Judging Freedom - Larry Johnson: Neocon Delusions Over Ukraine.

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Larry Johnson: Neocon Delusions Over Ukraine.See 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 Monday, January 29th, 2024. Larry Johnson joins us now. Larry, always a pleasure. I do want to talk to you. Thank you. I do want to talk to you at some length about your spot on analysis, which you posted on your own site last night, Sonar 21, of the attack on the U.S. military base in Jordan or Syria, wherever it is. But before we get there, there's a few other loose ends that I want to address with you. Prior to this attack, you had written about the neocon delusions over Ukraine. Are there neocons in and around the president, in the government, who actually think that Ukraine can still win this war and expel Russia? Yes, most certainly. They're

hinging this now on, they say, oh, all Ukraine needs to do is adopt the same strategy that Russia did in last summer's defeat of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. They simply need to dig in, dig deeper, have these great fortifications and Russia will collapse. And, you know, these dummies don't even understand what happened last year. First and foremost, Ukraine does not have any kind of air power to speak of. And without fixed wing aircraft and rotary wing aircraft that can provide cover for troops on the ground who are advancing, any ground assault like we witnessed last year by the Ukrainians is going to fail. I mean, you know, you don't have to be Clausewitz to figure this out.

Sun Tzu, no, you don't have to even go to an advanced military school. This is real simple stuff. And yet, these nitwits that infest the Biden administration, and frankly, not just the Biden administration, because you've got some on the Republican side as well. They indulge these fantasies that you can take the Ukrainian troops who are an average age of 43 years of age, and anyone with basic math skills understand that if your average age is 43, you've got a lot of 50 and 60-year-old guys running around, and they have no business being on a battlefield. And just because you put them in a trench that's fortified with concrete, they're not going to be safe and secure because they don't have air protection. They don't have air defense.

So, you know, the Ukrainians can go ahead and dig in and the Russians are going to root them out. I mean, they've been going through these massive fortifications, which is one of the reasons the Russians proceed so slowly. But they've been methodically doing it for more than a year. So it's going to continue and Ukraine's going to continue to have people die. Do they have a different, do the neocons around Biden or even in the Congress have a different definition or understanding of the word win than we do when they say they can win the war? What do they mean? Yeah, I think they really are disconnected from reality on this. You wish you could put down some objective standards.

They're winning for them, it seems to imply, as long as they can shout down any opposition voice and keep any information that would be contrary to what they're spending off the airwaves, out of the mainstream media, then that's a victory. But the country is very ill-served by that. Again, it's fortunate that we've got a variety of YouTube channels like yours that provide an alternative, and people are increasingly flocking to it.

You're getting more viewers than CNN. Does Ukraine stand a chance without a massive injection of human assets, young men in the hundreds of thousands, which simply don't exist there? Yeah, that's the point I've made in one of my pieces, that let's assume that the Ukrainians could somehow scare up 40,000 new recruits a month, because that's what Russia's signing up. So let's say that they could match Russia on that. Great. Where are they going to be trained? Because every military base in Ukraine is within striking distance of Russian missiles, and the Russians have hit them. If you recall very early in the special military operation in March of 2022, the Russians hit with a hypersonic missile a base called Yavariv, which is in western Ukraine near the Polish border. And that was a de facto NATO base. It was an assembly point for foreigners that were coming in to fight, quote, as mercenaries and killed a lot of them. And I know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they were shocked when that took place because they

had no idea. They really didn't believe the Russians when they claimed to have hypersonic missiles. So put all these troops to train somewhere in Ukraine, they're didn't believe the Russians when they claimed to have hypersonic missiles. So put all these troops to train somewhere in Ukraine, they're going to be hit. So that means you got to take them overseas. And basic training, if you're going to just do rudimentary basic training, that's 13 weeks. So get your calendar out. It's okay, we got 30,000 guys at the end of February. We're going to start training them in March, April, May.

