Judging Freedom - Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Blinken in Davos- A Disaster!

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Blinken in Davos- A Disaster!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 Thursday, January 18th, 2024. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson returns to the show. Colonel, it's always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for coming back and thank you for letting me pick your brain on these topics. I want to talk to you about President Biden's foreign policy and the role of the State Department in it and the role of the Secretary of State in it. But before we do it, I just want to establish some parameters. Do you believe that the war in Ukraine is effectively over,

and Ukraine has effectively lost? That's an interesting question. I was just dealing with an individual whom I recently met from Norway, and she asked me basically the same question. I was just dealing with an individual whom I recently met from Norway. And she asked me basically the same question. I said, go to chapter eight or book eight of Clausewitz on war. War changes as time goes by. The first major change was Putin invaded and didn't get anywhere in terms of his objectives. And so the war changed at that point. Ukraine, with the support of NATO, courageous and valiant people in the field, stopped the Russians. Then the war

changed again. Second decision, very incompetent strategic decision by Washington, London, and Kiev, go on the offensive. That changed the nature of the war again because they are roundly defeated now after that offensive. All they can do is hunker down and try to go on the defensive as Russia did against them, but it's an entirely new war now. And my fear is that we will let it go on in this very unforgivable way, and Russia will gain and gain, and then it'll be an entirely new war again, and Russia will have new strategic decisions to make, such as, do I want the whole country? This is not a place we want to be. To your point, Colonel, Dmitry Medvedev, who for four years was the president of Russia and is now the vice chair of Russia's equivalent of the National Security Council, said yesterday, and sometimes I think he's the bad guy to Putin's good guy. experience in the State Department working with Secretary Powell. But Dmitry Medvedev said, Kiev is in our crosshairs. Now, I don't think that means that they're going to attack Kiev or

they want to take it over, as Secretary Blinken, we'll run the tape for you in a minute, told the crowd at Davos that Putin wanted, the last thing in the world he wants to do is to govern a country of 40 million people that are basically hostile to him. But I wonder if as the war changed and with that critical and catastrophic decision pushed by London and Washington on Kiev. It didn't sharpen the knives, so to speak, of the Russian military. Well, Putin's model, of course, and here Clausewitz is trenchant again. He says, don't count on one more being like another war, was Georgia.

He made a threat. He took the territory he wanted. He backed off. He didn't go to Tbilisi. He well could have. NATO would not have been able to stop him from going to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, and taking the entire state, but he didn't want it. Who wants Georgia? That's the place Stalin came from. And he feels the same way about Ukraine, although, as I just reiterated, he had a different circumstance in Ukraine. He got stopped due to the courage and we wind up essentially destroying Ukraine and maybe enthusiastically infusing Putin with a new objective and a new course of action. It's not what you want to do. The Republicans in the House of Representatives are trying to decide whether or not they want

to support the president's proposal to send, number staggering, Colonel, 68 billion more dollars to Ukraine. If the Speaker Mike Johnson called you up and asked you what you thought of that, what would you tell him? I'd say, I don't care about your domestic politics. What I care about is our foreign policy and our national security. And you shouldn't give the president a penny more. This should stop. We should go to a negotiated ceasefire and then to negotiations to decide what we're going to do with the situation on the ground. The outlines of an agreement are there. I could formulate that. I'm a erstwhile diplomat.

I could formulate that in about an hour. It's there. But we won't do it. We won't do it because we've got this incredibly confused domestic political scene, which isn't operating on this very subject, this money. It's not operating on national security purpose. It's operating on domestic politics purpose. And that's absurd. But that's how it's happening. Right. We'll switch to the other hot spot. Are you satisfied from the evidence you've observed? I don't know if you had a chance to listen to the presentations at the International Court of Justice or if you have other sources of that evidence, but are you satisfied from the evidence you've observed that Israel is engaged in acts of genocide in Gaza? I went through this with Colin Powell when he was trying to get President Bush to understand

