Judging Freedom - Expectations for Ukraine Victory Vanishing in the West w/Matthew Hoh

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Expectations for Ukraine Victory Vanishing in the West w/Matthew HohSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, August 8, 2023. Matt Ho, one of our regular military contributors, joins us now. Matt, it's always

a pleasure, and thank you for joining. In retrospect, do you think maybe it was a mistake on the part of President Putin to have engaged in such incrementalism in the manner in which he fought the war rather or initiated the war rather than going in full blast and just taking control of the territory to which he believes Russia has a rightful claim? First, thanks for having me back on, Judge. It's good to see you. Sure. I'm on record as saying I oppose the Russian invasion. I believe that they should have tried other options, other means, pursued diplomatic, economic actions. But the idea of launching a war, an invasion, a war of aggression is to me something, a line that I just won't cross because of my own involvement in our wars of aggression. So I try and keep that principle. However, I don't know if Russia had, trying to look at this objectively then though.

Right. Look at it objectively as a person of great military experience. I don't know if Russia had the wherewithal to have subjugated Ukraine entirely in February 22, March 22. I don't know if they had the resources, the logistics, the combat capability, et cetera, to have done a World War II style subjugation of Kyiv and into Western Ukraine. I think if they had... Did they have the wherewithal to capture the Donbass, the areas that Putin has articulated are ethnically, historically, culturally, and linguistically, in his view, Russian? Yes, and they've done. I think they've achieved most of their limited territorial objectives. So I think his incrementalism has been smart because he has

achieved his goals. I also think what was smart too was that even though he launched this invasion, it was also coupled with diplomatic efforts. So when the invasion happens in February 22, it forces the Ukrainians to the negotiating table. This is something that's well documented. It was discussed at the time, reported on by Reuters, the BBC, Financial Times. It's completely ignored now. It's basically been ripped out of our history books that these negotiations took place. But they did. And the Russians and the Ukrainians got to a point where they had a draft agreement,

a 15-point draft agreement in March via their talks that first began in Belarus and then continued in Istanbul. What year is this, Matt? This is in 22. This is not even 18 months ago, Judge. So I think what he did and what showed a certain degree of finesse and a certain degree of smart that in the US and in the West, we have not been willing to apply to Vladimir Putin and the Russians. And this is, of course, one of the

reasons why the US, the West and NATO's efforts in Ukraine have fallen so short is because we haven't had proper respect for an adversary. It doesn't mean you have to like them. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them. It doesn't mean that you're cheerleading for them or some type of apologies for them. It means that you understand and respect them. You're not just using strategic empathy, but you're also putting, you're also doing what literally every military guru, for lack of a better term, throughout the centuries has said to do. It's one of the first things that you're taught as a young Marine or Army officer is to

put yourself in the shoes of the enemy. So if you build a defense, the first thing you're taught as a young Marine or army officer is to put yourself in the shoes of the enemy. So if you build a defense, the first thing you're supposed to do is go out and look at your position from the perspective of the enemy. How would you attack your own position, right? I mean, and this is something that has been one of the harbingers, why it was predictable that the Ukrainian counteroffense was going to fail, why the NATO efforts, the U.S. efforts in Ukraine were going to fail, why the economic sanctions were not going to force a Russian collapse. Because the Americans, the Europeans just simply refuse to respectfully apply any type of wisdom, intelligence or or evidence-based thought process to their actions in Ukraine. You are being candid, intellectually honest, and charitable. Why do I say charitable? Because your colleagues, former intelligence and former military who come on the show,

say it's because the CIA told Joe Biden what they thought he wanted to hear, rather than the facts and reality that agents on the ground were delivering up to their bosses. So have those who made the decisions in Intel, in the Pentagon, in the West Wing, and in the Oval Office been deluded by the political process through which intelligence information goes? Russia's weak. Ukraine is strong. This thing isn't going to last long. We'll look like heroes. I think it's a mixture of both, a mixture of both. Look, when I resigned from Afghanistan in 2000, my position with the State Department of Afghanistan in 2009, I had to go and I had to be interviewed by the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, which at that