So by June 1st, they will know how to put on their uniforms. They'll know how to dig a latrine. They'll know maybe how to shoot a rifle. That's it. They don't know anything beyond that. Because if you're going to do advanced individual training, what they call AIT, boy, you know, you're looking at another two to three months. So stretch this out over time. There is no way Ukraine can reconstitute a force of any significance backed up with the capabilities, specifically air supremacy, air defense. You know, without those two things, they have zero chance of prevailing against Russia. One of the items I read over the weekend, it might've been one of yours, I'm not sure,

referred to the Zaluzhny line. Zaluzhny is the name of the general who's the military commander. Is this some mocking of him or are they actually referring to something as the Zaluzhny line? Can you imagine an Eisenhower line in World War II? Well, they are being driven out of their existing positions, and they're having to fall back, you know, 15, 20 kilometers, and they reportedly are now digging new fortifications. Now, the way this is getting reported, I think, is very misleading because they ignore the fact that over the last nine years, while the Ukrainians were invading the Donbass, they built extensive fortifications, underground bunkers, tunnels, well defended positions, which is why the Russians have

been moving very, very slowly because they're not going to launch human wave attacks against these fixed locations. So the fact that they're now feeling the need to try to reconstruct on a hurried basis, new defensive positions behind their existing lines is just further evidence that the Russians are advancing, the Russians are moving forward, and Ukraine does not have an answer. The only thing Ukraine is able to do is they are launching a lot of drone strikes against Russian positions, but the Russians still have more drones and are still at a decided advantage over Ukraine in terms of that kind of firepower. Over the weekend, switching gears, Larry, over the weekend, three American soldiers were killed at this Tower 52 place at a border. It's not even clear which country it's in because we're not sure where the border is, or maybe it's in Jordan, but it's within a few kilometers of Syria.

And 34 were wounded. You believe, I think, that depending upon the American response to this, it may very well be the beginning of an extremely dangerous and wider war. Yeah, this is really the first time that U.S. troops at these bases have been killed and wounded in such a large number. If you recall, after the assassination, when Donald Trump was president of Soleimani, the Iranian general, Iran, about six, seven days later, they launched a significant ballistic missile attack

against a U.S. base in Syria at Al-Tanf, which is actually just across the border from this Tower 22. And it caused several injuries, but didn't kill anybody. The killing of these three, and let me say, the story is that this was hit by a drone. This was no drone. We've been watching footage of the Russian-Ukraine war with drone attacks for more than two years, and we've never seen a drone that struck a target, able to kill three people and wound 34. This was something larger, bigger.

The average drone can't carry a warhead of the size that would cause this kind of damage. Now, where did it come from? The Iranians are denying that it was theirs or they had anything to do with it. You have a lot of so-called proxies, Islamic groups that are fighting U.S. presence, because the reality is the United States is illegally present in Syria. We are legally present in Jordan because Jordan gave us permission to put that base in place. And it's literally right, you know, it's within 10 kilometers of the Al-Tanf base in Syria. But the strike on it has, you know, ignited what I call the political craziness in Washington. Everybody's calling for striking Iran. We're going to strike Iran.

We can bomb Iran. And I guess they think that Iran is like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which didn't have any air power, which didn't have any effective air defense systems. And so that we can just go wherever we want and bomb whoever we want. And there's not going to be any consequences. That's damn stupid because Iran is, you know, a hundred times more capable than Iraq ever was. Iran has air defense. Iran has fixed wing aircraft. Iran has ballistic missiles. And Iran knows that we're going to be gunning for them. So we would be entering a hostile environment with the likelihood we're going to get pilots shot down. And we're going to have ships in the Persian Gulf blown up. You know, so it's one of those, if we decide to cross this Rubicon, it's not going to be the easy sweep, the victory that we imagine.

And that's what's dangerous. I don't want to get too deep into domestic American politics, but you and I were talking before we went on air that the voices calling for bombing Iran are spreading. It's not just the usual cast of characters like Senator Graham and Mrs. Nuland, but it's spreading to more mainstream Republicans and even some Democrats. I have to opine that this is highly dangerous. The president is vulnerable. The president is cognitively, mentally weak. His campaign is very weak.

