Judging Freedom - Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Netanyahu Deceives US Into War

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Netanyahu Deceives US Into WarSee 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, September 5th, 2024. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now. Colonel, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for coming back on the show. Thank you Netanyahu's efforts to deceive America into a war with Iran. But before we get there, there are some hot issues, events that have happened in the past three or four days that I need to get your views on. The first is the continuing Ukrainian invasion into and remaining in Kursk. President Putin has said this is nothing and we will starve them out. President Zelensky says it's a great victory. We've captured, he used square kilometers. I'm going to translate it to square miles. We've captured over 500 square miles of geography. We've captured a lot of Russian prisoners and we're exchanging them for Ukrainian prisoners of war that the Russians have had for several months.

Who's right? Let me start by saying that I fish in 50,000 square miles of Idaho panhandle forest. 500 square miles would disappear in that. And Russia's got a lot more than that. So it's really kind of nonsense. Anatole Levin sent me a piece this morning, which he's just written. He sent me a piece about a week ago after he'd been in Moscow for a couple of weeks. Now he's been in Ukraine for a week. He wrote a piece on how the Russians are looking at the war. And he interviewed all manner of Russians, official ones and unofficial

ones. And he interviewed all manner of Ukrainians. And here's what he got from one of the Ukrainian leaders in the military. Quote, for some time, the situation in Donbass was difficult, but controlled. Now it is out of control. It looks like our front line there has collapsed. If or when Pokrovs falls, it will mean Russia controls all of the southern Donbass. And Anatole goes on, that's the end of the general's quote. Anatole goes on and says, and they'll turn east or they'll turn north and they'll roll up the Ukrainian line. And for all intents and purposes, it'll be over. And having used the strategic reserve, the best soldiers Ukraine had in Kursk, was a monumental failure.

Colonel, let me make sure I understood you correctly. The human being being quoted is a Ukrainian general? Yes. Well, if it's an accurate quote and you have no reason to question its accuracy because you know the author who delivered the quote to you. It's devastating. You're not going to see that in the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. Very interesting.

And it's a very balanced article. He talks about how merging the two visits, and Anatole's been in Moscow many times, merging the two visits, he talks about the Russian side too. And he talks about the reason Putin is talking more and more definitively about negotiations and a ceasefire is because he's got some problems too. And those problems are he's lost 200,000 soldiers. He doesn't want to conscript anymore. He doesn't want to keep this war going on and on and on with the prospects every day of escalation. So he's ready to negotiate. This is just prime for ending this stupid conflict.

And yet, look what's happening. What's happening is we're approaching the election and the election is keeping anyone from being sane in Washington. And they think, let's just get to November. But let's think about that for a minute. I'm hearing from the election task force and others who are monitoring the run up to the election that we may not get through this very quickly. It may be a long time before we determine who the president is.

And even if we do, it may be very contentious afterwards. So that's going to take all the air, the oxygen out of Washington to devote to that. And we're going to still have this conflict in Ukraine with the potential for escalation, which is absolutely insane. Not only that, Europe's falling apart. If you watch the German elections. Yes, yes, absolutely. I was planning to ask you about the German election. I'll ask you about it now and about Turkey joining BRICS. Can Turkey be in BRICS and NATO at the same time? I think not. And I think Erdogan's already made his decision. He's just waiting for the most opportune moment to exit NATO. And Chancellor Scholz is a

lame duck. Yes, very much so. Not only a lame duck, he's shot in the butt three times with arrows. Colonel, you have a unique way. President Zelensky is not even the valid, lawful, constitutional president of Ukraine. President Putin will not negotiate with him. And yet President Zelensky, what did he do this week? Fired his foreign minister, who's as bellicose as he is, and fired half of his cabinet. What do you think that's about? Well, I think he also, if I'm hearing right, he fired most of the people responsible for the excursion into that 500 square miles of Russian territory, because he knows now that it's turned out to be a huge mistake. So I don't give him much longer. I really don't. I

think we will see him going soon, either to one of his dachas somewhere with his money or into a grave. But forgive me for being snarky, but not before November 5th. It could be. All right. The Russian ballistic missile attack on the Ukrainian version, with some modification of West Point, killing 100 cadets and instructors, including Swedish and Polish instructors,

and seriously injuring 280 people. A military academy, a military target located in a civilian area. What message was Putin sending with that? I think several things. One, I can do it. And most times you can't prevent it. And two, these are legitimate targets. These are the targets of war.

