Judging Freedom - James (Jim) Webb : Why Should US Troops be Mercenaries for Israel?

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

James (Jim) Webb : Why Should US Troops be Mercenaries for Israel?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for

freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Thursday, April 2nd, 226. My guest today for the first. and not the last time on the show is James Webb, Jimmy Webb, former rifleman and sergeant in the Marine Corps, who speaks his mind in a way that I think everyone watching us now will find eye-opening and pleasing. Jimmy, welcome here. It's a pleasure to have you here. You know that your father and I were friends many years ago back in the Reagan administration, and I have continued to be a fan of his and an admirer of your family. You are a former rifleman and sergeant in the Marine Corps.

Your father was a Marine. He was also, of course, the Secretary of the Navy, which includes the Marines. Your grandfather was a Marine. It would be safe to say that Marine Corps runs in your family. I think that's a completely accurate description, Judge, and it's great to see you again. Great to join you. I thank you profusely for all the kind words. But yeah, my family has served this country for the entire duration that we have been here.

And on my father's side, that runs back to the French and Indian War. My mother's family came here in the early 1900s and immediately started to pick up the line on that with my grandfather being on Iwo Jima in World War II as a Marine. My mother was a army nurse in Vietnam. And my aunts and uncles all served. And we're proud to do it. We love this country. You said on your father's side, the French and Indian War, not your father himself. I have often been accused and been guilty of misestimating your father's age because he's got that baby face.

You fought in Iraq. Correct. Was it from your perspective today in 2026? Was it a just cause? for American troops to cause such a death and horror there, or were we just doing the bidding of another country? So, Judge, this is a very emotional and sensitive question to a lot of veterans, including myself.

The first part of it is, was it a just cause in retrospect or were we doing the bidding of another country? I do not think that there is a justification out there that has ever been laid out that our engagement in Iraq has made America safe for. has made the region in which Iraq is in any more stable. I mean, we're back at war there again right now. We've been at war since before we went into Iraq and since we, quote, unquote, left Iraq.

You know, and the big thing with going to war in whatever region it is is having a consensus of the people and going through the legislative and legal process to get it done to make sure that we adhere to our constitution. and also, you know, to have the buy-in of the American people and the people who are going to go out there and do this, the soldiers on the ground who are going to pay potentially with their own lives and have an experience, which sticks with them for the rest of their lives, as we've seen with many coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan. I can see your emotion, and I'm going to dive into this a little bit. If you don't want to answer any of these questions, tell me, although knowing you and your family,

I think you'll answer everything that I give you. Are your views about the Iraq war, about the concept of killing people for no discernible benefit to the American public, different today than they were when you were a Marine rifleman? So my personal views remain about the same. I went because my country needed me, and it is a family tradition. I am proud to be a Marine. It is the definitive experience of my life. I can't speak for 100% percent. of the men and women who served in Iraq, but I do know the opinion of my peers. And we are still trying to figure out exactly what that all meant, because we went into an environment where we were told right out of the gate that we would be agreed as liberators, and that sounds very familiar in today's context. And we simply were not. We ran into a headlong insurgency that became a

proving ground for a lot of terrorist groups around the world. But the most of the fighting that we did, even where I was at, which was in Ramadi Iraq at the height of the conflict there in 2006 and into 2007, most of the fighting was against locals who over time you begin to empathize with. Maybe not their particular way of doing things on the day to day or the systems of government that they choose. However, we were in their neighborhood trying to change the way that they live at the behest of our government with a rifle. And if that happened in my neighborhood today, I would do the exact same thing.

So it's one of these things we've been searching for. And one of the biggest injuries coming out of Iraq with service members is moral injury. And it's the inability to justify to yourself the actions which you and your peers took on the ground. So that's a long way of saying, Judge. No, not really. There's a lot of... It was not a moral war then. It's not a moral war from the perspective of history, even though we know a lot more about it now than we did then.

A million human beings died. Five thousand of them were Americans, several trillion dollars gone, some literally gone, missing, but that's the debt that was added to the debt of the federal government of the United States. And nothing to claim for it. Can you spread democracy with the end of a gun? Can you force people to change their culture, their lives, and their government? Because you think your government is better than theirs? I don't mean you personally.

