Judging Freedom - Col. Douglas Macgregor: Israel Is Desperate.

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Col. Douglas Macgregor: Israel Is Desperate.See 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 Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024. Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now. Colonel, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. Welcome back to the show and thank you for your time. There's a lot that I want to ask you about. I'd like to start with relatively breaking news, maybe 36 hours old, and that is the Israeli assault on and destruction of a consulate adjacent to an embassy of Iran in Damascus, Syria, the motivation behind it and your view of the likely response to it. So the Israelis have not claimed credit for it, but all indications are that they did this. Why would they do something like this? Mr. Netanyahu must escalate to survive. And he believes that escalating the war is ultimately Israel's salvation. I don't share that view, but that's his opinion. He probably also sees it as his personal salvation.

How do you escalate the war? You goad Iran into attacking you. And this is a direct provocation designed to precipitate a major response from Iran. If Iran cannot be dragged into this war, then it is very unlikely that Mr. Netanyahu will be able to drag us into his war on his side. So simply put, why would you attack the sovereign territory, which is what a consulate or embassy is, as you know, of Iran? You want Iran to attack you so that you can precipitate a war that will involve the United States against Iran on your side. If the mullahs do nothing, if they exercise

Putin-like restraint, what do you expect Netanyahu to do? Ratchet up the attacks on Iran to do everything he can to goad them? Yes, I would think so. I mean, there's no alternative for him. He knows that he's got to attack Hezbollah, and that's a foregone conclusion. It's just a question of when. So he's got to drag in Iran into this mess as he sees it. Now, what he's not paying attention to is the coalescing of the rest of the region against him. He's not paying much attention to what's going on up in Turkey, for instance. The Turkish population is enraged at Israel, and the Turkish population just rejected Erdogan at the polls. Now, there were several reasons for that, but one of them was Erdogan's continuous provision of oil and food and other things to the Israelis, despite all of his tough talk.

And the Turks really want to go after the Israelis. They want action against them. And the Arabs are looking at the Turks as their leaders because they are the one Sunni Muslim power with real military capability that could defeat Israel because they know that the neighbors cannot. Iran attacks Israel. If Iran engages in a war for Israel, that's not a pinprick, tit for tat, but a serious war. Wouldn't you expect Russia to come to Iran's side? And wouldn't this effectively, thank you, Prime Minister Netanyahu, commence a regional war, almost World War III? Well, I think that's true and you know I've been saying that for a long time and people don't seem to don't seem to understand or grasp it you have the failed war in that Washington's been waging in Ukraine Ukraine is destroyed and we continue to provoke Russia at every opportunity I think they're talking about stealing 300 billion dollars

uh Russian funds and turning this over to the ukrainians the fools on the hill want to do this this kind of behavior makes it inevitable that if we become involved in a conflict with iran that the russians will come to the aid of iran there's no question about it they they've deployed forces down into the red sea their Their submarines were already in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, and they have forces in the Mediterranean. So it's a foregone conclusion that if Mr. Netanyahu is successful and we are dragged into this, we will end up fighting with the Russians directly. Talk to me about the rage that you mentioned a few minutes ago, Colonel, is it of such a magnitude that leaders in the area, Turkey, Iran, Jordan, may feel pressured into doing something lest something happen against their will?

Oh, absolutely. This is already true in Egypt and Jordan. And I would argue Saudi Arabia, the Emirates are all under pressure. The elites in the region are under tremendous pressure. And if they don't act, they all stand an excellent chance of going away. General Sisi has tried, as many others, to be on both sides of the fence. On the one hand, he's tried to speak out against what the Israelis are doing, but he's had to renegotiate his enormous national sovereign debt. He's needed our support for that.