They might be deeper. They might be more strategic. They might be different than other targets, but they are nonetheless the targets of war. The British went after West Point, for example. I would too if I'd been the British in those circumstances. It's a legitimate target. And then there's another message in there too. I'm controlling escalation very, very carefully. I don't think you are, and you're going to regret

it. He is controlling escalation very carefully. He, President Putin, must be coming under severe pressure from nationalists, from right-wingers, from military types, from intelligence types, for the reasons you just articulated. He doesn't want another draft. He's lost 200,000 men, which is a third of what the Ukrainians have lost. A lot of pressure to get the war over with. Does pressure for Putin mean this type of attack, or does it mean the slow, methodical advance toward the Dnieper River, which started two and a half years ago and has not ever suffered a serious setback or reversal? I think possibly both, but it's going to be based on what we do.

If he thinks we are doing things that indicate to him that we are intent on escalation and in a serious way that might impact what you just described, which is basically success, then he'll escalate too. And I think Scott Ritter's piece on, what do you call it, on a highway to hell, was not only eloquent, but that's what I've been screaming about on a lot of outlets everywhere I can go, is how we have divorced ourselves from any kind of treaty regime with regard to nuclear weapons, and we're now embarked on an arms race that makes the one we had post-World War II pale in significance. We are really going hell-bent for a world that will be poised to destroy itself.

One last subject matter before we get to Israel, Colonel. You were once a very high-ranking official in the American government. I'm going to play one from yesterday afternoon. You tell me what you think about this. Chris, cut number nine and then immediately cut number 10. The subject matter and content of many of the videos published by the company are often consistent with Russia's interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian interests, particularly its ongoing war in Ukraine. The company never disclosed to the influencers

or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government. Instead, the defendants in the company claimed that the company was sponsored by a private investor. But that private investor was a fictitious persona. The charges unsealed this morning do not represent the end of the investigation. It remains active and ongoing.

What about the First Amendment, Mr. Attorney General? All of this, all of it is speech. Yes. I was reading Ray McGovern's piece this morning about the resurrection of Russiagate. Ray is absolutely correct. The Democrats will do anything to get elected. They'll do anything to damage Donald Trump. It's just incredible. because I was a member of the National Task Force for Election Crises in 2020 and 2021. I left, but I still stay in touch with them. I asked one of the lawyers, I said, now you told me, you told me categorically that there are no federal laws against foreign money in U.S. elections. That means that you can do anything you want to within a U.S. election environment,

and there's no federal law to prohibit it. Because if money's not permitted, then certainly speech is not permitted or not prohibited. He said, you're absolutely right. Some of the states have laws, but no federal law exists to keep foreign money out of U.S. elections. When I told people in Maine that, they looked at me like, hey, you know what we had in our last election when the senator up there, the female senator, I forget her name now, but she was, because of her decision on the Supreme Court justice, she was really in trouble, they thought. Well, more money poured into Maine from foreign countries than had ever been in Maine before for any politician. Okay, so just so the audience is clear, and I'm pretty sure you know this, there's money and there's money.

So if the Israelis or the Russians or the Chinese want to spend money on a campaign in America, they can do it. But if they want to donate directly to the candidate, the candidate cannot accept money from a foreign source. That's true. Right. So this is not about even though it may it may have been done to help Vice President Harris. This is not about a candidate. This is about in. I don't even know what the crime is. I got to read the. But I will say this, and I got corrected on this by that very same lawyer. He said, look, AIPAC money is not foreign money. It's not Israeli money.

It's American citizens, often dual citizens, but it's American citizens like Miriam Adelson and others who are billionaires. That's who gives all the money for AIPAC. And so there's no foreign agent business going on there. I disagree with the last part. An American giving his money for a foreign country makes that American arguably a foreign agent, particularly if the foreign country is directing how the money is going to be spent, which leads me, of he's beating the war drums for Iran. The economy is collapsing.

