Judging Freedom - Matthew Hoh (fmr. Capt. USMC) - Are Gazan civilians combatants?

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

#israel #gaza #hamas #war #peace #ukraine #russia About Matthew Hoh:Former USMC Captain and State Department Officer and Eisenhower Media Network (EMN) Associate Director. Iraq War veteran and Afghanistan State Department officer; 100% disabled veteran and Senior Fellow Emeritus with the Center for International PolicySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, Judging Freedom fans, never miss an episode of Judge Napolitano's Judging Freedom. Grab the audio version on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get the audio version of Judging Freedom. Subscribe today. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, November 7th, 2023. Matt Ho joins us today. Matt, always a pleasure. Thank you for coming back on the show. I want to prevail on your expertise, not just your years in the United States Marine Corps, but also your time in the State Department. Over the weekend, General Zeluzhny, who is the commander of all Ukrainian troops, said that the war with Russia is essentially at a stalemate and President Zelensky's people erupted publicly and condemned what he said. What does that tell you?

Thanks for having me back on, Judge. I think General Zelensky has gotten to the point where he can't continue to go forward with the charade, whether it's for his own personal reasons. We've heard for a while now that he sees the continuation of the policy as it is, of the continual funneling of tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine from the West to prop it up, these ruinous and suicidal frontal assaults against the dug-in Russian defense, the futility of it all? Is he trying to change that? Is he realized that the collapse is coming, that because of decisions and choices and pressure put on by the West, Ukraine is facing a collapse that it might not have had, well,

certainly wouldn't have had if it had sued for peace at the beginning of the Russian invasion like the Ukrainian government wanted to do. But for it was pulled away from that by the U.S. and Britain. But I think is this Zeluzhny saying forcefully, as forcefully as he can, that this needs to stop, that there needs to be a change or else what is going to come is going to be a catastrophe. NBC News reported on Sunday, just two days ago, Matt, that some people in the State Department and some people in the foreign ministries of certain EU countries have begun to speak among themselves about the need for a negotiated settlement. You just alluded to a negotiated settlement. They had a great one on the table that both sides agreed to until the Americans and the Brits interfered. But is this finally, is this at last, if true, a recognition

by the Biden administration and by the neocons around him, and maybe I'm going to carry it away because I don't know that they would recognize it at all by their colleagues in Western Europe, that the war has been a disaster and that it is effectively over with and Russia has effectively prevailed. Well, I think we have to remember, too, that the main reason for support from this war, from the White House, from the Washington DC establishment, from the Brits, has been the perceived domestic political benefits of that, right? I mean, the Democratic Party has campaigned on Putin equals Trump, Russia equals the Republicans for years now. I mean, this goes back to 2015. So this has all just been caused by it, part of it intertwined with it, you know, to pull it apart would take us hours to discuss, but that's the reality of it. So the domestic

political benefits, I think, are what really drove so much of US policy. And as Gerhard Schroeder, the former chancellor of Germany, said a couple of weeks ago, you know, the U.S. is the one calling the shots. Schroeder was involved in what we were just referring to, the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in February and March of 2022. And Schroeder said it fell apart because the Americans said for it to fall apart. All decisions came from Washington. And so if you go and you look back and you say, okay, what are the reasons for those decisions for the US saying these things? I think ultimately it comes back to domestic politics. And I think the White House right now is pleased because as Ukraine has just disappeared from the American media in the last four weeks because of what's

happening in Gaza, but as it has dropped off of CNN and MSNBC and Fox, I think the White House has breathed a sigh of relief because, you know, I don't think many Americans are calling CNN or Fox and saying, hey, where's the coverage on Ukraine? So I think that the great hope that this war would just kind of go away, that was what I think many in the White House and the Democratic Party have been hoping for for a number of, ever since they got past the illusion that the great offensive of 2023 was going to win this war, after reality just really smacked them in the face. I think that that hope of it just going away now seems possible. Do you think that the Victoria Nulands and Lindsey Grahams of the world, particularly those who have levers of influence to pull in the American government, are giving up the ghost on Ukraine because of the most favored nation status of Israel? I think what we've definitely seen, of course, is that Israel

is the priority. And this would be a lesson to all nations around the world. And this is certainly contributing to the multipolarization of the world for institutions like BRICS gaining favor, attracting more members, this idea that you can't trust the United States. We've said it before. I mean, every other guest on your show, Judge, says it because it's just such a great thing to quote. But Kissinger saying it's dangerous to be an enemy in the United States, deadly to be a friend. I mean, so the Ukrainians are turning into the new Afghans. And I think nations around the world saying, I don't want to be the next Ukrainians, particularly how clear it is, is that it will be the Americans are OK with it just being us in Israel against the world. And certainly the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu, this idea of Israel as a modern spotter, as fortress Israel, as Israel against the world, which is biblical.