He wants to keep the United States on side. How much longer that goes on is hard to tell because the Russians and the Chinese may well step in and offer to help him, which would then grant him some freedom of maneuver vis-a-vis Israel. Then you have the Jordanians, and the Jordanian king is hanging on, I think, by his fingernails. He's a very competent man. He's a brilliant leader. He has negotiated the troubled waters of the region with great alacrity. I don't think he wants in any way, shape, or form to be at war with Israel. But he has over a million enraged Palestinians who want to attack

Israel. And I don't think he's going to have much longer to stave it off. I think he's in a very, very sensitive position. Everybody comments about how lawless, but also how smart Benjamin Netanyahu is. He's a survivor. How dumb was it for the Israelis to follow for an hour and a half a truck with food workers and then to use three missiles to kill seven people, including an American, in that truck? Talk about enraging the public. That's resonating even

over here, Colonel. Well, this is one of the things that reached the American people, and the American people were disturbed by it. But this is not new. These instances of operators of unmanned aerial systems tracking and then killing people who frankly were simply in the open had nothing to do with the enemy per se Hamas or anything else are frequent these things have happened very frequently and I think it's becoming increasingly clear that this is an exercise in casual murder at the whim of the Israelis. And the Israeli leadership, remember, they made it very clear from the beginning that Gaza is full of enemies.

If you're in Gaza, you're probably an enemy. They're not going to stop their soldiers from killing anyone, and they're certainly not going to stop the Air Force or the operators of these unmanned systems from killing anyone. Here's a cut from an Australian television station lamenting, including a clip from Prime Minister Albanese of Australia,

lamenting the death, the murder of one of those seven food workers. A direct hit from a targeted drone strike straight through the charity logo that was meant to ensure those inside were protected from harm. Three vehicles, seven aid workers obliterated, among them Australian Zombie Francom. Hey, this is Zombie from World Central Kitchen. The 43-year-old's death now the centre of a new diplomatic war with Israel. This is completely unacceptable. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a 20-minute early morning call with his Israeli counterpart. I expressed Australia's anger and concern at the death of Zomi Francom.

The killing summed up in two words by Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Outrageous and they are unacceptable. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admits Israeli Defence Forces were responsible but claims it was unintentional. This happens in wartime. We are thoroughly looking into it and we'll do everything to ensure it does not happen again. Three of the victims were from the UK, one a joint US-Canadian citizen, another from Poland and a Palestinian local driver. He was buried overnight. The missiles were launched from a Hermes 450 drone. The Israeli military telling local media they believed an armed Hamas terror suspect was with the aid workers at the time.

The convoy was hit as it left the charity's warehouse in Deir al-Bala after collecting more than 100 tons of food aid delivered to Gaza by sea. Three precision strikes over a two and a half kilometer stretch as they tried to outrun the drone. The IDF. No way this was a mistake, Colonel, no matter what Netanyahu says. Nobody believes him anyway. Nobody in the West. Well, I shouldn't say nobody in the West. Biden and that crowd believe him. Admiral Kirby believes him.

They continue to justify what he does. Who challenges Netanyahu in the West besides people like Dennis Kucinich and you and Scott Ritter and me? Well, there's nothing more reliable than a man that can be bought with cold, hard cash, right? And people need to understand that that's the case in Washington. Most of your political class is bought and paid for by the Israeli lobby. They're not going to jeopardize their positions, their income, their access under any circumstances. The other point I would make here, though, that Americans don't seem to understand, I don't think a lot of people do, he called it a war zone. Well, it is, but it isn't. It is and it isn't.

First of all, Hamas does not have an integrated air defense system. Hamas is organized and they're obviously tenacious fighters, but they're not an army. They have rockets and they use them and they fire them when they can, but it's a minimum of fire support. And finally, they don't have any naval forces. So you're dealing with essentially guerrillas that, yes, they do swim inside the population. But normally we don't annihilate the entire population on the grounds that it contains a few guerrillas. That's collective punishment. We don't engage in that kind of thing. The bottom line is that this fog of war argument, it wasn't clear. We didn't know. I don't think that's legitimate in this sense at all, certainly not in this case. Remember, the Israeli troops opened fire on some of their own people who had actually escaped

custody and were trying to reach them. This was very early in this entire war. And they were very trigger happy and they killed their own people. It was only when they finally got close enough to see who they were, they realized they'd killed Israelis. So this is a sort of a free fire zone in the worst sense of the word. It reminds me a lot of Vietnam and some of the things that we did there. Colonel, when Netanyahu says, and he says it repeatedly, that he wants to eliminate Hamas, he said recently he thinks it can be done in a couple of weeks.