IDF is challenging him. Mossad is challenging him. Shin Bet is challenging him. Is Israel about to collapse? I don't know if Israel is about to collapse, but I think like Zelensky in Kiev, Bibi Netanyahu is about to collapse. I've said that a couple of times before and been disappointed. He's been able to squirrel his way out of it. But I think the forces that are arrayed against him now, both domestic and foreign, are significant enough that the Israeli people are going to wake up in sufficient numbers to get rid of him. Now, I don't know what

will follow. I think it'll be more of the same with a lighter coat of paint, but I'd rather see that than I would Netanyahu continue in his, what I think is just a despicable campaign to do what he wants to do, which is kill all the Palestinians in his path. The second part of that campaign is to draw the United States into a war with Iran, is it not? Yes. And here's some late blooming stuff on that. Sure. Acknowledged by a lot of experts now is that the 100 plane strike did absolutely zero. It bounced the rubble. It may have got a couple of Katyushas. Most of them were fakes.

Hezbollah has everything ready to go now, sophisticated stuff ready to go. And they're pretty sure that 60 to 70 percent of it, if not more, is going to get through. And it's going to get through all the way to Tel Aviv. What they're waiting on is Iran. Now, I thought the ceasefire talks and the peace talks and such and all the movement from Cairo to Doha and back again and Tony Blinken and all these people talking about these things and Bill Burns working away in the trenches on it was enough to stall Iran. But what I'm hearing is Iran is taking all this time to make sure what they do works and works really well. So Bibi may ultimately get his wishes and it may be extremely destructive for the state of Israel, if not existential.

Well, Iran has a lot of new equipment and it came from Moscow and they got to make sure they know how to operate it and the right people are running it, whether they're Russian or Iranian technicians. In his speech to the Congress, the one where he was interrupted 58 times, the one where the longest interruption is when he condemned you and Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, not by name, but collectively, for having the temerity to march in the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this genocidal psychopath addressing the Congress. And he got this prolonged, it was over a minute, standing ovation as he attacked the freedom of speech. He also said in that speech, Iran is your enemy. This will be your war.

Victory will be your victory. I'm paraphrasing, but I'm being intellectually honest in my paraphrase. Is Iran, by any stretch of the imagination, a danger or a threat to the national security of the United States of America? The only place where that might be true in a moment's time is in the straight of a moose. And that would only be a moment's time because the United States still maintains the capacity to reopen anything they might do in the way of closing it. Temporarily, they could drive the price of oil up catastrophically, but we would relieve that within a couple of weeks. So no, the answer to your question is no, they can't. Only if we give them the opportunity, like for example, we invade, then they are a threat to our security because they will beat us. Is the American military support for Israel. More than 500 aircraft in nine months flown from the U.S. to Israel.

Do the math. It's several a day. Is American support for Israel totally unconditional, even if Bibi deceives, even if he lies and cheats? Up to this point, yes. My answer has to be a resounding yes, because up to this point, and I hear it spraying a bit, most of the members of Congress that count and most of the branches of government that count believe that Netanyahu was right when he alluded to the fact that if he weren't killing the Arabs, we'd have to be there killing them for him. And that's a long story about why we believe that, but we do in our heart of hearts. And so that supply to Israel has been more or less to keep us from having to do it while he does our dirty work for us. That's the way they rationalize it.

From Lindsey Graham to Josh Hawley to Chuck Schumer to Mitch McConnell, that's the way they rationalize it. And to Joe Biden. Oh, I wasn't going to play this, but now I have to. Cut number three, Chris. If you want the hostages home, which we all do, you have to increase the cost to Iran. Iran is the great Satan here. Hamas is the junior partner. They're barbaric religious Nazis, Hamas. They could care less about the Palestinian people. I would urge the Biden administration and Israel to hold Iran accountable for the fate of remaining hostages and put on the target list

oil refineries in Iran if the hostages are not released. Can you imagine the American military destroying Iran oil refineries because they didn't meet one of Netanyahu's demands that he keeps upping and upping and upping? Not only that, Judge, but it would be sort of like when we tried to destroy the Nazis' oil refineries in Romania. We bombed the bejesus out of them, and about a week or two later, they were pumping again. You just can't do that sort of thing with aerial bombardment unless you do it around the clock for weeks on end, and even then you're not going to do it thoroughly enough to stop the oil flow. There are all sorts of ways to get it going again. Listen to what Lindsey said. Listen to what he said. Hamas are Palestinians,