what the Genocide Convention meant, what it meant legally, what it meant in terms of foreign policy, what it meant internationally and in terms of international law and criminal justice, and then declare it with regard to Sudan. He did. Now, the administration then put him out on that limb and then sought it off. We didn't really do anything about it, which brings to light the real deficiency in this convention, as it is the deficiency of all international law. If you're not willing to back it up with a big gun, it's not worth much except nuisance value. I have read the 84-page application to the court. Here's what Kirby said. If I remember, I wrote it down. It's meritless, counterproductive, without any base in fact. John Kirby should be ashamed of himself. And I'm ashamed of him as a

representative of the Navy and of my nation, because that's not how you do things diplomatically. Plus it's a lie. It's a ball-faced lie. It's a well-articulated case, much better articulated than the one in Sudan that I had to deal with with Secretary Powell. And what you do in a circumstance like that is you lead off. You lead off, John, by saying South Africa is a sovereign state. It has a right to do what it feels is requisite in this situation. There is a lot of killing going on in Gaza. We can't get away from that. And if South Africa feels the way it says it feels in this application, which is submitted in accordance with the rules,

then South Africa has every right to do that. And oh, by the way, John, do you know they're considered in the eyes of the world as a black state. So your remarks were just unconscionable. And that's the kind of crap that we're putting out as the most powerful country in the world today in terms of our diplomacy. We don't know how to do diplomacy. Even if there is no, as you say, big gun, Colonel, with which to enforce a substantial violation of an international agreement. And even if it's just what judges call an advisory opinion, because there was no testimony, it was just four hours of argument from the South African lawyers that did a wonderful job, four hours of argument from the lawyers representing Israel, I don't think they dented the South African argument.

But if the court issues this advisory opinion that it is more likely than not, which is the standard, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, more likely than not that Israel is engaged in acts of genocide? Would that not isolate Israel diplomatically and further damage its PR war, which it already appears to be losing? It would, unquestionably, and that's the reason Kirby said what he said, in politic as it was. I go back to Sir Nigel Rodley in Sicily, the late Sir Nigel Rodley, a real stalwart in the international criminal justice world. And I asked him one time late at night in Sicily, I said, is this worth it? Is what we're doing, is this effort to enforce international justice, is it worth it? He said, we bother the bastards.

He was right. That's what you do it for, at least now, because the court doesn't have any guns behind it or the guns behind it like America, who claim to be a stalwart in human relations and human rights and international criminal justice. We're the exact opposite. Our guns are aimed the other way. So you bother the bastards, though, and you do. And in this case, bastards is right term. Do you accept the argument that Joe Biden could put an end to the killing in Gaza in 24 hours or less with a phone call to Prime Minister Netanyahu? Absolutely. I go back to when Ronald Reagan allegedly called the prime minister when they had invaded Lebanon. And after he was responded to positively by the prime minister, Reagan turns, this might be apocryphal, but he turned to Schultz or someone and he said, I can't believe it. He's going to do it. Netanyahu would be the same way. He'd be furious. He'd be angry as hell, but he would have to do what he was told to do because otherwise he'd have to stop. Here's what Prime Minister Netanyahu said earlier today. This is a troubling, Colonel, because he uses the phrase from the river to the sea, which if you use that while carrying a

Palestinian flag on some college campuses today you'd be kicked off the campus nevertheless he makes uh this argument not suggesting but saying all the territory from the river to the sea is israel number 17 chris for 30 years i am very, and I'm saying something very simple. This conflict is not on the lack of a state of Palestinians, but the

existence of a state, the Jewish state. Every area that we evacuate, we receive terrible terror against that. It happened in South Lebanon, in Gaza, and also Judea and Samaria, which we did it. And therefore, I clarify that in any other arrangement, in the future, the state of Israel

will have to control the entire area from the river to the sea. This is what happens when you have sovereignty. This truth I say to our American friends. And I also stopped the attempt to impose on us a reality that will jeopardize us. A prime minister in Israel has to be able to say no even to the best of friends.

To say no when you need to and to say yes when you can. How does that rest in the White House, which if they said no to him, it's over? That's an interesting set of remarks that he laid out there. Thank you for playing it. I had not seen it yet. We are always hauling out the analogy of Munich when we want to talk about aggression and we want to talk about giving in to aggression.

