Judging Freedom - Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: War and Debt

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: War and DebtSee 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 Friday, February 16th, 2024. Colonel Larry Wilkerson joins us now. Colonel, a pleasure as always. Thanks for your time today. Colonel, when the United States wages war, like when it invaded Afghanistan and invaded Iraq, or when it pays for war, like the military equipment and cash we're giving to Ukraine and the equipment and cash we're giving to Israel, who actually pays for it? We start the printing presses, of course, and run off more and more money. And ultimately, you have to look at who buys our treasury notes and thus our debt. And so when you look at a recent $200 million payment of China to Sri Lanka for lease of the port facility there. You look at how many treasury notes China unloaded the month before, and you find out the amounts are just about the same,

$200 million. So essentially, the rest of the world buying our notes, buying our debt, is financing our wars. Not directly, of course, but it works out that way. But when was the last time the taxpayers directly financed a war? I'm smiling because I don't think this has ever happened, maybe in World War II, when the Roosevelt administration persuaded everybody that they didn't know what was coming in Pearl Harbor or that there needed to be a liberation of Europe. But all these wars, the debt on them is paid by generations unborn. If it were paid by real contemporary taxpayers, what would happen? World War II was really a unique experience in the American portfolio of wars because we did everything from scrap drives to war bonds,

to bringing veterans back from the battle zone, to pitch for war bonds and such. So yeah, we didn't pay for the war entirely as it went down, but we certainly defrayed some of the colossal debt that, for example, today we're just building up like Topsy Turvy, 34, 35 trillion, 40 trillion in another 10 years. No one seems to be concerned about it. And some rather smart people from the Office of Management and Budget essentially opined in a principals meeting that the Iraq war could wind up. This is the second Iraq war could wind up costing, oh, maybe half a billion to a billion dollars. The only one, of course, who got the prediction really right was the old senator in the Senate who, to a quiet Senate, no one there, said, why, this could wind up costing billions, maybe even tens of billions. He got it right. Dick Cheney. Who was that senator, Colonel?

You know, the white haired man who knew the Senate better than anybody else. Robert Byrd? Yeah, Byrd. He was speaking. I remember that vividly. I used to play it for my students. He would say, why, listen, you could hear a pin drop in this chamber and we're going to war. And we're going to spend the taxpayers' money to the tunes of billions, maybe tens of billions. But he was right. He was the only one who was right. But at this meeting, when the Office of Management and Budget put the possibility out there that Iraq might cost a lot, and of course it wound up costing almost a trillion dollars,

Dick Cheney said, quote, quote, Ronald Reagan proved deficits don't matter, unquote. And that's the way we've been operating. Yeah, that's the famous, Ronald Reagan didn't prove that deficits do matter. Absolutely. Look at the national debt. You just said it's between $34 and $35 trillion. It will be $40 trillion at this rate. And there's no reason to suggest or believe that unless the federal government defaults and goes out of business and we break off into separate republics that it's going to stop uh soon we the debt service

which is real cash i guess they could borrow for the debt service that is really crazy it looks like borrowing from using one credit card to pay another credit card but that's when moody's that's when moody's makes a major downgrade of your debt. You're right, Colonel. Correct. But the debt service will soon be a trillion a year, and that's between a third and a quarter of all tax collections. So this crowd in Congress has, and people who have been in the White House, it doesn't matter which party, we're talking about post-World War II to the present, doesn't seem to care about debt. Recently, just the past two hours, President Biden made another pitch for money for Ukraine. This is number two, Chris, where the president is complaining,

how dare the Congress go on a two-week vacation without helping Ukraine slaughter more of its own people. I'm putting words in his mouth. Anything you can do to get ammunition to the Ukrainians without a supplemental from Congress? No, but it's about time they step up, don't you think? Instead of going on a two-week vacation. Two weeks and walking away. Two weeks. What are they thinking? My God, this is bizarre. And it's just reinforcing all the concern and almost, I won't say panic, but real concern about the United States being a reliable ally. This is outrageous.