I mean the federal government, the government of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in that era? No, not at all. I mean, if you look throughout history, democratic societies have emerged out of internal revolution, out of the desire to have self-governance. This is principally an enlightenment ideal. And it comes from Western Europe in various different directions. When you take a look at exporting a particular ideology at the barrel of a gun, I can think of no better example than Leon Trotsky. It is a page out of the communist handbook for a permanent revolution.

And that's a really confusing thing for me, from my philosophical standpoint, Judge, just because we have preached around the world where we export our ideals. and our ideals foment changed from within societies. When you take a look at how the communists operated, they operated in a way of or a system of permanent revolution, which Trotsky in particular thought should come from the barrel of a gun where you export violence in order to foment change that benefits your system, not necessarily theirs. Wow.

Would you discourage your children from joining the Marine Corps today, notwithstanding the extraordinary and it appears continuous history of your family's service to the country through the military? I would. I said on Tucker Carlson's show exactly that. It is a sentiment that I am very firm on. I know a lot of people who are in the same situation I am. military service in this country has largely become generational. It's almost a caste system at this point. And you have the same people going over and over again because they believe in the ideals of this country and that the system in which inserts us into these environments is just and has been effectively declared constitutional in the process. However, what we're looking at particularly today with Iran, and at any point, I mean, down the road, I'm saying any point, down the road this could change. But this is not a war that has been demonstrated by any facet of government or any piece of logic to be in the American interest.

And quite frankly, the administration with Marco Rubio, the Speaker of the House, they have said that the reason we're there is because of Israel, because of another country. And this reduces the American fighting men and women, effectively, in my opinion, some mercenaries because we are we are. are going there to execute the policies and the furtherance of another system of another country. And we've never done that before explicitly. And I will not let my kids do that. No. How do your friends and colleagues still in the Marine Corps feel about being mercenaries for the Netanyahu government? I haven't asked him that question explicitly, Judge. It's very sensitive. You know, it's when I have friends who are going into theater, the last thing you want to talk about, you know, are the higher level ideals. But I can tell you that morale is not particularly high.

There's a lot of confusion about what we're doing. And, you know, while my conversations with people are, can be considered somewhat anecdotal, right? You can take a look at the USS Gerald Ford. They had incidents where they were clogging their own toilets on the way overseas. and then there was a laundry fire apparently when they got in theater and they're now not there anymore. That is as clear of an indicator as low morale as I can get. And I think it's fairly ubiquitous. People want to stand up and serve this country.

They want to fight for America. And when you ask them to lay down their lives, you can't have a mindset where they're going to go do this because it's their job. It's no, no job on earth requires you to sacrifice your life just because somebody else tells you, you know, you're supposed to do that for a paycheck. And if you're telling them to do it for a paycheck, you're telling them they're a mercenary. Right, right, right. The, we don't really discuss politics per se on this show. Of course, we do talk about the law and about and about morality. But in your view, as the president articulated a cause for war against Iran?

Not a clear one, Judge. Not at all. He didn't go to Congress. He didn't come to the American people. His speech last night seems to have zeroed in kind of sort of, but not really, on the issue of nuclear weapons, which it should be noted were apparently destroyed last June. in what could be very easily summed up is another unconstitutional action by the country. But the objectives have not been laid out. There is absolutely no imperative strategically that has been explained for our actions in Iran. There's no explanation for how this furthers our relationships around the world, how it makes us more effective economically, more effective diplomatically, or really what the end state is.

Right. I don't think the president, and you may know, I've known him personally for 40 years and had many, many encounters with him, good encounters, personal encounters, where he sought my advice in his first term. But the president, in my view, has yet to articulate a militarily achievable goal. I mean, for example, what business is it of ours that the country of Iran is run by a deeply religious belief people who seem to be more interested in their religion than they do in Jeffersonian democracy. That's not a basis for invading a country. Them having ballistic missiles, when they have Israel that wants to destroy them, of course they're entitled to ballistic missiles. They signed the nonproliferation treaty, so they're entitled to uranium for civilian purposes. They permitted the UN and

American inspectors to inspect their enrichment. That's not a basis for invading them. I don't know what the basis is. The latest is while they closed the Strait of Hormuz. Well, the Strait of Hormuz was open before you attacked them.

You want a war. Absolutely. Do the troops think, as I just articulated, in summary fashion. So it's, I believe a lot of that sentiment is shared, Judge. And once again, I can't speak for every single person out there.