you fool. What is the likelihood of American full-fledged involvement? I guess that would mean naval and air power, Colonel. You tell me if it would mean Marines or soldiers or army on the ground. What is the likelihood of American involvement of that magnitude in a war with Iran? Bibi Netanyahu's wish. The last time we thoroughly wargamed it, which I admit was a few years ago, but I've kept up with the wargames ever since. The only thing we did with bombing was we made them very, very mad and we made them go underground, which is usually the consequence of massive bombing. You don't solve anything. You just make the enemy even more fiercely devoted to what he was going to do that your bombing was trying to stop. And the North Koreans were there to show them throughout the time I was in government to show them how to do underground facilities, and nobody's better at it than the North Koreans. So you would have to put troops on the ground eventually to make sure that you had destroyed, for the time being anyway, any capability they had to make nuclear weapons.

And once you put troops on the ground, think about Iraq, think about Afghanistan, but think about it with 90 million people, very homogeneous, much more difficult terrain, much vaster strategic depth, and going to fight you to the death, every one of them. You mentioned earlier, maybe I misheard you, Colonel, that a war between the United States and Iran, the U.S. would lose. Why do you say that, Colonel? I say that for the same reason we lost in Afghanistan, and we lost in Iraq, and we lost in Libya. Look at Libya today. Libya is a basket case, and we made it that way, us and NATO.

We have not won anything, Judge, since the first Gulf War, and that's across the board. If you think Afghanistan is a victory, please come talk to me. If you think Iraq was a victory, please come talk to me. If you think Syria was a victory, please come talk to me. If you think Iraq was a victory, please come talk to me. If you think Syria was a victory, please come talk to me. We haven't won anything, and we wouldn't win in Iran in a far more profound way than we didn't win in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and a host of other countries that we tried to influence with military power, which is not the thing you need in dealing with these countries. What is the likelihood of an American war against Iran? I think very slim, because one thing I believe this administration understands,

and I know its military leaders understand, is they don't want it. They don't want it as an October surprise before November 5th, and they don't want it at any time. That's exactly true. I was there during Operation Praying Madness. I was at SYNC PAC. We were the providing SYNC. I was there during Operation Earnest Will when we re-flagged the Kuwaiti tankers. And one of the things we started every briefing with virtually was we do not want a war. We were talking earlier about AIPAC. Here's a comment about AIPAC, but I wonder if the person making this comment wants a war with Iran. This is from September 1st, cut number eight. If you go back 15 years or even less, the strongest lobby in that sense in the United

States was Israel. You couldn't say a thing about Israel, Christian or Jew, you couldn't say anything about today. It's like under siege. And then you see Schumer, who's become a Palestinian, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, he's actually become like a Hamas agent. Schumer, how did that happen? The recipient of more than $100 million from AIPAC. Is he willing to fight, if he's elected, willing to fight a war against Iran, or is it anybody's guess? I don't think Donald Trump would be that stupid to put the United States in a position

where he'd had no choice but a war, a ground war with Iran. Would he bomb them? Would he go after them with Navy carrier? Would he listen to Lindsey Graham? I don't think so. I really don't. I actually think Donald Trump despises Lindsey Graham. Okay. Another story for another time. Colonel, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope we can see you again next week.

Let me say one more thing. Oh, absolutely, sir. I spent a lot of my life in Georgia at Fort Benning, now Fort Moore. Oh, you told us about Georgia cops a few months ago. I was home-based. A heap of them beating up a female professor who was tending to an injured and wounded student. But go ahead, please. No, I was home-based there. I quail hunted there. I fished there.

My heart goes out to Georgia for these kids that were killed. I just don't know what's wrong with this, Judge. I really do not know what's wrong with this. I think the Georgia authorities, from what I'm reading, are going to indict the parents. It turns out this kid has been talking about killing fellow students and teachers for months. Maybe that's what it'll take. Yeah, it's a horrible, horrible state of affairs. It will probably become a political football. You know, it's September.

The debate is next week. I can imagine Vice President Harris saying these types of weapons shouldn't be in the hands of civilians. And Trump will give a probably a broad brush defense of the Second Amendment. But it's a terrible, terrible tragedy. And I appreciate and I think a lot of people watching now appreciate your emotional response to it. Thank you, Colonel. Thank you for all the best to you, sir. We'll see you next week. Take care. Thank you. Coming up shortly, three o'clock Eastern, Professor Mearsheimer,

four o'clock Eastern, Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. 🎵