Colonel, are you able to put a numerical handle on the Ukraine war? Could you tell us what it costs roughly per week, per day, per month, however you want to break it down, for the Ukraine military to attempt to resist the Russians? I've seen a wide range of figures, just as I've seen a wide range of figures for the war in Gaza right now. I've seen everything from 75 million to 150 million a day. I tend to come down in the middle of that, maybe 100 million a day. How about Gaza? What is the IDF spending? We know where they're getting the cash and the equipment from, from the U.S.,

but what do you think they're spending a day? When they conducted Operation Cast Lead for about 23 days, as I recall, and did the same thing and gave us a precursor of this, murdered everything in sight, it was about $100 million to $125 million a day. I suspect it's close to that today. And you don't really have a way of calculating it precisely, because as you said, there's so much U.S. money that's very fungible in there. There's so many assets that are fungible, like drawing down our war reserve stocks. No one puts a price tag on that until 10 years from now when they have to replenish them. Right. So even if the House of Representatives votes to approve what the Senate approved, I think it's $98 billion, but let's just talk about the $61 billion for Ukraine.

And the president signs this, and he desperately wants to sign it. We'll run another clip of him pleading for this in a minute. Even if that $61 billion is authorized. What will it consist of, and how long will it take for equipment to get there? Listening to the after speeches from Jan Stoltenberg and from Secretary Austin and others after the Ramstein conference on the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, I think it was the 15th of February, a couple of days ago. I don't think it's going to be much at all in terms of an instant shot in the arm, if you will, which is the way the president's talking. I think it's going to take time for that money to get in there. It's going to take time for whatever that money purchases

to get in there, whether it's ammunition or gives the Germans some help with the tanks that they apparently now are promising. But it's not going to be instantaneous. And Russia will just make more ground and more gains and more Ukrainian boys and girls. It's hard to say boys and girls now, since the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is 43, are going to die. And this money is not going to do anything to stanch that ultimate outcome. The last clip that we ran, I don't know if you caught this at the beginning, I'm sure you did, the reporter says, is there any way to get that money without waiting for Congress? And Biden said, no. Well, they did that with Israel. They sent Israel $200 million by certifying on a weekend when Congress wasn't meeting,

and Congress still hasn't ratified it, that this was a matter of American national security. I contend that that's an act of perjury because it's not a matter of national security. And Secretary Blinken had to sign under oath that it was. The statute requires that he sign under oath that it is. You're probably familiar with this from your years. Right. In order to get the Treasury to loosen the cash or the DOD to send equipment over there. I would defy the Secretary to explain how it's a matter of national security. Not the point of my question. The point of my question is I wonder why they don't pull the same shenanigan with respect to Ukraine. First, of all the picky unish things we've done in the past 30 years to bring articles of

impeachment to bear against people, particularly presidents, there hasn't been a single one of those things that probably would have been in the founders' eyes an impeachable offense. This is. There is no question about it. In the founders' eyes, particularly James Madison, this would be an impeachable offense for both the Secretary of State and the President. So that's how grave this offense is, in my view, and in the view of this republic, if there's anybody out there that cares about it being a democratic federal republic anymore. With the case of Israel, though, you're never going to get anybody to say anything about it because Israel owns Washington, D.C., period.

I want to pick up on that in a minute, but I want to underscore what you just said. And I'm happy that Madison, who, of course, is the scrivener of the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention, you know this, you teach this at William and Mary, the Constitution expressly says, no money shall be spent from the Treasury, but what is expressly authorized by Congress and put in a public journal. Oh, okay, Tony Blinken, you just spent $200 million that wasn't approved by Congress and wasn't put in a public journal, and you lied under oath in order to do it. Is he going to be impeached for that? Absolutely not. Not if it's Israel. Right, right. Has AIPAC corrupted the Congress?

