Judging Freedom - In Ukraine - Are we looking at years of War_

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, February 27, 2023. It's a few minutes after three o'clock in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Scott Horton, my friend, but better known from antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute joins us now. Scott, it's always a pleasure. Welcome back to the show. You have teased lately that you will soon be writing what a catastrophe Ukraine has become an American involvement and it has become. Can you elaborate on that, please? Yes, sir. I gave a speech on February the 29th, 2020, called The New Cold War with Russia is All America's Fault. And then two years later, when the war began, I gave the same speech again, only I had added some things to it.

And that became the core of this book that I'm writing now. It's called Provoked. How America started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. And it's about 550 pages so far, Judge. And I got probably another 100 pages to write, and then I'm going to try to figure out how to cut it back down by 100 pages or more and try to make the thing. Well, you're writing a book, not a doorstop. That's right. Well, you know, it started out really, you know, about how they started this war, but it ended up really being everything that from H.W. Bush all the way through that America has done really to be bad sports at the end of the last Cold War and kick the Russians while they're down on the Versailles Treaty model after World War I, rather than befriend them and rebuild them and be good, honest friends to them

on the World War II model like we did with West Germany and Japan. And so they really have picked this fight. And that goes for every single one of them. H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And of course, by Joe Biden, I mean all along, Your Honor, because he was in the Senate and then vice president, of course, and is up to his eyeballs in every bit of this for 30 years. One of the more horrific things that Biden did, I mean, equally as horrific, how do you measure horror, as providing aid to the Ukrainians is the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline and blaming it on the Russians. Now, you recently had a fascinating interview, which I just listened to, with the great Cy Hirsch. Cy is, of course, the senior investigative journalist, the best known, Bob Woodward will shoot me for this, investigative journalist in the United States. He of My Lai Massacre and Watergate and Pentagon Papers and Pulitzer Prize fame.

He, a single investigative journalist who beat the billions behind mainstream media to get to the bottom of the story. What did he tell you, if anything, that's not in the piece that he wrote, which is long, but it's only 19 pages about the Biden administration's decision and internal disputes about when, how and under what circumstances to destroy the pipeline. Yeah, well, it's very interesting story. First of all, Cy Hersh blows Bob Woodward out of the water. Bob Woodward does interview access journalism with principles on the record. That's not investigative journalism like Cy Hirsch does. And this guy is-

Well, Cy is out of class by himself. That's true. He is. And you look at his scoops, even just over the last generation, starting in the W. Bush years, nevermind in the 80s and 90s and all that before 60s, 70s, Israel's nuclear program, the fake assassination attempt against H.W. Bush in Kuwait in 93, and the redirection, all the plans for war with Iran during W. Bush and all these things, the torture scandal, is absolutely the best of the best, bar none. And what he says is going on here really is that Biden was afraid that with the winter coming, the Germans might literally and figuratively get cold feet on this policy and decide that they want to try to seek peace and rapprochement and figure out how to get back in line with the Russians.

And in order to preclude that possibility, he went ahead and blew the pipeline up was essentially what he was thinking. Did Psy indicate if any of his sources told him of any policy or ideological or legal battle amongst Biden and his people? Did anybody say, you know, it's against the law to do this? You know, you're attacking an ally. You know, we have a treaty that if one of these allies is attacked, it triggers article 5 of NATO. Did they talk about those things? Do you know? No. I did not ask him about that. I plead guilty, sir. But I don't think there was any indication in the article that there was a squabble over authority or jurisdiction to do it. The question was how to do it.

How far does the president want to go? And what can we do to make that possible for him? And everybody's just clicking heels and saluting and doing what they're told all the way up and down the line is the impression. You know, you, you make a great point. First, I'm not saying this just because I'm your friend. I'm saying this because you are an extraordinary researcher and writer. But your ability to trace the path of presidential authoritarianism and American empire building, you know, going back to Ronald Reagan or maybe even before that back to the CIA deposing Mossadegh in Iran in the 1950s under Eisenhower and how it just

gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and now the last of these and I regrettably there probably will be more no one's even questioning the authority or lawfulness. Just let's go ahead and do it because this is what the boss wants to have done. Did no one consider this to be an act of war? To me and to you, I think. Sure. It's not only an act of war, it's a war crime. Sure. I mean, I don't know the specifics about how criminal it is according to the international law. I presume so. But certainly the president has no authority to involve us in action like that, especially against an allied state like Germany. And just this is one of the things that really red pilled me back in 1990, 1991 was H.W. Bush announcing, I don't care if Congress votes yes or no. I'm enforcing a UN resolution and I can go to Iraq if I want. And I knew enough about the constitution just from government school that I knew that that's not the way it's supposed to be. And he says, you know, now it's the new order. Now we go under what the baby blue flag says instead of the red, white, and blue.