I would haul it out right now, and incidentally, I think we haul it out inappropriately, but I would haul it out, I think, appropriately now and say, what's to stop Israel from going further? What's to stop them from going on into Jordan? What's to stop them from encroaching on Egypt? What's to stop them from going further into that basket case right now called Lebanon? What's to stop them, period, if you let them go all the way from the river to the sea, as he just said, and get what they want and get it by killing people and using military power to do it. What's to say he won't stop? Great observation, Colonel. What do you think, Colonel, is the essence of Joe Biden's foreign policy?

Is it a misguided idealism, American exceptionalism, whatever you want to call it? I'm using a Senator Lindsey Graham phrase. Or is it I'm going to feed the hands that nourish me, the military industrial complex, and keep them enriched? All of the above, I think, Judge, but prominently and predominantly, it's I want to get elected again. And he's calculating, his calculus is just that. Whatever he thinks increases that, however infinitesimally or greatly, and whatever doesn't do that or keeps it neutral, he's going to stay away from. That's how his calculus works right now. That's what he's doing. He's ensuring that he gets reelected. And he needs Jewish money to get reelected. I'm just going to take a little

aside here, because this is right in your wheelhouse uh an american citizen dual citizenship with a latin american country as well by the name of gonzalo lira a thorn in the side of the uh ukraine government uh notwithstanding their threats to him moved to ukraine and lived there and he he was very popular on uh social media made very, very strong arguments against Ukraine. And he was arrested for disseminating materials purporting to justify Russian aggression. In other words, freedom of speech. And he was beaten and brutally treated in America and died in Ukrainian prison. His father claims that he begged the American embassy in Kiev to get his son out. There's a picture of Gonzalo, who's now deceased. Is it not the job of the State

Department to protect American citizens in foreign countries? And couldn't he have been ordinarily released with a phone call from Tony Blinken, or maybe not even Tony Blinken, maybe even the U.S. ambassador, whoever that is, in Kiev? Well, probably the latter. I remember vividly when Powell had occasion to wax eloquent, if you will, on that very subject. And it was his appreciation and his directions to those in the State Department at that time that one of the most important duties they had, no matter how insignificant, no matter how singular one individual the situation was, one of their most important duties was to protect American citizens. And I think he was deadly serious about that.

And I watched how he acted with regard to citizens who would get in trouble and how much personal attention he would pay to it. So, yes, the answer to your question is if you have the right feelings about it and the right inspiration about it, one of your number one missions is to protect Americans abroad. Certainly the ambassador gets that message from, most Americans don't know, ambassadors do not work for the Secretary of State. They work for the President of the United States. He charges each ambassador with a personal letter to that ambassador. The Secretary of State is just the conduit for information flow from the ambassador to the president, but if their

master wants to, he's perfectly within his priorities to pick up the phone and call the president direct. And protecting American citizens is one of the president's predominant missions too. They let him die. Brittany Griner, they traded for her. The kid from the Wall Street Journal, I don't know what they're negotiating about. The former Marine, Paul Whalen, in prison for six years. This guy was in prison for three or four months, but they let him die. And you're telling me they could have gotten him out with a phone call. Probably.

I would guess 90% they could have gotten him out with a phone call? Probably. I would guess 90% think I got him out with a phone call. Yesterday, Secretary Blinken, you have been critical of Secretary Blinken at Davos for very sound reasons. We're going to give you a few more, although maybe you've seen these already. Yesterday, Secretary Blinken made absurd comments that Putin's military has failed. Cut 13, Chris. Putin has already failed in what he set out to do. He set out to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, to subsume it into Russia. That has failed, and it cannot and will not succeed. Second, Ukraine has not only stood up to the aggression over the past year, took back more than 50 percent of the territory that had been taken from it in February of 2022. The last year, the last part of the last

year has been challenging, but even then, something that got little notice. What Ukraine managed to do in the Black Sea, opening it up, pushing the Russian Navy back, and starting to get grain out to the world. It's been the breadbasket of the world. It's gone back to that as a result of actions it's taken. What do you think, Colonel? He'd have never been able to do that if the Russians hadn't had an abacuiest in the grain. And second, those statements were just ludicrous. They show how little grasp of military reality that Tony Blinken has or what a ball-faced liar he is. Ukraine is in very bad shape right now. It's been in bad shape since it made the catastrophically bad decision to launch that counteroffensive with London and Washington's backing and I suspect other capitals in NATO, but mostly London and Washington.

