Judging Freedom - Col Douglas Macgregor - Reinforcing Failure in Ukraine

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

Reinforcing Failure in Ukraine https://www.theamericanconservative.c... #Ukraine #Putin #BidenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, August 23, 2022. It's about 11 o'clock in the morning here on the East Coast. We go to our regular expert on matters military who needs no introduction. To those of you watching and listening, Colonel Douglas McGregor. Colonel, it's a pleasure. Welcome back here to Judging Freedom. I want to start with your insight on the murder or assassination of the young female Russian journalist whose father is apparently a philosopher of sorts, of great influence within the Kremlin, the murder having occurred in or right outside of Moscow via a car bombing. Do you think the CIA was involved in this? Well, there's no way to know, frankly, so it would be speculative to say one way or the other. I think we should point out that Alexander Dugin,

and I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, is a very well-known figure because of his strong commitment to Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity in Russia. He is one of the people who's been very outspoken in his support of the intervention in Ukraine and has frankly talked in very negative terms about the Ukrainian government and the forces fighting the Russians. This is the father, not the daughter. Well, the daughter is similar to her dad, but has not expressed those views publicly, at least as far as I know. But her father is sort of dripping in buckets of blood, if you will, about what should happen to the evil Ukrainians. So that made him an easy target. But he is not Putin's brain, as somebody thinks.

He's simply someone that Putin listens to. Putin is like any prudent president or leader of any country. He listens to a number of different people, and he's sympathetic to the Russian nationalists, but he's also worked very hard to suppress them and their influence on many occasions because they tend to be very hot-headed, and Dugin is one of those people. So it's tragic that this man's daughter was killed.

It was a dumb thing to do, frankly, and I think we're now going to watch some very unattractive consequences. Any number of things are possible at this point. Was the murderer, or is it fair to implicate in her murder, this female Ukrainian intelligence agent? Well, the FSB is no less or no more competent than most other national police services and its intelligence arm. The fact that they produced all of this as rapidly as they did suggests to me

that it's probably accurate. And I would think the Ukrainians will naturally deny any involvement, and they really should. I wouldn't want to own up to this if I were with the Ukrainians. But I think it's pretty clear that this is very plausible. And it makes sense. It's stupid. I think that's the worst part, because one of the things that you and I have discussed routinely is that the longer this conflict persists, so does the danger of it widening, expanding and exploding in everyone's face. to that danger because inside Russia, the population, which is already very supportive of President Putin and his policies, is enraged over this murder, justifiably so. But it's dangerous. United States continuing to send ammunition to the Ukrainians for weaponry that is not really of much help to them? Well, if you look at the $750 million package, most of that money pays for ammunition. There are a handful of howitzers that are part of the deal,

and those howitzers will add to of the deal, and those howitzers will add to the artillery arsenal, but not a great deal. What the Ukrainians need now more than ever is ammunition. They can't keep up with the Russian ammunition supplies. Remember, the Russians spent roughly six years amassing the ammunition that they're currently using, which sustains these, you know, 1,500 rounds every two or three hours. As a result, the Ukrainians desperately need that. Will that help them? It'll probably help them somewhat. I think what's more important is that we are now doubling down on assistance and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. We already have teams downloading critical data to the Ukrainians from our satellite array. And we have contractors

on the ground even operating the HIMARS system. I don't know how many of those are left. And they also have a large number of NATO officers, I'm told, who have effectively become the de facto Ukrainian general staff. I don't know how much more we can do. Contractors operating the HIMARS system. What is the HIMARS system? Is it offensive weaponry? Oh, yeah.

Well, it's whatever you want to use it for. But yes, it's a powerful weapon. It's rocket-loaded. Are American contractors operating the HIMARS system? Are American civilians shooting at Russians? it's a powerful weapon it's rocking our world are are american contractors i don't know the high mar system american civilians shooting russians i do not know the national identity i simply know that these people are not ukrainians these are contractors because it takes many months to learn how to operate the system i mean just the driver on the high mars the high mobility rocket system has to perform roughly 1100 tasks in the space of a few minutes

in order to ready the launcher to fire. So you have to have people who are very well trained. Is the American military continuing to send personnel, I don't want to call them troops because they're out of uniform, and we all know the legal and potentially fatal consequences of that, but is the DOJ continuing to send American military personnel out of uniform to Ukraine? Well, I'm told that that's happening. I can't confirm it, and I can't prove it. I'm hearing that from people on the ground in Poland and I'm being told that there are cells that operate the surveillance,

reconnaissance, intelligence capabilities for the Ukrainians. Some of them are as far east as Kiev, but most of them are in the western portion of the country. The thing is this, Judge. If we think this is happening, and we have people telling us it is, but we can't personally confirm it, the Russians know. The question is, how much longer do they wait before they try to disable our satellites?

How much longer do they wait before they target us, these cells on the ground in Ukraine? I don't know. But it's a very dangerous situation. It's back to the original point. And then the third point here, which is very, very important, is that we're substituting fiction for reality in the newspapers, in the Wall Street Journal, in cable news, television about, oh, the Ukrainians are preparing a great offensive. With what? There's nothing to use. I mean, they don't have the troops that they once did. Their best troops are gone, destroyed, wounded. Now, the latest thing I heard from someone over there is there may be as many as 100,000 dead Ukrainians. I know there are 60,000 to 70,000. That's reasonable. Are there 100

thousand? I don't know. But I know that they are losing more every day now than they did in the past. The only thing that this assistance will do, Judge, is potentially in some areas slow down the Russians briefly. But it's not going to change anything. It's not going to stop their advance and it's not going to turn the war around in Ukraine's favor. So when the Wall Street Journal reports, as it did this morning, and you just referenced it, that the Ukrainian military is ready for an offensive and it's enthusiastic and determined to move forward and the Russians are disillusioned, where are they getting this nonsense from? I think they have a cell. People sit down there and cook it up. You know, Trotsky, the famous Bolshevik, in 1921 was asked about some information he was distributing about the

recent performance of the Red Army against the Poles, which of course was terrible. The Red Army was almost completely annihilated in front of Warsaw. And this member of the Communist Party came up to Trotsky and said, Comrade, look at this. This isn't true. How can we say this? And Trotsky smiled and said, Comrade, paper will put up with anything you put on it. Well, so will cable news. So will the internet. We're just disseminating disinformation. All right. Are American intelligence agencies complicit in disseminating not only disinformation, but information that's 180 degrees from the truth? Well, we've always had the ability to plant falsehoods and false stories whenever we wanted to in foreign newspapers.