Isn't Hamas an idea? Isn't it impossible for him to eliminate Hamas? Well, I made that comment early on that killing an idea is much more difficult than killing people. But what this campaign has done is elevated Hamas to a level of notoriety and celebrity that it would never have otherwise had. And that's one of the reasons that I think Netanyahu, in his anger along with the Israeli public, has said, well, then they all must pay for this. Let the only solution is the final solution. Eradicate this population once and for all.

Hatred has taken over. Emotion has taken over. calculus, unless you want to judge plans for the annihilation of Arabs in Gaza, in the West Bank, and potentially southern Lebanon as a rational calculus. I think that's simply where we are. By the way, to get back briefly to the Iranians, I think it's important to understand that over the last five or six weeks, we've heard nothing out of these so-called Iraqi and Syrian Shiite militias. They've gone quiet. They had been attacking us. I think now after this strike on the consulate, we're likely to see them stir once again and begin attacking us as well as the Israelis, if they can do it. Do you think the Iranian government has restrained them?

Yes, I think the Iranian government pleaded with them to back off. And unlike the Houthis, who are far more independent and autonomous, the Iraqi Shiite militias heeded the call for restraint. I think that restraint will now end, and they'll probably work very, very hard to attack us, and as I said, the Israelis, in whatever way they can. I don't think you're going to see a deliberate counter-strike from Iranian soil, because again, the Iranians don't want a war. This is the thing that has to be understood. Nobody in the region except the Israelis and the United States are enthusiastic about the war.

If the Iranians give Netanyahu his war, how powerful is the Iranian military and how modern is its arsenal of offensive weaponry? Well, remember the Iranian army, the ground force, is very small. And the Republican or Revolutionary Guard Corps is really a special operations and special forces element. They go out and work with the various Shiite groups and organizations. They've helped to train and equip these Shiite militias. But they're not really capable of taking the field against the Israeli Defense Force.

And frankly, it's too far away. They don't have the logistical infrastructure to sustain anything. Iran's trump card is this arsenal of rockets and missiles, primarily theater and tactical ballistic missiles, but also cruise missiles. And they can reach virtually any target inside Israel. And if they were to attack, I think they would unleash everything. Because once you begin trading missile strikes, restraint doesn't make any sense. You end up in a position where you either use it or you lose it. And why would the Iranians wait around for the United States Air Force and the U.S. Naval Air to attack them and essentially put their arsenal at risk? If they're compelled to fight,

I think they would probably launch massive, massive strikes. Now, the other thing is that they're well-prepared. They have dispersed a lot of their capabilities. They have dispersed command and control. Even if we destroy much of the command and control, it will still persist. It's very redundant. And so I think it could turn into a long war. The people, of course, who will suffer most are the Israelis at home and the Iranians inside Iran, because Iran's a desert country. I'm sure they will attack water supplies, water purification plants,

water distribution points, energy distribution, this sort of thing. And that will have a catastrophic effect on the Iranian populace. That's something the Iranian leadership doesn't want. And as a result, they've been very careful at this point to restrain their own forces from attacking. But, you know, that could end quickly, depending upon next moves by Israel. Transitioning to Ukraine, Colonel, do you have any indication from sources about whether there are MI6, CIA, Mossad, Ukrainian intelligence fingerprints on the attack on the Krokus concert hall? Well, I'm hearing a variety of things. I don't have concrete substantive evidence. I'm hearing people tell me that, yes, we've had a hand in this. Now, what does that mean? Does it mean that we provided some training, that we encouraged the Ukrainians to do this? It seems unlikely that the SBU,

the Ukrainian secret police, and their own sort of branch of special forces would have undertaken something like this without U.S.-U.K. knowledge or backing backing I guess it's possible but it seems unlikely to me so in that sense I think it's real and again you know they attacked within the last 24 hours they managed to attack with a drone you know an oil refinery uh the these are the actions of a dying organization a dying dying state, a dying regime. And I think they're very desperate. And I'm sure that we're providing them with whatever intelligence we can that will make these strikes – well, will magnify the effects of these strikes, because they desperately

