been a problem. We went through that in Vietnam for years. This morning in Moscow, President Putin addressed publicly the new U.S. ambassador to

Moscow. There were other Western ambassadors there as well. And he basically blamed the war on the United States and articulated in public his view, a view you and I share, and most people watching us now share, I think, that the U.S. was responsible for the coup in Ukraine in 2014, the so-called color revolution. And the U.S. started all of this and thus is largely responsible for it. I don't know that President Putin has been that direct, that public about this before. Well, I think he certainly made the larger case. He hasn't been specific about the so-called coup, but there's a huge mountain of evidence to support what he's saying. And by the way,

you now have Mr. Netanyahu in Israel, who is absolutely convinced that we're running a quote-unquote color revolution against him and his government. Well, you're a question ahead of me as to whether, God bless you, Colonel, whether you believe that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for massive, massive, persistent, endless demonstrations in the streets in Jerusalem and Israel over the makeup of the Israeli judiciary. Well, you have this thing called the National Endowment for Democracy that is all over the place. And the National Endowment for Democracy should probably be renamed Color Revolution Headquarters for the subversion and installation of new governments that are subservient to, responsive to U.S. will. I mean,

that was clearly going on in Kazakhstan in the first few weeks of this Ukrainian disaster. You'll recall the Russians sent a lot of special forces in there to help the government recover itself. It's been the case in any number of places. I think that's one of the reasons that Lukashenko has effectively signed on 100% for Putin, because you had the same outfit working in Minsk. This is not new. Now, is the CIA involved with that? Of course. staunchest allies in Poland. We have a little clip there. There's the president of Poland and there's President Zelensky. What more can the Poles give him short of troops on the ground, which we know is what he wants? Well, now we've got another problem in the region. All of these, I shouldn't say all, but most of the states in Central East Europe

that border Russia or are close to it in any way have agendas. We've got to remember that Poland, after World War I, regained much of its territory that it had lost in the 1790s. It would like to do the same thing again. Remember that Stalin's great gift to the Europeans was to shove millions of Germans further west, then shove millions of Poles into places that were historically German, at least for a thousand years. And this had a wonderful effect because it forced the Germans away from Russia, but it also created in Stalin's mind permanent conditions of hostility between the Germans and

the Poles for the territorial changes that he imposed on them. Hungary lost vast territory at the end of the Second World War. The Kingdom of Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They controlled vast lands that are now occupied by the Romanians. Some are occupied by the Serbs. Some are occupied today by Croats. Some are occupied by Slovaks. So you go back into these countries and you begin to talk to people. And just because you lost a war, just because you weren't on the winning side a hundred years ago, you have to understand these people. They were dominant powers for centuries. Dominant not just in economic or military terms,

but also culturally, linguistically. You get the same thing when you go to Iran. Very few people understand that from the Chinese border all the way to the border with Russia and Ukraine, the language that was spoken on the so-called Silk Road was Persian. All right. While we're talking about cultural, are there cultural rumblings now in Kosovo? Yes. Yeah, that's another terrible wound. It's another example of where we intervened. We created an artificial construct that was forced into existence that otherwise would never have been tolerated in the region.

Yugoslavia? Yeah. Well, remember that Yugoslavia fell apart. That, too, was inevitable because the majority of people that were Roman Catholics or Muslim certainly did not want to live under Orthodox Christian Serbs. You know, that's another gift from World War I. It was a dumb idea. We're going to force people that have been either allied or ruled by Catholic Germans for a thousand years into the arms of Christian Orthodox Serbs. It's crazy, but we did it. So that fell apart. And then we decided, well, all of these

people must be compelled to live together in the new multicultural, multinational, multi-multi, whatever it is, paradise that we in Washington are creating. And the whole world will learn this is the way it must be. Well, this is all nonsense. Kosovo is part of Serbia and has been part of Serbia for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. They lost it a couple of times and they regained it. And they fought very hard during the Balkan wars to get it away from the Ottoman Turks. If you're Greek, if you're a Bulgarian, if you're Romanian, if you are Serbian, the presence of large Muslim populations that were essentially created by the Turks and separate governments and institutions that were installed by the Turks, they're very uncomfortable with this. And given what we experienced in 2001, you can imagine the paranoia flag went to full mast. It's still there. So Islamist terrorism, Islamist assassination programs, gangsterism,