It would be a lie if I said no. Just reading Walt Mearsheimer's Israel lobby and knowing what I know and what I have seen in my some 12 long years of exposure to the process at the highest levels, AIPAC owns the Congress in a real sense. And when it comes to voting and key votes, committee or whole House or Senate, they own the majority to do it. I wonder if your former boss, the late Secretary Colin Powell, would ever have done this, Secretary Pompeo. Oh, God. I I mean there he is dancing with the idea of celebrating their slaughter of women and children in Gaza there they're in some sort of a

place where they go to take a break for a few days from the killing. There's one of Colin Powell's successors. Colin Powell would have some really rich words for that. I don't even get that there's any domestic political advantage to him doing that. He's been roundly ridiculed for it, as like one of Colin Powell's other successors, Hillary Clinton has been roundly criticized for calling Tucker Carlson a useful idiot because he got the interview of the decade, maybe of the century, that nobody in mainstream media could get. But Pompeo knows that he needs certain key funders if he's going to make a run for the presidency. And Americans have short memories on things like you've just displayed.

He will get that money out of these mostly Jewish or Jewish sympathetic billionaires. I have asked the question about has AIPAC corrupted the Congress to almost every one of our guests this week. You have given the most direct, they're all on the same genre as you, if I will, if I may. But you have given the most direct answer. I'd be lying if I said that it didn't. I don't know how that is going to stop. Powell is both a uniformed military officer, in this case, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as the Secretary of

State in civilian guard. And I had a number of conversations, and they all came down to the same thing, really, with him at some point in the conversation saying, someday we shall pay dearly. Chris, in President Biden's recent presser, number six, here he's threatening Putin. Putin and the whole world should know if any adversary were to attack us, our NATO allies would back us. And if Putin were to attack a NATO ally, the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory. Now's the time for even defend every inch of NATO territory. Now is the time for even greater unity among our NATO allies to stand up to the threat that Putin's Russia poses. Paul Jay He still is preaching the domino theory, Colonel,

that if we fail to use Ukraine as a battering ram with which to drive Vladimir Putin from office, he's going to attack a NATO country. The world he wants to do or could afford to do. Putin got that precisely correct when he told Tucker, when Tucker asked him a question about what that meant to him to have the president of the United States making statements like that. And Putin said, threat mongering, threat mongering. That's what it is

Chris do you have the uh Tucker um I wasn't planning and running it but the Colonel made reference to it uh the Tucker Q a where uh Tucker asks President Putin could you ever see yourself invading Poland can we can you imagine a scenario where you sent Russian troops to Poland? Only in one case, if Poland attacks Russia. Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don't have any interest.

It's just threat mongering. Yet the President of the United States continues to make the argument if Putin takes Ukraine, another false premise. He doesn't want to take Ukraine. The last thing in the world he wants to do is govern Ukraine and live with a perpetual guerrilla war. He just wants- He wants a neutral Ukraine. Correct. And he wants those portions of Ukraine that have threatened, particularly the Azov

group and such, Russians who live on Ukrainian soil, to be in some way under more Russian influence, if possible. I think he would give in to referenda if they elapsed over a time of, say, a decade or so, and then let the people in those oblasts go where they wanted to go, where they voted to go. Let the vestige of the war die down a little bit, because I'm sure even some of the Russians in those oblasts right now don't have very fond memories of what's happened to them in the last few weeks, months, and a couple of years. But Putin would do that. All he wants is a neutral Ukraine. He's said that so many times, he's tired of saying it, I'm sure.

If the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, were to call you up and ask you to tell him why he should not put on the floor of the House or do everything in his power to prevent the ratification or the approval of the Senate version of this, of aid to Ukraine, what would you tell him? I would tell him that on his back and on his heart and in his mind must be the deaths of every Ukrainian who passes now once this money has been approved, because it's lost. And all you're doing is, you know, in the old farmer's terms, you're pounding sand down a rat hole. You are making sure that more Ukrainians will die for nothing. How depleted is the Ukrainian, getting back to sending gear over there, how depleted is the Ukrainian military?

Do they even have the technical capability to operate whatever we have in storage that we might be able to get there in the next six or 12 months? And you can expand on this, Colonel. Will there be a Ukraine military under the command of President Zelensky and General Sarsky in six or eight months? Well, that's a very good question. Not one that's cohesive and capable of maintaining a reasonable battlefield sobriety and success rate. It will be at best fighting last ditch, delaying tactics against a Russian juggernaut that is in no special hurry to do anything further than what they've done. The only place I worry about with that regard, and I've said this elsewhere, is if I were the Russian military, and I have a lot of respect for some of the mid-rank of the Russian military, which now has risen a little.