I think that's also happening here in the United States. I'm not an intelligence expert. You know, Phil Giraldi would be a better man to ask than me. But the bottom line is I certainly would assume that at this stage because we're just being treated to this massive deluge of fiction. And the Europeans are starting to wake up. Many Germans that I know were absolutely up in arms over the Russian intervention and said, we've got to do everything we can to stop the Russians, harm the Russians. Now they take a very different position.

They see this through a very new lens. It's not distorted by propaganda, but they're not getting any information different from what we are through their media. Well, the Germans are concerned about winter, are they not? They're concerned about whether they'll be able to heat their homes with natural gas from Russia, on which they have, for better or for worse, grown accustomed for a generation. Am I right? Of course.

Absolutely. No question about it. So what happens? It's now the end of August. What happens as winter approaches? Will this conflagration continue into the winter? Will Zelensky negotiate with Putin or somebody from Putin in a rational way? Will Joe Biden keep sending billions in ammunition or weaponry to a lost cause? Will NATO recognize that the longer the fight goes on, as you have said so articulately, the more dangerous it can expand or explode. Well, I suppose that President Biden will continue to sign whatever Susan Rice and Jake Sullivan and Ron Klain and others put in front of him. They seem to be the ones that are orchestrating most of this policy. Blinken is, of course, with them, along with Austin and the people behind him in

the Pentagon. And remember that they've dug a very deep hole for themselves. How do you get out of this deep hole? Well, in order to get out, you've got to, at some point, admit the truth. Well, that's an impossibility. They can't admit the truth. And so what they're going to try and do is the impossible, which is turn it around by turning to anything they can come up with, any instrumentality, any program, any information system, anything at all that promises some success. So I guess the short answer on the first part is that I don't see any evidence that President Biden is going to come forward and do anything. I think he'd probably resign or go away long before admitting to anything. The rest of it is back to the original point. I just don't know how much longer our

European allies, their publics, the electorates will put up with this. I think we're going to see change in Europe long before we see it here in the United States. There are large numbers of people living in Europe now who are beginning to question, fortunately, thankfully. The people that question the least are usually the ones who are the furthest away from the conflict, the Norwegians, for instance. Everybody in Norway is perfectly happy to let this go on ad infinitum. They just want us to protect them. But once you get to Germany, you get to the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Romanians. The Poles.

Yes. Well, even the Polish population is beginning to turn sour on this. And the closer you get to the Polish border with Ukraine, the more fearful people are. It's very obvious. So I think we're going to see some sort of cresting wave that will come in and change these governments. I don't see how they survive the problem is that the governments that are likely to succeed them are all going to be in

my judgment very karensky like we we you know karensky was the man that took over after the czar was deposed and all he had to do to be successful was to end the war, number one, stop the war, declare peace, bring the army back, and then begin feeding the population. Well, he wouldn't do that because he said, well, I'm dependent on the West for money, for capital, for support. So he failed to do that. He was deposed nine months later, and our friend Lenin took over. What did Lenin do? End the war, feed everybody, bring back the army, turn it into an instrument of political power and terrorism. The rest is history. Well, I think we're going to see something similar happen. We'll see this man Olaf Scholz go away, probably Macron at

some point, maybe others. And then you're going to see somebody else come in and the new one is going to try and stay once again with one foot in each camp. I want to get along with the Russians and I want to end this, but I still want to be Washington's friend. We're reaching a point now where that's an impossibility and that's Putin's game or strategy would be a more appropriate thing. Either you do business with me or you sink with Washington. But one person we're not going to see go away in the very near future is Putin himself. No, well, I don't think so. But I read every day somebody tells me that he suffers from colon cancer and that he could die very suddenly. I have no idea. I just don't know. All I know from what I can tell from people who are over there is that

he is enormously popular. Anyone who thinks that anyone is going to launch a coup against this man and remove them is deranged. It's not going to happen. And the second point, and we've talked about this before, Putin is the one man exercising restraint. If it weren't for him, I think they would have already destroyed several of our satellites, I think they would have already destroyed several of our satellites. I think we would have seen precision attacks on these contractors that are on the ground over there. Why is Putin exercising restraint? He doesn't want the war to go on any longer than it has to. Right. He doesn't. He thought, and frankly, I did too. He thought that when he demonstrated his resolve and determination to, you know, block this NATO membership for Ukraine

and demand the removal of NATO forces and troops from Eastern Ukraine's border, that the Ukrainians would say, wait a minute, slow down. We don't want to destroy everything. We don't want millions of people to be displaced. Let's talk. He was wrong. And we are calling the shots in Kiev and we have from the very beginning. And I think he knows that. And so he's sort of slogging through at this point, hoping against hope that we will wake up, I suppose. But if he were removed, you'd get a very different outcome from any potential successor that I'm aware of. Colonel McGregor, always a pleasure. Your insight is tantalizing and much to be valued. Thanks for joining us. Okay, Judge. Thank you. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.