Judging Freedom - Col. Karen Kwiatkowski: How the Israeli_Hamas war could expand.

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

How the Israeli / Hamas war could expand.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 Tuesday, November 7th, 2023. Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski joins us now. Colonel Kwiatkowski joins us now. Colonel Kwiatkowski, always a pleasure. Thank you for coming back to the show. I want to spend a fair amount of time on Israel, but before we do, there have been some developments in Ukraine that I'd like you to unpack for us. Over the weekend, General Vladimir Zeluzhny, the commander of the Ukraine military, said that the Ukraine military and the Russian military had effectively achieved a stalemate. And for that, he was publicly rebuked, reprimanded, and even denounced by his own bosses

in the Zelensky administration. How do you interpret that? Well, sometimes in this phase of military operations, the generals begin to speak the truth. And I think that the general is closer to the soldiers and closer to the front and has a good understanding of capabilities. And he's probably pushing back in the only way that he can against the unreasonable nature of the requests of the Zelensky government, because I think Zelensky is not being realistic. And I imagine that's what General Zelensky is feeling. You know, the other interesting thing was his aide got blown up right after this. Did you see that in the news? Say again, please. One of Zelushny's aides was blown up. Yes,

yes. He got blown, literally blown up in a will-be-trapped birthday gift that he apparently opened in front of others and no one else was harmed, but he was killed. I mean, is that an inside job or do the Russians send things through the mail to high ranking military? I never heard of that. I mean, I don't know for sure, but it didn't sound like something that the Russians did. It sounds like things are falling apart inside of the Ukrainian military and the political structure. I think there's more than one person. There's probably many, many people in leadership positions there that are trying to figure out the best way to survive.

And that they have to end, the war has to end or else no one's going to survive and certainly not the politicians and the generals so you know I think it's in some ways it's a good sign that we're seeing this of course it was all unnecessary because the United States is the ones that really caused this thing and pushed it and pushed it and pushed it past all points of reason. So we are responsible for this and it's sad, but I think maybe this is the point of, not the breaking point, but really a breaking of an impasse so that we can get to what comes next in Ukraine, which I hope is a piece in rebuilding. You know, the Ukrainians certainly deserve that.

Well, rebuilding. The Federal Reserve will borrow money from China and give it to American banks who will lend it to American industrialists, who will rebuild Ukraine at our expense. And then the Fed will print cash to pay the interest on the money that it borrowed from China. This is just crazy. It's going to go on and on and on and on. Yeah, that's true. It's sad. It doesn't have to be us that rebuilds it. I mean, ideally, the best way to do it is for the country to pull itself up. I mean, it sounds harsh, but, you know, that's what should happen. But yeah, you're right.

It'll be a tax period. But to your point, Karen, the Russians and the Ukrainians had the framework of an agreement until the Americans and the British said no. So it is largely, primarily the fault of the American government that half of Ukraine, well, three quarters of its military is gone. Nearly a whole generation of young men are gone. The entire government, from bus drivers to physicians in government hospitals, are expected to be paid from cash that comes from the United States. All of this is because of the U.S. And now add to this, President Zelensky said yesterday he doesn't see the need for elections in 2024. Karen, will he even be alive and in Ukraine in 2024? I don't think he'll be in Ukraine.

I wish him ill, but I don't think he'll be in Ukraine. And if he is in Ukraine, he might be under the ground. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, this is kind of the end. And it is sad to think about the agreement that they had that was very workable. It's very similar to what they're going to end up with today. But meanwhile, they destroyed their country, lost half their population to, you know, leaving the country, refugees, death, destruction. And we've even polluted. We've helped with our American, you know, uranium-plated weapons and bomblets. You know, we've helped pollute the country. It's really a tragedy. And