Trump is very strong. These are dangerous times in which Joe Biden might kill innocent people. He's done it before in order to enhance his own domestic political standing. Well, you know, it's not just John Bolton he's out calling for, Jack Kane, of course, but you've got other retired generals like Keith Kellogg, who is, oh yeah, we need to attack Iran. Now, this borders on military malpractice because the United States does not have the force structure in the region to start and sustain a campaign. Just look how we're struggling to try to deal with the Houthis. The Houthis are a third world army. They don't have an air force.

They don't have a robust air defense system, but by God, they've shut down the Red Sea to US, UK, and Israeli traffic. Everybody else can sail through, but they've targeted them specifically, and they know which ships to target. And our answer, we're going to go, we drop some bombs in Yemen, and the Yemen's keep moving their stuff around. So we're chasing. We're a dog that's trying to chase 10 squirrels. We don't know which squirrel to chase. Are we doing all of this because the IDF has failed to degrade Hamas in Gaza,

has failed to get an appreciable number of hostages returned. And Joe Biden wants to give Netanyahu an out or another front in which to fight. Yeah, it's a combination. You know, the reason we're attacking the Houthis is because the Houthis said, hey, there's not going to be any more traffic going into Israel until Israel imposes a ceasefire in Gaza. And candidly, Yemen is one of only two countries that's actually doing something substantively to aid the Palestinian people. The other would be South Africa with the ICJ issue that we talked about last week.

So what's lacking here, Judge, is a strategy. The Israeli strategy is they want to exterminate the Palestinian people. They say they've never used those words, but they want to wipe them out of Gaza, get them elsewhere. They don't care where they go. They don't care what happens to them. They don't care if they are living or dead. They just want them out. They want them out of Gaza. They want them out of the West Bank so Israel can be restored to what they say is its biblical foundation. And in that regards,

the United States' quote, strategy is to try to maybe keep the war from spreading, but at the same time, we're giving Israel every incentive to continue to fight. And what's really disturbing is there are these persistent rumors that Israel is going to launch an operation in the north, an attack, an invasion of Lebanon to go after Hezbollah. That is insane. Because almost 20 years ago, in 2006, Hezbollah fought the Israeli army to a standstill. In fact, it was viewed as a defeat of the Israeli army. Israel was forced to pull out because they suffered too many casualties. I'll tell you this, Hezbollah is far improved, far stronger, far more capable today than it was 20 years ago. And I don't see Israel as having made similar kinds of improvements in its force capability.

So it's a recipe for disaster. Here's the two fanatics that are in the Israeli government and in the Israeli war cabinet, Ben-Gavir and Smotrich. It's an Al Jazeera report, but they're saying to, well, they're giving their advice to Prime Minister Netanyahu. Cut number, cut number two, Chris. Mr. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I'm addressing you from this stage. It's a shame to wait another 19 years to understand that Gush Katith and northern Samaria must be returned. The responsibility of brave leadership is to make courageous decisions. We are settling our land from width to length, controlling it and fighting terror always and bringing with God's help security to all of Israel.

You know what the answer is. Without settlement, there is no security. So these are the two hard right members of the war cabinet publicly trying to push Netanyahu into expanding the borders of the state of Israel from the river to the sea. It's no surprise that they want that, but is it a surprise to you that they are publicly calling for it at a very tenuous time in Netanyahu's premiership? Wisdom would dictate there are certain things you shouldn't say in public, even if that's your plan. These guys are not wise at all,

and they're flagrant in it. So what they're talking about is taking and getting rid of every Palestinian that now occupies the West Bank and get them out of there and have all Israeli settlers take that over. Similarly for Gaza. I said, I don't like to call these guys right wing. I refer just the term extremists because the definition of extremists in my book when it comes to this is that there is no regard for the Palestinians as human beings they're viewed as subhuman

they're going to be treated as refuse there is no such thing as a human rights abuse as far as they're concerned and they're frankly just snubbing the International Court of Justice, telling the UN and the rest of the world, screw you, we're going to do what we want. The problem is these guys are experienced terrorists, and they've been convicted of terrorism in Israel, believe it or not, and yet they're in the government. But they're going to put Israel into a situation that, frankly, could threaten the very existence of Israel. That's what they don't understand. What will Iran do if the United States attacks