And so that was one of the things that made me such an anti-government guy in the first place was seeing how exactly what you're talking about, that imperial war power that Congress has essentially ceded to the president since Truman, at least. If you're just joining us, we're speaking with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com and of the Libertarian Institute, who in recent years has highly distinguished himself as a voice of reason and morality, particularly with respect to foreign affairs. Let me play a clip for you. One of the people we have on that our audience loves to hate, but he does get a good audience and he is personally a nice guy but he's very very pro-Ukraine as Matt Van Dyke Matt runs what he says is a 501c3 called Sons of Liberty International it consists of American veterans physically present in Ukraine training the Ukrainian troops on basic principles of warfare and using American equipment and he comes to us more or less once a week from Kiev.

Here he is just three or four days ago on whether or not the conflagration between Russia and Ukraine will be a long-running stalemate. Take a listen. Well, currently it is a stalemate. The Russians have been trying to take Bakhmut for several months, but very intensely the past several weeks, they're not making too much progress. I still believe Bakhmut will eventually fall, except this massive Russian offensive that people were predicting to occur by today, the one-year anniversary of the war, has not occurred. It looks like the Russians don't have the logistics to support a massive

offensive, and the forces that they've mobilized don't seem to have the will or the capability to advance the way that the Russians would like. Really, it's become symbolic and it's unfortunate because it's a meat grinder. A lot of lives are being lost. A lot of Ukrainian lives that I believe would have been better utilized in a counteroffensive against Russia have been used to hold a city of relatively little strategic significance. What do you say? I don't have a specific problem with anything he said there. I mean, I admit to you that, I mean, I wouldn't make such a declarative statement about what the Russians are capable of in the, you know, near present term or whatever, but more or less that tracks with what I can tell. I'm really not a battlefield type expert about,

you know, who's winning what ground on the suburbs of which town and those kinds of things. But overall, it does seem to me that we're dealing with a question of sort of the unstoppable force versus the immovable object, right? The Russians have more men, more equipment, more artillery, more tanks, and all of that. On the other hand, the Ukrainians are fighting on home turf. They have much higher morale because they're fighting a defensive war and they're backed by the United States and all of our European allies and all the money and weapons that we can give them and trainers like your friend there over there, you know, helping them to perfect their tactics and all that. And look, I mean, the war is a year old now and it doesn't seem like anyone is making any real progress. And then mostly I'd like to endorse his point about, um, oh, I, I, I don't know. I don't, I'm not sure every, every word he

said in there, but I, you know, I'm not for either side winning the war. If that was any of his things, I I'm saying, you know, his point about the meat grinder to me is means, you know, is the number one point to just say, this thing should be called off immediately. I mean, it has become a meat grinder because we have supplied Ukraine with the equipment with which to resist the Russian onslaught. It would have been over 11 months ago if we had not been involved. Yeah, probably so. And in fact, look, the original plan was everyone's kind of assumed that the government in Kiev would fall, their military would be smashed. And then the plan was to back an insurgency based out of the West. That was what they all told the newspapers a year

ago. We want to replicate Afghanistan. So things have gone much better for the Western side than they thought it was going to be. Here's Jack Devine, another weekly guest that my audience really loves to hate. And I've said this to Jack's face. It doesn't trouble him. Jack has career CIA, now retired. Jack was in charge of monitoring Russian espionage in the United States and of causing American espionage in Russia. if you can imagine a life spent doing that. But this clip, he discusses the place of the, this is more in your field, I think, Scott, he discusses the place of the Ukraine-Russian war in the bigger geopolitical events of this century? You push until the Russians cease and desist. I don't believe there's peace, right? But I do think you'll reach a point where everyone's using up so much ammunition, so many soldiers have died, that you slow down the pace of war. No one wins. War could go on for a long time, but it will not go on for a long time at this level. And victory

is not about Ukraine. It's the geopolitical risk of the world today. And it's the China, Russia and their allies, the alliance against the West. If Russia fails to accomplish its goal, he will go. And that will change the geopolitical. There's a bigger thing at play here than just the current day to day fighting. And I think there's a world that's going to be unstable if we allow Putin to go unchallenged. And I think we're doing a very good job of challenging him. See, I think Jack tips the globalist's hands, although some of them have tipped their hand even more. I mean, their goal is to drive Putin from office. I don't think that's a realistic

military goal, but that's what they want to do. They have no idea who's going to replace him, no idea how tenacious his replacement might be. The former president of Russia, the one that was in there when Putin couldn't run for a third term, they since have changed the Constitution to allow him to do that. Dmitry Medvedev says we may have to march all the way to Poland and we may have to march into Poland. So Americans don't even know what they're what they're asking for. But Jack, I think, tips his hands that what they hands is what they want is to get rid of Putin. Yeah, I think that's right. And look, you know, I haven't seen that whole interview, but it seems pretty apparent from that statement there that this is the same argument you always get from the war party, which is the bad guy is a bad actor and he's acting badly.