I wish that we would learn the right lessons from it. Remember Henry Kissinger, your friend and colleague Matt Ho is fond of quoting this. The only thing worse than being Americans, more dangerous than being America's enemy, is being America's friend or ally. I guess he could have said America's vassal state, like South Vietnam or Iraq for a while, and now Ukraine. The NBC News reports that over the weekend, there was apparently a lot of chatter amongst American and Western European diplomats about the need for a negotiated settlement. Some of that chatter must have made its way to President Zelensky. You and I and others have seen and read and talked about the article in Time magazine, which is a firsthand article. And this article was written by a

reporter that accompanied Zelensky and his crew around for a week, which reports that President Zelensky is delusional and his staff knows it. So how do you think he reacted when his masters in London and Berlin and Washington start dropping hints about a negotiated settlement that you could have had two years ago if we had stayed out of it? Sure, sure. Well, you know, obviously he doesn't mainly the whole world has already seen him as a U.S. puppet with us pulling the strings. And of course, the puppet is the puppet master is done. He's the game is over. The show is over. And yeah, Zelinsky is in aky is in a terrible position. It's not, you know, he's brought it on himself in many ways. But, yeah, he's done for. But, again, as an American with a president like Biden that's running our country,

it's very difficult for me to criticize the leadership of other countries. Yeah, yes, understood, understood. Understood. Do you think it is now well recognized even amongst the Victoria Nulands and Lindsey Grahams of the world and of the American government that the war is over, that Ukraine is lost, that it's been a disaster, and I don't know if they admit that it's lost, but if you think about these folks, they depend on this current administration to maintain them in power. And that administration is not polling very well, and it's going to be changed out next year. So I think the neocons are very practical about this. You know, they're never going to say they're sorry. They're never going to admit it was a mistake. They're going to move on. And I think they're in that move-on mode right now for both domestic political reasons and the fact that this has been a disaster, a strategic and tactical disaster from day one.

Switching gears, do you believe that President Biden is serious when he says he's in favor of a two-state solution between the Israelis and the Palestinian people? In his mind, he probably is because for 20 years we've been talking about this and he's been talking about it. He's not serious because no one, not a single politician in America is serious about that, and neither are any Israeli politicians serious about it. They don't want that. What they want is what they're currently proceeding and accomplishing. And no, they don't want a two-state. They want Palestinians gone, and they don't care if they're in their own state, but it'll be far, far from Israel's borders, and ideally, you know, a non-entity. They don't care if they're in their own state, but it'll be far, far from Israel's borders.

And ideally, you know, a non-entity. The two state solution is it's just public relations. And it's sad because I think many in the State Department honestly invested years of their lives and their talents to try to bring it forward. But the powers that be in this country and in Israel are not interested in that, and they never have been. And then we're waking up to the fact that that is just empty words. Actions always speak louder than words, and what we're seeing is the actions that I think a good many Israelis want, even though I think many of them realize the risk

that they're entering into. But they want Palestinians gone, and they don't care where they go. They could be dead, they could be in the water, they could be in the desert, they don't care. They want them out of what they consider to be Israel. So, if Tony Blinken couldn't talk Benjamin Netanyahu into a brief humanitarian pause, we used to call it a ceasefire, now humanitarian pause, in order to bring food and water and medical supplies in, how the hell is he going to talk him into a two-state solution? It would be impossible. They'd have to have a gun to his head, metaphorically speaking, to get them to agree to a two-state solution, which makes me ask you the next question.

Do you think Hamas intended for this overreaction in order to galvanize Arab support, either military support or political support, for the two-state solution. I mean, we both heard, you and I both heard what President Erdogan said to a million and a half people. McGovern and Ritter tell me that the Turkish army is the second best in the world after only the United States, and it's well trained, and it's right there. Do you think that the Hamas people, monsters though some of them have been, intended to evoke a military response against Israel? I think you can say that they did.

And I think that they are extremely savvy in terms of how international opinion is being shaped and has changed over the past 20 years or so. So certainly they expected an overreaction. They wanted an overreaction by Israel. I think they hoped for the international reaction, but I don't know if they orchestrated it, but certainly what's happening in most of what's going on in the world, we only see it from the American side, but we are viewed, I don't want to sound like Trump here, but we're viewed as weak or weakening in many ways around the world. So when do you strike your enemy? When do you overextend your enemy?