Iran? And presumably that attack would come in the form of a missile or a bomb it's not going to be troops yeah it depends on what we hit but uh you know the a lot of uh voices in the united states advocating going after iranian oil fields for example iran has the capability with anti-ship missiles to shut down traffic oil traffic coming out of the red sea that only only those ships that Iran wants to move will move. Everything else will be stopped. Iran has ballistic missiles, a whole range of both short-range and long-range ballistic missiles that can target, for example, al-Udeid, the U.S. Air Force base that's in Qatar. I've been been there it's sort of the major transit point that was used to get in and out of iraq during the during the war in iraq there are other u.s military

facilities in the region and in fact the reach of the israeli uh excuse me the iranian missiles as such they can reach into israel they can hit Tel Aviv very easily. And they can hit all of the U.S. military bases that are in Syria and Iraq and even in Jordan. So, as I said, this could escalate significantly. And if the United States is going to say, okay, we're going to prepare to hit Iran, then they need to withdraw the personnel out of these bases because they're going to be sitting ducks. Up to this point, Iran has not made a concentrated effort to kill Americans. I think that that's going to change if we bomb and launch military strikes inside Iran. Shouldn't we close down all of these bases in Iraq, in Syria, in Jordan, in Lebanon? Shouldn't

we just bring all those troops home? Not a single one of them is defending American national security interests. Right, but they're there to defend Israel. That's it. I mean, that's the primary mission. It's painted that the reason our troops are in Syria is described as, oh, we're fighting against ISIS. Really? If we were serious about fighting against ISIS, we would join forces with the other country that wants to destroy ISIS. And you know who that country is? Iran. Iran. So we're not interested in working with Iran to destroy ISIS because, believe it or not, the Iranians are as much threatened by those religious extremists. Let's call that group of Islam. troops, about 2,500 are based there, guarding a Conoco oil facility.

Well, that Conoco oil facility produces oil that is then sent to Turkey. So the Turks get a cut of the money, and then the Turks send that oil on to Israel. So this is all about oil and money and Israel security, Israel having a secure pipeline for oil. And, you know, candidly, the United States has no business being there. We're illegally, we're not in Syria with the permission of the Syrian government. The only foreign entity that has been invited to fight in Syria and work with the Syrian government are the Russians, period. If the U.S. attacks Iran, does Iran attack Israel?

Does Russia enter the fray? That's the unknown. What we do know is that within the last two, three weeks, Russia told Iran that it was now prepared to sign a strategic defense agreement. That agreement, to my knowledge, has not yet been signed. But Shoigu, basically their version of Lloyd Austin, except someone who's much more fit and does tell his president when he goes to the hospital, that Shoigu said, yeah, no, we're going to sign this with Iran. So there's already established military cooperation between Iran and Russia and China. Over the last four years, Iran has conducted joint military exercises And frankly, if the United States launches this kind of attack against Iran that's being advocated by the John Boltons and the Victoria Newlands and

the Lindsey Grahams, then very conceivably, we could see the Russia and Chinese getting involved in a significant way. Larry Johnson, thank you, my dear friend. No matter what we talk about, it's enlightening to hear your analysis. Who knows what's going to happen this week, but we'll see you at the end of the week for the Intelligence Roundtable with Ray McGovern. Thank you, my dear friend. Thanks, Judge. Of course. Coming up later today at two o'clock at two o'clock Eastern, retired, kicked out Lieutenant Colonel Matt Lohmeyer. Why was he kicked out of the military? Because he complained that it was too woke at three o'clock. Kevin DeMeritt on Economics 101 and at 430, Colonel Douglas McGregor is World War III

right around the corner. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.