And that's why we have to do something. And but never explaining that actually FDR was sending planes to China for months before Pearl Harbor. And, you know, H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia for 10 solid years before September 11th. And that in this case, America broke their promises and not just expanded our military alliance to their borders, but broke the promise that we wouldn't put military equipment in the new NATO nations. And in fact, they put in these dual-use missile launchers that are supposedly anti-ballistic missile launchers, but can hold Tomahawk cruise missiles. And so they're breaking the spirit of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty

and at least potentially reintroducing nuclear weapons into Europe and all these things. If you just go back with, even just for humor's sake, and read the statements of President Putin from 2005 and 2007 at the Munich conference, and in 2015 and 2018 when he debuted his new nuclear weapons and all of these things, all he says over and over again are specific and frankly understandable security concerns. America is surrounding Russia. And when the wrong guy wins the election, we overthrow him and make sure that we have enemies of Russia surrounding them, that we're militarizing, we're making Ukraine a de facto member of NATO through the normalization

of their military, the interoperability, as they call it, all of these things. People accuse Putin all the time. They say, oh, he wants to recreate the Soviet empire. He said one time that it was too bad it fell, or all these things. But that was never his case for war whatsoever. His case always was, one, the de facto NATO status for Ukraine, and two, the war in the Donbass and the failure of the Kiev government under American keeping to implement the means to which our allies signed. You have your finger right on the pulse of this, Scott. I mean, if Joe Biden were here and I were to say, don't worry, he's not coming on the show. Mr. President, what is your goal? I don't think he could answer the question. His military goal.

If his goal is to eliminate Russian troops from eastern Ukraine and Crimea, that is not a militarily achievable goal without nuclear weapons and an utter destruction of society there. If his goal is to remove Putin from office, that's not a militarily achievable goal. I mean, what do you say to people, particularly young people, because I get asked this question a lot, what can they do? The Democrats are as bad as the Republicans. You and I have known this for years, and we've said it publicly thousands of times. The big government party is just one party. They all want to kill, and they all want to destroy. In this particular case, even our friends, the libertarians in Congress have

been silent about Nord Stream. Even the people on the left who are notoriously anti-war, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, they've been silent. How do you stir the pot on this to make the Congress realize that the American public simply will not tolerate much more killing in the name of geopolitical strategy? Yeah. Well, I mean, I wish I had a actual answer of something that would, you know, you know, step one, step two. A practical answer. Yeah. Practical answer. Yeah. I mean, the real thing is, you know, step one, step two. And a practical answer. Yeah, practical answer. Yeah. I mean, the real thing is, you know, for people who lean left, attack the left from the left and hold your, you know, liberal and progressive supposed representatives accountable that you can't let these right wing MAGA guys outflank us on peace. We're the good guys on war and all those things invoke all the right shibboleths that

left-wingers need to understand and need to hear in order to sign up and then for the right attack the right from the right and look at what a huge opportunity we have here in fact judge did you see this let me quote i got it right here man the this donald trump said in this statement the other day he said we need to clean house of all the warmongers and America last globalists and the deep state, the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Industrial Complex. That was a former Republican president of the United States that said that. So one that ought to be music to any libertarian or any left or progressives here. Wow. He really that's better than any Eisenhower quote. I mean, man, that is something else. Right.

And then, too, for the MAGA guys, are you going to tolerate these country club Republicans, these rhinos and these centrists and these John McCain corpses walking around like Mitch McConnell dragging us into nuclear war. This guy, Michael McCaul in Texas, who almost daily attacks Joe Biden for not doing enough. Or are you going to get with Donald Trump who says enough of the globalists, enough of the interventionists, enough with the warmongers. And I know he wasn't a perfect president. There are sections in my book all about the people he killed. It's true. But those are also the people who ruined him. And he clearly has a grudge. And he's right. Just as he was right since 2013 that we ought to get out of Afghanistan.

He really does have good instincts. And that we should get the hell out of NATO. They certainly are wealthy and strong enough to defend themselves. Right. And so if Donald Trump can say that, then no right winger has to believe in the national. Now I know how to raise your blood pressure in a good way. All I have to do is say what's good about Donald Trump and you get going. And I have something to say. It's incredible because I'm not a fan. I'm not a supporter, but I am absolutely a supporter of

of what he's doing to make it OK for conservatives to stop believing in this George W. Bush foreign policy anymore. We don't need it. Scott Horton, always a pleasure. You're always welcome here, my friend. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, Judge. Judge Napolitano, more as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.