want the cash that is being discussed on the Hill right now. And apparently, Speaker Johnson, predictably, given his background, is now saying he's going to support this and steer this through the Congress. And what will happen to that cash? Two-thirds of it will stay right here in the United States, going to the military-industrial complex. A chunk of it will go into Zelensky and his buddies' pockets. Will they ever actually get any equipment that will help them? And help them to do what, Colonel? Just delay the inevitable, which is the demise of their country and their government? I think what is building right now on the Russian side in terms of offensive military capability, the number of points headed and pointed towards the west from Kherson all the way up to Kharkov,

suggests that there will be not much left for the Ukrainians to equip and support. I think the end game is now upon us. And if you look at the ground over there, it needs another week or two to firm up so that it can take the large armored forces that the Russians are going to launch. But at the same time, most of the Ukrainian air defense, much of the energy infrastructure, the grid, the plants that produce power, these things have been attacked very effectively. Lots and lots of towns are blacked out and now we see ukrainian civilians who figured out the handwriting is on the wall and they're leaving kharkov is being abandoned i would not be surprised

to see this happen in other cities now in some cases people who are russians will probably temporarily leave until the russians come back and they'll return. But those who are first and foremost Ukrainians, they will leave and they will not be back because they know that this time the Russians will not leave. The president of Ukraine, President Zelensky, yesterday signed into law a lowering of the draft age from 27 to 25. So they're going to go to law schools and medical schools and graduate schools and take that cadre of people, train them for three weeks and send them into a meat grinder. I guess, Colonel, there's no realization of the desirability of a negotiated settlement. How can they not understand how desperate they are?

Before you answer that, the head of the General Stoltenberg wants to put, Secretary General Stoltenberg wants to put together a $100 billion loan to give to Zelensky. What's he going to do with it? I think that the globalist elites that are ruling the states in Europe, in Western Europe primarily, are unwilling to admit the truth, because they know if they admit the truth, they'll be held accountable at the ballot box, and they will lose. I think they're going to lose anyway. But when the truth comes out, they've had it, because they've also committed suicide economically, as you know, by rejecting cheap Russian energy and turning to us for expensive energy and to other means,

believing that the future consists of windmills and solar panels. There's no future for windmills and solar panels. That's a lot of nonsense. Civilization needs a lot of cheap, effective energy. You're only going to get that from coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power. But they're going to persist in this fantasy as long as they can. They have nowhere else to go. The other thing that's interesting to me with the Ukrainians and this last-ditch effort to bring people into the military is that it mirrors something that's happening here in the United States. I mean, you've seen the announcements. The Army, the Air Force, the Navy, they want retirees to return. So I don't know what the age limit is, but I think it's under 50.

And, you know, how many of these retirees want to give up their retirement to come back on active duty? How are they going to entice them? I don't know. There may be bonuses involved, perhaps promotions, but we're not much better off and we haven't even been to war. That's the thing Americans need to understand. I mean, the Ukrainians have been slaughtered, so they're on their last legs we're not but we're facing a similar manpower problem here in the united states and of course you know the other solution is to give migrants illegals who've come into the united states the opportunity to serve in the armed forces in fact we've even said that they can buy weapons without background checks. Incomprehensible, since we have 80-plus million legal gun owners in the United States,

and they've all been through background checks. Why we would sell an illegal gun under any circumstances is incomprehensible to me. But everything seems to be designed not only to destroy Russians and to bankroll the final solution for the final solution for the arabs that live in and around israel we're also staring at some something similar here at home directed at us at the american people how likely you've you've given us a dark picture of what is likely to happen in the Middle East if the Israelis continue to attack Iran. How likely is the war in Ukraine to expand and become a regional war, whether you want to call it World War III or whatever you want to call it, if the EU does give $100 million, whether it's in cash or in equipment, to Zelensky, and if the United States, I forget which, of Poland, says the era of peace is over.

All these things are happening at once. How do you see this playing out? Well, remember, Tusk was formerly up in Brussels and is very much an EU creature and a globalist. I don't think Tusk resonates very strongly with the Polish population. I'll be surprised if he lasts much longer. I've looked at the latest polling, and the polls, first of all, are very, very lukewarm on the idea of sending anything to Ukraine because they see the corruption, and they've got, what, three or four million Ukrainian refugees living inside their country as it is. And they know that the Polish military is in no position to launch offensive operations

in Ukraine beyond, say, 50 or 60 kilometers, which isn't very much. I think the truth is as follows. That money cannot buy more bodies. It can't buy more manpower. The European forces are boutique organizations. They're small. They're designed, in the case of the French, for operations in North Africa, the British for operations in places like Belize or potentially Cyprus.