And Russia has, for all intents and purposes now, got to decide whether it wants to go further. And go further will mean the annihilation of what's left of Ukraine, which incidentally, I heard yesterday, is not a whole lot. They've lost a lot of people, either immigration or killed or people who have decided that they don't want to have anything to do with the security situation anymore and started moving more internal to Ukraine and now are leaving. Same thing is happening in Israel. I'm trying to get the picture in Israel on just how many Jews have immigrated, how many have left, essentially for the reason that it's not what was promised to them. It's not secure.

Now, that's being offset to a certain extent because Putin is still releasing Jews from Russia to come into Israel. But you don't sit around and say the kinds of things that Blinken said, which are abjectly refuted by the facts on the ground. And the rest of the world knows that. The rest of the world understands the Ukraine situation apparently better than Anthony Blinken does. And I wouldn't give you two cents for his military skills. So it's just, it's another example of how the Secretary of State doesn't know what he's talking about. We have one more example, and this is really hand-wringing. And if you didn't notice the questioner, it's Tom Friedman from the New York Times, and you know the audience. By the way, was Secretary Powell ever speak at Davos to that crowd in your year? In my memory, I think he went one time. I'm not

sure that he spoke, and I'm almost positive that was the time. I'd have to go back and look at my papers, but that was the time that he gave me the fat cat appraisal of the people in Dallas. He didn't have much use for them. Yeah, they are fat cats. Well, here is Secretary Blinken again with Tom Friedman in front of those fat cats, hand-wringing over Gaza, cut number 11. One of the things you hear so often from people, given the high civilian casualties in Gaza, is does the United States, do Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian and Muslim lives, Palestinian Christian lives, given the incredible asymmetry in casualties? And I've been asked that.

I want to give you a chance to respond to that. No. Period. For me, I think for so many of us, what we're seeing every single day in Gaza is gut-wrenching. And the suffering we're seeing among innocent men, women and children breaks my heart.

The question is, what is to be done? We've made judgments about how we thought we could be most effective in trying to shape this in ways to get more humanitarian assistance to people, to get better protections, and minimize civilian casualties. And at every step along the way, not only have we impressed upon Israel its responsibilities to do that, we've seen some progress in areas where, absent our engagement, I don't believe it would have happened. I know you're not a shrink, Colonel, but what is wrong with him?

That's a very good question. I ask myself that almost every time I hear him say something that I think is going to be substantive and it winds up being cosmetic or just irrational. That was the latter category. What are you doing about it then? Because they aren't doing anything about it. The only thing they're doing is remonstrating every now and then. They're not doing anything substantive about it. Because if they were doing something substantive, as I gave you that analogy of Ronald Reagan previously, then Netanyahu, bastard that he is, and disliker of Joe Biden and the rest of his administration as he is, would have to do something. And he's not doing a thing. The reason

he's doing things somewhat differently right now that Blinken was hinting at is because he's taking significant casualties. He's taking casualties that are not helping his situation in Israel at all with his cabinet or with his people. So nothing that we've done that I can see has had any impact on him. If you listen to his rhetoric in English even, you understand that he's saying extended middle finger to you, Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken. I'm going to do what I need to do to eradicate Hamas. And I'm changing my strategy only as circumstances on the battlefield caused me to change my strategy. I'm not really listening to you at all.

Here's a clip from one of our regular guests who happens to be on right after you, Max Blumenthal. He's at the State Department questioning one of the State Department's spokespersons. I think the answers will irritate you, but I'm anxious to hear what you have to say about this. Secretary Blinken has specifically accused China of genocide for its treatment of the Uyghurs. But Blinken didn't point to any mass killing there. According to Euromed Monitor, 4% of the entire population of the Gaza Strip is now dead or injured. In just 90 days, 65,000 tons of munitions have been dropped on the Gaza Strip, three times what was dropped on Hiroshima.