point was led by Chuck Hagel and David Boren, who were both had been previous chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee. And we're now at universities, Hagel at Georgetown, Boren at Oklahoma. Both moderate senators, one a moderate Democrat, the other a moderate Republican. Correct. And what they said to me, why they brought me in, why I had to give this testimony, was they said, you know what, we're looking at what you're saying about Afghanistan. We're hearing what all these captains and majors and colonels who are coming through our universities are saying about this war. And we're seeing that it just simply does not match up with what's going on the president's desk. And I think that's been a case for generations now.

Of course, I'm with the Eisenhower Media Network,, I pray to God to help this country if one day a man sits in this chair who doesn't understand the military like I do. And what he's talking about is not the need to be a strategic thinker, not to have military experience, not to understand logistics, but to understand that the generals and admirals always lie. And Kennedy understood that as well. JFK understood that as well. And that's the case here. The question is, is that if that's the case and Joe Biden is not receiving the information that he needs to make sane and smart and honest decisions, well, Biden's been doing this for a very long time. He has to know they're lying to him. And I've had a lot of experience on the Hill.

And I can tell you that one time I was in with the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. And he said to me and my colleagues, I know the generals come in here and lie to us all the time, but there's nothing we can do about it. And you hear about this over and over and over again from members of Congress who don't believe in the war policies of the United States. They don't believe in the American wars, whether they're direct wars or they're proxy wars, but they're too afraid to say anything otherwise. They're too afraid to go against the grain. They need to go along and get along. All right. So they teach young Marine and Army officers, young second lieutenants, to look at their own defenses from the perspective of the enemy. Do they teach them to tell the truth?

Do they teach them that it's morally reprehensible to lie to a military superior or to a civilian commander? Yeah, you have this issue. You have this reality that the United States military has a culture of lying. And this is not Matt Ho who is saying this. This is coming from research and studies put out by institutions like West Point and the Army War College, which have said that explicitly. The United States military has a culture of lying. It's baked into the promotion process. Even in private, I don't mean the rank of private, even in a private conversation with the President of the United States in the Oval Office,

and the lie will be to make him feel good, to make him look good, to reinforce his preconceived notions or to make the speaker and his branch look good. I think it gets interconnected, right? So the benefits to the individual, the benefits to the institution, the benefits to the man in the Oval Office, et cetera, the political party in charge, they're all interconnected and they all feed off of each other. And then, of course, as we talked about last time I was on your show, the military industrial conflicts, what's the benefit to that general or admiral when they retire? Are they going to be a yes man? Are they going to be a sycophant? Are they going

to get onto that board of directors at Lockheed or Raytheon and then start to make really good money. And the really insidious gross thing about this judge is that when you talk to some of these people about this, they feel like that's what's owed them. They feel they deserve that big money, right? They feel it's their turn. I put, you know, this idea of somehow military service as service is just such a fake and fraudulent concept as it's carried out by the senior leadership within the Pentagon. And I would imagine that at the faculty at West Point, we're listening to you now and then commenting privately on what you were saying. They'd all agree. They would agree. They would agree. And again, you can go and it's not just West Point, but the Army War College and other institutions have noted this, have put out papers about the willingness, the way that lying, the mendacity

is the foundation for how the U.S. military operates. And whether this is about whether a weapons system is going to work, right, whether the F-35 that's going to cost almost $2 trillion when all is said and done is ever actually going to be able to fly a mission, right, whether or not the new $15 billion aircraft carriers will ever be able to launch a plane, whether it's weapons purchases, whether it's about how well the wars are going, whether or not these wars are continuing to be worth fighting, whether there's any chance or whether it's whether it's the military evaluation of how the war is going to turn out. I mean, remember this. They're blaming the document release only in this one kid, Jack Teixeira, the National Guardsman from Massachusetts. There were probably others involved, senior to him, but whatever. The documents made it unambiguously clear that the Pentagon was of