I mean, certainly this is now's the time. Now's the time to do it. And I also think, too, for groups like Hamas or any longstanding group that's trying to liberate people from occupation or anything, whether they're terrorists or even just freedom fighters. You know, we have our own freedom fighters, of course, that do much the same thing. There comes a time when life is cheap and it's like this is our time. And I think there was a little bit of that attitude in there. But predicting the future is a very dangerous situation because of what you say about the Turkish army and also global opinion. And also the fact that we can't buy our way out of this. America's money is no good in a lot of places.

So it's it's it's pretty iffy. It's a pretty dangerous situation that we have. One of the members of Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet, one of the extreme right-wing people, suggested using nuclear weapons on Gaza to rid the Palestinian problem once and for all. Wow. Okay, that's somebody in the government of Israel for the first time admitting publicly that they have nuclear weapons theoretically that should trigger an American statute a federal statute that prohibits any military aid to any country that has nuclear weapons other than the approved ones that had them before the statute was enacted, Great Britain, Russia, China. What do you make of that?

Netanyahu was furious at this and said we would never do it. You can't say we don't have nuclear weapons because then he opens up a can of worms because too many people, American, Israeli, Western, and Middle Eastern know that they have them because they've worked on them. Yeah. No, it's true. And again, this is kind of the overreaction that I think Hamas may have been hoping for, because a discussion now, an open discussion and an open admission of these nuclear weapons out of bounds of any treaties, not inspected by any international inspection agencies, not controlled, not even known, but they've admitted it. So yeah,

puts them in the bed. This is the, you know, you get a rage response. And I think much of what Israel's government and many around the world who are on the side of Israel, they're enraged. And when you're enraged, you're not being rational and logical. So blurting out information like this changes the dynamic greatly because certainly it'll make the United States look like hypocrites, but many, many other members of the global, the nations of the UN and that kind of thing are very familiar with the technocratic and legal procedures that go along with this. So it's not just like, oh, we're going to let this one pass. There's a whole

planet out there that are not going to let this pass. And now that it's blurted out there, one more problem for Israel and certainly a problem for the United States as well. How can the United States, supposedly committed to the rule of law, signatory to treaties that require it, as is Israel for that matter, accept and defend the concept of collective punishment? Yeah, well, we can't. We can't do it without being hypocrites and liars and proving, incidentally, proving Putin and Xi Jinping correct in saying that the United States basically picks and chooses the rules of law that it will enforce and comply with. So we're proving our enemies' points, if you want to call them enemies.

We're proving their points by our behavior. We're really getting boxed in diplomatically and politically. And unfortunately, we're getting boxed in militarily too, as well. So that's, I think it's a dangerous time. I don't know what the solution is going to be. The true, I think masks are coming off and we're seeing the true faces of both our nation and some of these others. What do you think Joe Biden's endgame is here? Is it domestic politics and hoping to get reelected? It's not the two-state solution for the reasons we just talked about. There's not enough of a groundswell for it. What do you think his end game is? That's a really good question. I don't think Biden, I think Biden just wants to survive one more day. I don't really,

he's not being very strategic in anything that he does. It seems like from his last public speech that he gave a few weeks ago that he wants to be remembered as a wartime president in a positive way, not a world-ending way. So there's that. The question is, the people around him, what did they want? Because his staff, the neocons that surround him, his chief appointees in the CIA State Department, these people, they're going to get new leadership next year. They don't know who it's going to be. It's probably not going to be Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. So there is a sense of unease. The strategy for these guys is really a four-year strategy, president to president. I think time is, and this is another thing that makes it dangerous,

time is ticking away. They're going to lose power politically at home. They're already deeply, deeply unpopular. What will they do? I mean, honestly, I'm not sure they won't take the advice of their friend in Ukraine and suspend elections, you know, because we have a nuclear war going on. What is the value of Secretary Blinken's diplomacy? He spent four days and seems to have achieved nothing. Now, listen, we both know the way diplomacy works. They don't always announce immediately what they've agreed to, but the King of Jordan wouldn't see him. Bibi Netanyahu rebuffed him.