You have evidence of industrial-style killing. The South African legal team presented 20 minutes straight of statements on the record by Israeli leadership expressing the intent to commit genocide, for example, referring to the Palestinian population as Amalek. So how can you explain this discrepancy between Secretary Blinken accusing China explicitly of genocide with no mass killing, presenting no evidence of the mass killing of Uyghurs, and then dismissing out of hand the potential that Israel could be committing genocide in the Gaza Strip,

calling it unfounded? How do you explain this discrepancy? The same way that I just explained it to your colleague, who asked essentially the same version of your question, which is that each conflict is different, and any kind of determination like this needs to be based on specific facts and law. And when it comes to the points that are being made in today's hearing, again, I'm not gonna speak

to those specifically. Israel will have an opportunity to address some of those tomorrow. Each conflict may be different. I would submit they probably are, as Clausewitz carefully points out. But killing men, women, and children is the same whether you're in Gaza or you're in Moscow or you're in Stalingrad or whatever. It is not different. And that was an idiotic answer because the convention is the same, too. I wonder if he's even read the convention. I wonder if he even realizes what the prerequisites are for a situation of

genocide. They're tough. They're really tough because the UN knew when they put this convention together that they didn't want it arbitrarily used. They wanted it to apply when real stuff was happening, like is happening in Gaza right now. In fact, I would submit to you that we haven't had something like what is happening in Gaza in a long, long time. You have to go back to the Genghis Khan. You have to go back to the times when people ran into enemy camps and raped every woman in sight or murdered them and so forth to get to the kinds of dimensions of killing that we're having in Gaza right now. So that was an absurd answer. And I take Max's frustration, I saw it in his face as he wanted to do a follow-up. You just get these kinds,

Kirby, Kirby is so bad that I wonder if he ever had to do anything in the United States Navy that required him to be the least bit diplomatic. Gosh, we have so many Kirby clips. Here's number four. This is very interesting. He has asked when is, this is yesterday, he has asked when is the last time Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu have spoken to each other? When was the last time President Biden spoke on the phone with Netanyahu? There has not been another call since the last one we read out. I don't have the exact

date in front of me. It's been more than 20 days, I think. Boy, they should probably speak every day, don't you think? There's your answer right there. There's your answer. That's real force, isn't it? That's presidential power. Colonel, your insight is so good. We could go on and on and on. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for your thoughts. I hope you can come back again next week with us, sir. Certainly. Let me say one follow-up. Please. George W. Bush gets a lot of criticism, and I'm one who will criticize him, mostly for his inexperience. He was a smart man. George W. Bush would be on the phone to Bibi Netanyahu every day.

Very interesting. I've been critical of Bush also, as you know, and he's harshly criticized on this show. But I can't imagine any president, no matter their attention span, except Joe Biden, allowing this to go on. That's three weeks with no communication and slaughter going on every day and the slaughter being committed using American weaponry and American planes arriving every day. Three cargo carriers a day bringing in more equipment. And the president obviating the Congress to send arms the same way Ronald Reagan did with the Contras and the Congress almost started impeachment proceedings against him. Right. It's ridiculous to do that with Israel because Israel practically owns the Congress when it comes to wanting money and military equipment. And back to Blinken.

Tony Blinken signed two declarations under oath. You've probably been through this, Colonel. Yes. Swearing that the money was needed. That wasn't money, that the equipment was needed in an emergency. And it was a matter of national security for the United States of America. And that's why we're bypassing Congress that came to a hundred million dollars. I would find him under oath to defend that. A ball face lie. It's one of the reasons Josh Paul left the State Department here, you may recall.

And I know exactly what he was talking about because I had to sit there in the room at times. And we're not even going to demarche Tel Aviv. We're not even going to demarche them. We're not even going to send a protest. Wow. Colonel, thank you very much. We'll see you again next week. All the best.

Surely. Take care. Of course. At 5 o'clock Eastern, the aforementioned Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.