Of course not. Of course not. But I can say within the communities that I run in, no one understands what we're doing. In particular, the straight of whore moves is a bit of a punchline. Like, as you said, it was open. We created this problem. It was probably the most probable course of action that the Iranians were going to take as an economic lever to protect their institutions and protect their government in what is very clearly an existential war for Iran. I mean, you can't start off the war by decapitating the top of society and claim to make it about anything other than that, about regime change.

And we've stayed away from that, I believe, as rhetoric in the government, because it's one of the things that Donald Trump ran. on. It was one of the things that caused me and my peers to vote for him. We don't want to see any more wars in the Middle East. And when he said he is the solution for this and he's going to bring people home, everybody believed him and supported him like unhesitatingly based on that fact. Right, right, right. So what do you think will be the rationale behind boots on the ground? something he also promised he would never do. There are 5,000 of your former colleagues there. Right. There are at least 5,000 from the 82nd Airborne. There's no 25 or 30, up to 50,000 that are stationed there. They're not all combat people. But even if you reduce it to the 10,000

that have arrived in the past two weeks, combat and support, what are they going to do? Not much, Judge. You know, honestly, this gives me a little bit of hope because, you know, that's, that's a drop in the bucket in terms of manpower. You can't operate at a large scale with troop of, with those kinds of troop numbers. If you go back to the Gulf War, we had some 700,000 people on the deck before the invasion. We had 150,000 on the deck before we went into Iraq. And that was to have enough manpower in place to cover any number of contingencies. If we do an operation to open the Straits of Poor Moose, which once again, you know, two battalions of Marines is not going to be able to do a whole heck of a lot on the ground. My unit was a battalion, a reinforced battalion in Iraq, and we covered a box of only a couple of square miles in a city, and we weren't facing any kind of conventional threat at all.

This was a counterinsurgency operation. So when you're looking at opening a straits of poor moves, it also is indicative of a lack of strategy because we caused the problem. and now our forces are postured in a reactive sense where they're trying to fix a problem that we caused or that the Iranians are forcing upon us, which means the Iranians have the initiative in that regard. And that's not a good place to be. That's not a place that the U.S. military has consistently been in a very, very, very long time. You probably have to go back to Korea to see an instance where we simply did not have the initiative against our opponents or our adversary. The secondary piece of where this might go, and I don't like to make predictions, I like to say if this, then what, and try to analyze it. There was a good report in the Washington Post the other day about a potential raid into Iran to pull out some of the nuclear dust that Donald Trump has been talking about.

How risky would that be? Off the chart. off the chart it does not seem it seems almost like fantasy land you know we have some of the most capable guys on earth but when you're talking about dropping thousands of people into a static position way into the interior of this country that is quite possibly the absolute worst thing you can do with our military we have we still have the greatest maneuver force in the world and where we run into problems in both iraq and afghanistan is not when we're initially going in it's when we stop and become a target. And this time around, it would be up against an opponent that has considerable

ballistic and drone capabilities that we still haven't sussed out as part of our doctrine. Let me stop for just a minute and say, you are a wonderful young man, extremely thoughtful and intellectually honest and personally courageous, and I commend you for it. We're definitely going to want to have you back on. I want you to comment to this, General Keith Kellogg, he's all in favor of killing other people. But here's what he said yesterday. Take the islands. It's not hard to do.

Watch this. Cut number 26. And President Trump had the guts to go do something about Iran. Nobody else has been able to do that before. I mean, we talked about it during Trump One, and we never were able to pull the trigger on. He has done that. He's sort of like the alpha male of all world leaders. Give him credit for doing that.

And I would take control those islands. You can do it. That is not a hard thing to do. Well, I don't know what he's a four star. I don't know what his personal experiences, but wouldn't it be insane to drop troops onto those islands, as you've just articulated? Absolutely. You run into two problems right out of the gate. Everybody's talked about Carg Island.

It's the smaller of the two. But once again, even if you get troops. on the deck. You're talking about having to occupy and hold a piece of terrain that when you do that, you're going to be a giant target the entire time. And if there's an assumption that the Iranians won't use massed fires on that island in order to protect their oil infrastructure, I think that decision making would be very unwise because you are assuming, you're making a big assumption, just like they assumed that the entire regime would topple when they took out the Ayatollah, that they're going to try to keep their infrastructure intact and potentially trade

their control of the country for that. Infrastructure can be rebuilt. The other island that is of somewhat large prominence in the discussion here is Kesham in the middle. Now, you run into a big force posturing problem right out of the gate because it's 600 square miles. And you have two battalions of Marines, which contain a total of right around 2,000 infantrymen. And then they're supporting elements.