I don't know what he said to President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, but it seems to me that these guys are not successful diplomats. No, they're really jokes of diplomats. And in fact, the latest funny thing from Blinken is, well, I had several things that I told, you know, Prime Minister Netanyahu. And one of them was maybe he could drop smaller bombs on Gaza. Smaller bombs. That was his State Department advice. So that's a sign of somebody that has nothing. Did somebody actually say that in public, Karen? Blinken was quoted saying that.

He had several things he asked him to do. Perhaps we can use smaller weapons, you know, not bunker busters. I mean, he didn't say not bunker busters. He said smaller weapons. They dropped six 2,000-pound bombs, which are pretty big. You know this better than I. You're an Air Force veteran on a refugee camp to kill one Hamas guy. Right.

This is in violation of proportionality and other historical rules of war. If there are rules of war, they're certainly in violation of it. But, yeah, we don't have any credibility over there, I don't think, in any of the countries. And we certainly have no influence over Netanyahu's government or any Israeli government. And from an Israeli perspective, that's a good thing. You don't want to be controlled by another country. But from an American perspective, given the billions and billions and billions of dollars spent both in D.C. and given to Israel, you would expect that we would have influence. And we have none. That has been, as one of our senators, that's a very poor investment. Today, or actually, I guess it was yesterday,

last night, Prime Minister Netanyahu told ABC News that he expects that the Israelis will stay in Gaza more or less permanently and will provide security. Stated differently, they'll become prison guards. How dangerous is that? They're going to confront guerrilla warfare for as long as they're there. Well, I think they think they're going to kill and remove all of the Palestinians, and then their front guard will then be the settlers that will return to Gaza, as they had been some years ago before they were removed. And the illegal settlements will now be more fully protected and authorized by the Israeli government.

And they'll continue to do what they do best, which is to do what they're doing in the West Bank. So that process, while it seems very unfair and non-constitutional from an American perspective, that is what has worked for Israel. They've taken land, they've seized land, they've held land, they've removed the native population, they've populated it with Israelis, and not Arab Israelis, they've populated it with Jewish Israelis. And that process is going to continue apace. I think that is pretty much what Netanyahu

is saying. And this certainly does buy him support amongst the right. So, you know, they say his days are numbered. Well, he will use this as a political selling point. He will say, we had our vengeance on Hamas, and we took back Gaza where it should have always been ours. Now it is ours, and we will populate it with armed settlers, with army accompaniments, and this is what they'll do. And again, it's very harsh. It seems inhumane in many ways. It seems wrong in many ways. It's theft.

It's murder. But that's what states do. And the state of Israel is doing what any state will do when it's out of control. And it is out of control. It's certainly not in our control. It's certainly not controlled by America, by American politicians. Blinken got a good collective punishment to stop, they would stop the flow of cash until the collective punishment stops. But they're not going to do that.

Cash and weaponry, because we're shipping weaponry and bombs. And many of the things that they use on the Palestinians are made in America has been that way for decades. Oh, the New York Times reported yesterday that the Israeli government has asked for, and the State Department has approved, the shipping of 24,000 weapons to be given to settlers in the West Bank that are illegal to own in the United States. Machine gun. Machine guns. Automatic rifles. One trigger pull, a fusillade every round in the chamber,

not in the chamber, in the magazine comes out. Illegal to own in the hands of civilian settlers in the West Bank. Made in the U.S., paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. Yeah. So clearly, clearly Blinken doesn't mean a single word that he says because the actions are just as you have described. And that's what that's what the truth is. Your actions are the truth.

And so, yeah, I think if we're going to behave like this, we have for many decades and we're doing it now, then Americans themselves need to be very careful because we are have made ourselves the enemy of a great many people around the world. Not just because we're hypocrites and we're abusive. We're actually assisting in the murder of people that our friends don't like. Lieutenant Colonel Karen Pachowski, thank you, my dear friend. No matter what we talk about, it's always a pleasure to have these conversations with you. Well, thank you. We look forward to next week. All the best. Thank you.

4.30 Eastern this afternoon, the one, the only Scott Ritter, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.