the view that Ukraine would have no air defenses by June and couldn't survive much longer. That document was prepared in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Defense is a former member of the board of Raytheon, and before that, retired as a four-star general. You get the picture, you know what I'm talking about. Two weeks before the document came out, and after he saw the document, he testified under oath to Senator Roger Wicker, interrogating him on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or Armed Services Committee, I think it was, and said Ukraine is going to win. That should be prosecuted. That's lying under oath. That's misleading Congress, and that's doing so in an environment where as a result of those lies, human beings, Russian boys and Ukrainian boys, will die.

Right. Right. You've seen that. how this Ukrainian offensive, which was supposed to be the end of Russia's occupation of Ukraine, is shown to be exactly what many of us thought it was going to be, just a great sacrifice of life for nothing more than for people to espouse talking points. But again, this is nothing new. Our friend Dan Ellsberg, who we lost a couple of months ago, the great Dan Ellsberg, who we lost a couple of months ago, you know, the great Dan Ellsberg, you know, he talks about he always talked about being on that airplane with Robert McNamara. And Ellsberg had spent all this time in Vietnam and he's on this plane briefing Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense at the time, and just saying how this war is futile. This war cannot be won, how badly it's going. And McNamara saying in agreement,

understanding, right, cognitively getting that. And then as soon as he steps off the plane, the reporters are all there. The war is going well. Progress is at hand. We're winning. I mean, this is the story we saw all throughout our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of your colleagues on this show, career CIA Phil Giraldi, who will be on with us tomorrow, famously told George W. Bush in the Oval Office, Saddam Hussein does not have any weapons of mass destruction. That is an absolute truth. George W. Bush threw him out and two days later announced to the country that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I'm assuming somebody else spoke to President Bush who was not as honest as Phil Giraldi and the president was basing what he believed to be true on that lie. Correct, correct. I mean, and that's the history of the Iraq war, is a war that was

just completely built upon a sandcastle of a lie. The house of cards of that war was the first layer was the lies that created it and then enabled it and then sustained it. And the same with the war in Afghanistan as well, particularly once you get into the surge where you have President Obama putting in a quarter million man army, 100,000 U.S. troops, 40,000 NATO the Washington Post made a big deal about my resignation, I was a front page above the fold, like 3000 word piece on me. I said to the reporter, I said to Karen DeYoung, who wrote the story, why did you write this story? And she said, because everyone I talked to at the Pentagon, at the CIA, at the State Department, the NSC, et cetera, they all agreed with you. They all agreed that the war could not be won, but they all go along with it, right? They all go along with it because it's best for them. And in his current iteration, what you see is you see thousands upon thousands of young Ukrainians and their families shattered for a lie, for a lie, basically. You and I have both publicly referred to the powers that be in Congress as the War Party, which is about 95% of all members of both houses of Congress. Does the War Party understand that the military, to which they give $860 billion a year that they've extracted from

us is lying to them? I think they do. I think they do. And for the most part, they don't care because it's good politics for them, right? They believe that particularly if you can wrap yourself in the bloody flag, right, as an allusion back to the post-Civil War period. But I think that's the case. I think that you have either a vapid embrace of the military where they don't want to know. They just want the political good things that come from standing on a dais or on a stage with a bunch of men and women in uniform. They like that image. And that's all that matters to them. But then, too, you take into the military industrial complex aspects of it.

Right. And the money that they're bringing in, the good things that being a faithful enabler, a faithful supporter, a faithful benefactor of the military industrial complex can bring to a politician. So absolutely, I think most of them have very little interest in the truth. They're only concerned about what is best for them and for their immediate political futures. Why do you think that Washington has not pushed for any negotiation. Why is the Biden administration afraid to say to Putin and Zelensky, send your emissaries to meet Tony Blinken in Geneva and let's have a ceasefire while they talk? Right. Why hasn't Joe Biden, the most powerful man in the world, gotten on a plane and banged Putin and Zelensky's heads together? Correct. Isn't that, isn't that what we elected this man for?