The cream rises to the top, especially in war. They would be salivating over the prospects of closing us out with Odessa, because Odessa is a far more important port than Sevastopol or anything else along that coastline. And if they had Odessa, that would sort of cement their fears of the Black Sea problem and the threat from the South in that arena. So, you know, as Clausewitz says, the dynamics of war change with every day of battle. And you start getting to the point where Ukraine is feeble and can't really do much of anything, no matter what NATO does, short of putting NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine. And maybe that might whet the appetite and the military might persuade Putin that they need

Odessa. So they're going to lose even more and they're going to lose the most valuable port in the country. They've already lost 500,000 young men. That's a generation of young men. Let's say the war stopped tomorrow. Joe Biden comes to his senses and says, we're not sending you anymore, and there's some sort of a truce. There's nobody to drive the cabs or operate the industry or run the factories or rebuild the damaged buildings. At least there's nobody in that generation.

You yourself told us earlier the average age, average age of the Ukrainian military is in the mid 40s. Do they have people in their 50s and 60s as grunts on the ground with firepower in their hands, Colonel? I'm told that they will take almost anyone who can hold a rifle and pull the trigger. That's figurative. But, you know, with the high tech that's out there, you could probably use people up to a fairly old age to run some of the things. But at the same time, you're looking at, for example, I listened to the, as I told you, the Ramstein conference, and I'm listening to these people talk about sending air defense capability. Well, Russia has air superiority right now. So they would have to flood that country with not just the air defense capability, state-of-the-art stuff, and the

competent technicians to maintain and run it, and those people who would actually use it, whether it's high-tech to the point where it goes around on its own, or whether it's just sort of medium tech and you have to have lots of people around to make it function properly, like patriots, for example, it doesn't matter because Russia's going to take them out. They have air superiority. You cannot beat that with just soldiers on the ground and missiles to shoot them down. Was Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Great Britain quite ill-advised, I'm being charitable in my words, to suggest that the British Air Force would enforce a no-fly zone over Kiev? Well, the first thing I would say about that, even if they were capable of it,

and I have a lot of respect for the Royal Air Force, but even if they were capable of it, is that that would be an act granting Putin the right to consider it NATO entering the war. And as he indicated, he's not ready to escalate the war, but if NATO were to do that, he'll match them in escalation. Switching over before we finish, Colonel, to the horrible things that have happened in Gaza, I'll just highlight three of them. We have videos of a Palestinian man stripped to his underwear, strapped to a chair and being tortured, beaten with sticks and with an electric prod by an Israeli soldier with Israeli civilians watching and filming. We have video of Palestinian ambulance drivers rushing to pick up Palestinians who've been shot in the street, waving to the IDF as if, you know, we're ambulance

drivers, let us be. The IDF motions them on. As soon as they get out of the ambulance to pick up the injured people, they themselves are blown away. And we have this character, Itamar Ben-Gavir, who's in Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet, who's the head of Israeli national security, roughly the head of the FBI. So could you imagine Chris Wray saying what I'm now going to tell you Mr. Ben-Gavir said. Palestinian women and children who get too close to the Israeli-Gaza border should have a bullet in their heads, and I will instruct the Israeli police to do it. I guess we can conclude that whatever happened in the International Court of Justice and whatever international pressure is being put

on the Israelis, they have not stopped their slaughter and their genocide. You can add to that the dancing Pompeo nonsense. I think that would be a sound conclusion, and I was just going to add, I think, and this is a horrible thing for me to have to say, but I'm going to say it. I think were Mike Pompeo present at any of those scenes you just described, he would be joining in the hurrahs. Wow. Sorry to hear that, but we'll end with that, Colonel. I think you know how much we appreciate your time, and the viewers, of course, love your analysis as much as I do. Thank you, Colonel. Have a great weekend. We look forward to you next week. Thanks for having me.

Of course. You have a good weekend too. Thank you, Colonel. Sure. Wow. A great interview. It's a very strong language at the end. Coming up at four o'clock.

Yeah. Everybody's favorite Friday afternoon. Time to end the week with the boys, Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, the intelligence community, our intelligence community roundtable, four o'clock Eastern. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out.