call it what you will, is run out of Kosovo to a large extent. It's a clearinghouse. A lot of those missing weapons from Ukraine show up in Kosovo and end up going to North Africa, down into the Arabian Peninsula. Didn't we bomb the daylights out of Kosovo in the Clinton administration? Mrs. Albright wanted sort of an American-controlled caliphate? Yeah, well, that's largely it. You've got to go back to Albright and Al Gore, Sandy Berger, Strobe Talbot. These are all figures in the church of moralizing globalism, and they wanted to create this new paradise. And so we bombed them for 78 days. And of course, this had a hugely negative impact on all the Orthodox

Christians that live in the region, because from their standpoint, we're backing an Islamist element in their neighborhood that they personally revile and detest, and we're doing it at the expense of Orthodox Christians. I mean, in that part of the world, you cannot be everyone's friend. If you side with anybody, you become instantly enemies for everybody else. And then we created this mess, and this mess's fault is gradually beginning to unravel. At the same time that we just authorized,

the president just authorized another $2.58 billion today in military equipment to be shipped to Ukraine. He has no off-ramp, Colonel. No. No political off-ramp, no moral off-ramp. He doesn't possess a moral off-ramp. I don't know how this is going to end. What do you see happening in the next six months? Well, remember from their vantage point,

and I'm talking about the people in power in Washington, this includes most of the people who sit in the Senate and the House. If you oppose our policy, you are by definition evil. So that anything that we do to you is justified. This is the unfortunate situation. We demonized the Serbs and treated them as though they were all war criminals. We're doing the same thing to the Russians. It's all going to end badly for us.

But I think the most likely scenario is financial crisis followed by economic downturn that will drive us out of Ukraine. That's the only way I see us leaving. Unless, of course, some of these governments in Europe turn over. And remember, the situation in Europe, certainly from an economic standpoint, is in many cases much worse. I think the governments in France and Germany are very tenuous at this point. No, I think so. And you could see those governments changing. The average German on the street doesn't want anything to do with the war against Russia

in Ukraine. The average German says, why haven't we negotiated an end to this? Why have we behaved as a vassal state for America? I mean, six weeks ago, eight weeks ago, 10 weeks ago, people said, well, you know, we have to be good NATO members. That's going away. People are saying, wait a minute, the cost of eggs for a dozen eggs is through the roof. We can't get the things that we need and want. Last question. How crazy is it in the midst of this war to double the size of the Russian-NATO border by adding Finland in the midst of this war? What do they expect President Putin to do?

Well, I think the Finns know that Putin is not going to do anything because he doesn't feel threatened by Finland, and he doesn't understand why the Finns have done this because the Finns haven't felt threatened by Russia. It's a very strange set of circumstances. The Russians have no interest in going to war with the Finns and vice versa. But what we have tried to do is eliminate neutrality as a solution. Right. And that's unfortunate. I'm surprised that we're not also trying to force the Austrians into joining NATO. I don't think that would go well, though, right now, because as we know, when Mr. I think those people, the Finns, I think once they examine this more carefully and get past the propaganda, the same lies, the same phony narrative that comes out all over the United States about the evil Russians and their war

crimes and all this nonsense, I think they may reconsider. I wouldn't be surprised. But NATO itself is on fragile ground. People don't understand behind the scenes, all is not well. The majority of NATO members are no longer 100% behind this thing, if they ever were. There's a lot of discontent. Oh, but heaven forbid you buck the United States, they'll bomb the pipeline supplying you with natural gas and blame it on a sailboat. I thought that was a very innovative explanation, didn't you? Colonel, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time with us.

Thanks, Judge. All the best. Bye-bye. Or as we get it, my dear friends, if you like all of this, like and subscribe. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.