Instead he mumbles and bumbles and fumbles. Right. Putin has lost. Russia has lost. Putin can't win. It's already lost. Right. I think it's because for the main, mainly it's domestic political politics. I think they're so afraid of being called weak, of being being attacked by the Republicans as not being strong enough. I think there's a lot of again goes back to the military industrial complex. There's the money involved. There's the legally a mania.

It goes back to JFK's JFK's American University speech in June of 63. For which he arguably was murdered. Right. Right. And in that speech, to paraphrase, he says how the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war. Right. And certainly if you turn on the television, turn on Netflix,

there aren't many peace TV shows. There aren't that many peace movies out there. Right. And so there is that aspect. It's a very real aspect of this, that war, they think war is good politics. Now, the reality, and this shows one of the fundamental inanities of our political system, is that almost every war that the U.S. gets into, sure, high popular public opinion, high popular support prior to or the beginning of the war, but within a year or two, that fades.

And we're seeing that where CNN last week had a poll, a very important poll that shows that majority of Americans no longer favor giving aid to Ukraine. Joe Biden and Mrs. Pelosi took care of that. You know this. He has a blank check for $113 billion. We don't even know how much of it he spent because the Pentagon keeps finding billion dollar accounting errors somewhere between 45 and 68, but he's still got another 40 or 50 billion to spend. That's plenty to spend between now and election day 2024. Well, they are running out, supposedly. And the thought was that they would have already come back to ask for more money. But that's becoming politically difficult for them. You know, 55% of Americans say they do not want to see

any more aid going to Ukraine. 51% have said, we've done enough for Ukraine already. I mean, and that's a drop of about 15 percentage points in the last 18 months. Basically, that support for the Ukraine war is solely based on partisanship. It's solely based on team blue preference. My guy in the White House is telling me this. I'm going to follow it. I have no doubt if it was a Republican in the White House prolonging this proxy war, the team red would be the same way.

But so you don't even have support for a war based upon any fundamental appreciation of the war, any type of idea that this is a just war. That whole phrase is a disgusting thing anyway. However, you have it based upon partisanship. What is best? What does my team say I should support? And that's what you see in the polling right now. Support. What would members of Congress do if you were to testify before them, along with Doug McGregor and Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern and Phil Giraldi, similar to what you're saying now? I'm sure they would ask us how we got in there. And then the other thing would be, as we were sort of saying before, Judge, they look at us, and I've had this experience. I mean, I used to be on the Hill all the time saying these sorts of things about the war in Afghanistan, the war in Libya, the war in Syria. And you would either get an acceptance of it,

an appreciation of it, a nodding and an agreement saying, I understand, and then not doing anything about it or just saying the opposite. Or you would get them looking at us like we had three heads, right? As if we were somehow space aliens who were speaking gibberish that they couldn't understand. This is nothing they'd ever heard before. This is complete nonsense. It's just, you know, gobbledygook to them because they simply want only what's best for their short-term political interests. And until that changes, until the White House says, or Leader McConnell says, you can change on this, they won't do it. I mean, that's how that's how tightly controlled this war policy is. It all goes back to domestic political politics. Matt, how always a pleasure, my dear friend, had a lot of other things to talk to you about,

but we'll do it. We'll do it the next time. You've just presented a brilliant and powerful argument on intellectual honesty and the way the government really works. And I know that my audience deeply and profoundly appreciates it as much as I do. We'll see you again soon. Thanks, Judge. Okay, my friends. Judge Napolitano, more as we get it, like and subscribe. If you like what you saw. Tell a friend, tell many friends, tell your relatives. Our goal is 250,000 subscriptions by Christmas. We're up to 190 or close to it already. Phil Giraldi on all of this tomorrow. Scott Ritter before the week is out. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. We'll see you next time.