These are not warfighting organizations in the historic sense. And our army is under strength. It's not adequately trained. It's sitting around on old equipment. And the logistical support structure that is so essential to launching offensive operations doesn't really exist. So I think the notion that any of this money is going to change anything is, first of all, false. It will do exactly what we discussed before. And then secondly, the notion that any of this money is going to change anything is first of all false. It will do exactly what we discussed before. And then secondly, the notion that the Europeans themselves are going to undertake anything, that's not going to happen because for them to do anything, we'd have to lead it. And we're not going to do that because we can't. The whole thing is a farce. It's a bad joke. It is foreshadowing the end of the European Union, I think,

and the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, all to support this mindless, impulsive war against Russia, utilizing the Ukrainian people and their country as cannon fodder. It's a tragedy. It doesn't make any sense. But then again, I think that we have perhaps the most ill-equipped, ill-prepared people in the history of this country running our foreign and defense policy, as well as our domestic agenda. They don't live in the real world. They're in a bubble in Washington. I run into people all the time that say, you know, there's no economic crisis there's no problem we can continue to print money and all you have to do is use your head and understand

that every 100 days we add another trillion dollars to the National Sovereign debt but that doesn't make any difference because we dominate the world financially well that's changing and now that Moscow has the lead in the BRICS and that BRICS organization is growing rapidly, I think you're going to see a move to gold-pegged currency in much of Eurasia. And as that develops, the dollar is going to be reduced in importance and essentially expelled. The future is grim. And these people in Washington don't get it,

and they are actually, through their decision-making, making things worse with each passing day. I just hope there's enough of us left by the time this election occurs to make any difference. And again, given the millions of people pouring into our country about whom we know nothing, who may well be organized to vote illegally in the coming elections. One wonders what's left of the republic. I mean, that's how bad it's gotten, Judge. And of course, you know this better than I do. Well, I know this because people like you educate me last question another part of the world and this is consistent with what you just said why are 2 000 marines on kinmen island off the coast of taiwan engaged in war games with chinese troops taiwanese troops what the hell are they doing there

that's a damn good question taiwan just suffered a terrible earthquake by the way and i think the taiwanese would benefit from humanitarian aid that we provide but not from the presence of the u.s military we've also put some special operations forces on islands that are just offshore of china but belong to taiwan again we seem to be doing everything in our power to provoke the Chinese into taking rash action against us. I don't understand why. It doesn't make any sense to me. But, you know, there are a lot of people in the United States

who buy the argument that China represents a great threat. And I talk to people all the time about, you know, if you think the Chinese are responsible for all the things that are wrong inside the United States, the easiest solution is to close your borders and control the population that's coming into the country. You have thousands of military-age Chinese men coming in here. We have Chinese with suitcases full of cash trying to buy up our agricultural sector. Those things we can deal with and we can stop that quickly. There's no reason to go to war. But again, perhaps this is a distraction,

but the more that I see of the behavior of the people in the White House and on the Hill, there is no coherent strategy. So the notion that there's some great conspiracy, there's some endpoint, doesn't make any sense because the endpoint is just disaster. The only thing that we have done since November of 2020 is cultivate the emergence of more groupings and alliances of powers against us. We are as much a pariah now in most ways as Israel is. And this isolation is a catastrophe. And it's interesting that the globalists call anyone who disagrees with them an isolationist, yet they are the very cause of our isolation. The downturn in our economy, the destruction of the rule of law, our open borders and our failures in Ukraine, and the fact that no one wants to be

in the United States military at this point. A dark and gloomy portrait, but I regret to say a factual one and courageously presented. Thank you, Colonel. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your thoughts. Thank you for your insight. Great. Thank you, Colonel. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your thoughts. Thank you for your insight. Great. Thank you, Judge. Okay. See you again soon. Coming up this afternoon at 2 o'clock Eastern, Connor Freeman, and at 3 o'clock Eastern, our old buddy, Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.