And even if you top that off with a brigade from the 82nd Airborne, then you know, you're, you still don't have the manpower to really control that space. And you go static once again very quickly. And things such as logistics, casualty evacuation, the whole gamut has to be, has to be executed under fire. And if you're looking at the different islands and how you would do this, it's going to be primarily by air. and historically supplying a military in the field exclusively by air has not gone well. Point one, Dnbn Fu, point two, Stalingrad. And you can go down the list.

It's not the preferable means of doing it. Right. I want to play another clip for you and then let you go. We have a lot of great minds on this show. I'm privileged to have those great minds. You'll join them. But one of the greatest is Professor John Meersheimer. This 90-second clip we're going to play has been viewed by more than a million people since we first ran it since he first said it two days ago.

He's intellectually honest and personally courageous like you. He's a West Point graduate. He teaches at the University of Chicago, one of the most demanding academic institutions in the United States. He's brilliant, gifted, and fearless. and what he says at the end opens up your eyes. Chris. We didn't even make any attempt to argue that the Iranians had done something militarily to precipitate our attack on Iran. There's no provocation here.

We just decided we were going to go out and we were going to whack the Iranians, both last June and again this time. Furthermore, both the Israelis and the Americans are running around the world assassinating leaders. This was not something that the United States engaged in in large part, or certainly in an overt way in the past. And here we are. And furthermore, there's the Gaza genocide, right? The Israelis, here's an apartheid state executing a genocide in Gaza, and we're complicitous in that genocide. But if there were Nuremberg trials, right, where the Israelis and the Americans were brought before the court, President Trump, along with President Netanyahu, and many of their advisors would be hanged, right? This is a genocide.

Is it not? It is a genocide. What did we do in 1945 with those Germans who executed a genocide in Europe and who were not only accused of executing a genocide, But those German leaders were accused of launching a war of aggression. There's remarkable resemblance to what we and the Israelis have now twice done against Iran. That phrase again, war of aggression. Your thoughts on what Professor Mearsheimer just said. Well, Professor Mearsheimer is one of the brightest minds out there on this subject,

and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. I think he nails it very much on the head. And what has been most troubling to me and something that we should fix very, very soon, as soon as possible, by disengaging us from this war, are the methodologies by which he is describing? This is antithetical to the way that America has conducted combat operations.

It overturns nearly 400 years, of precedent in history with the Western style of war going back to the Treaty of Westphalia, talking about the assassination of the Ayatollah right out of the gate, in the middle of negotiations. And the challenge we now have with the entire construct of how we conduct business overseas is trying to find a way to redeem our credibility as negotiators and as people who are diplomatic in their nature. This is undoubtedly a war of aggression and a war of choice. on a country like he says posed no stated threat to the United States of America. Are they a regional nuisance and a regional adversary? Yes, but they have absolutely no force

projecting capabilities. And when you're deciding to go after a country and starting by taking down their leadership one by one over a regional nuisance that might be a threat to your interests, on behalf of that interest, by the way, which is a very, which is a real issue, is Israel, you put yourself in a box globally. Everybody's watching. They watched how we backed up the Israelis in Gaza, and that continues to this day, by the way, where there are some 70,000 dead. And we can have all kinds of rhetoric inside the United States that makes us feel better about it. They're killing Hamas, if you want to say that. But the rest of the world sees it. And to drag our military into this, which is consistently the most respected institution in the United States

is a massive stain on our national honor. And I hope very soon that we can recalibrate our relationship with Israel. Let them know that we are the senior partner in this. They are our client state. They do not dictate our policy and begin to disengage and actually negotiate with Iran. Jimmy Webb, what a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. It was an absolute delight, and your audience is for a first-time person on this show, enormous and deeply appreciative. I hope you'll come back and join us again.

Judge, I would love to thank you for the opportunity. The pleasure has been all mine. Oh, sure. Remind your father, I love him, even though I thought he was your grandfather. I will. You'll get a kick out of that. All the best, Jimmy. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Sure. What a wonderful, brilliant, gifted young man, privilege to be able to interview him. Coming up at 2 o'clock this afternoon, if you're watching us live 33 minutes from now on all of this, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.