Right. I mean, that refers back to, you know, that's Old Testament type of theocracy of us against the world. You know, as with the U.S. as their benefactor, that's politically advantageous. But this idea that somehow the White House may now see an opportunity to get away from Ukraine, the fact that you had the head of Ukrainian armed forces call the war stalemate. I mean, the idea that a military,

the top general would speak in such a way is even during our worst times in Iraq and Afghanistan, you never heard American generals talk that way. When it was clear that we were losing, we were clear it was hopeless. The closest you come, I guess, is General McChrystal in 2009 saying that we're losing the war, But that was all just part of the propaganda PR machine to get more troops to be sent in. In this case, it was illusionary. He did present a wish list of this is what I want. We can still turn this way around. But I think most people see through that and they realize the desperation of the situation. And that, again, because of the decisions made by the West to back up this incredibly corrupt kleptocracy, this house of cards in Kiev that's dominated by right wing nationalists with Zelensky as a figurehead, the ruinous decisions to defend Bakhmut at the cost of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, then this completely idiotic and suicidal frontal assault into the teeth of a well-prepared Russian defense has left the

nation at the point of collapse. And of course, the entire country is propped up by foreign assistance. If the U.S. and the IMF or the World Bank stop sending money to Ukraine, people don't get paid. And we're not talking about the soldiers. We're talking about people working in the hospitals, people who are driving buses, people, you know. So the fact that this is so precarious, that it is as if you were walking across the rotten floorboards of a very old house and every step you're expecting to go through that

floor is a feeling I think that dominates all of Ukraine. And also, too, for those looking from the outside, you know, populates their understanding of it, that this can't last. At some point, it's going to collapse. And so this NBC News report, NBC News, of course, being a very reliable pro-Ukrainian outlet over the last 20 months for them to be putting forth that the United States has been having these discussions, not informally. According to this report, it was done through the Ukrainian Contact Group, which is a consortium of 50 nations that has been established. The idea of the contact group was that Ukraine needs trucks. Okay, so the Dutch are going to provide 100 trucks. They need artillery system. Okay, Belgium's going to provide 25 artillery systems. So it's a working

group. It has a real effect. It's practical. So the fact that this was brought up there, I think, says a lot. I pity President Zelensky. I mean, what is he going to do? He's already talking about canceling elections next year. He's got the Nazis to his right. He'll probably shoot him if he talks about negotiating. He's got his American and Western benefactors who are now going to begin to talk seriously about negotiating. He's got the House of Representatives, which doesn't want to give him another nickel, no matter what Mitch McConnell in the Senate wants, what's he going to do? I guess move to Miami or Paris. Right. I read a thing that his family is in Israel. I don't know how true that is or not. But certainly that idea, and we've seen that before. We've seen other American puppet figureheads, other American leaders of of of proxy regimes face the same consequences.

You know, I'm actually unsure where Ashraf Ghani is right now, the former leader of Afghanistan. But yeah, I mean, what does he do? What is available to him? And we talked about this last week, Judge. There was that article in Time magazine that just described Zelensky's descent into madness. You know, he's delusional. He's messianic. This is what his people are saying. You know, and so, you know, where does he go from that? How does that get better? So I think there has to be conversations being had if they haven't been had before. But of how do we replace Zelensky? How do we write this problem? How do we you know, and he's already said he's not going to not going to have elections. So we can't go the route that we did in Afghanistan where we can get Ghani to come in to replace Karzai through the elections.

You know, so now you're talking about a more hard coup. You know, do we kill this guy? How do we make this guy not a problem? Because the other part of this is if we get him out, he's going to run his mouth and say how he was betrayed, you know, because he definitely feels betrayed. And I think he's got a right to feel betrayed. The U.S. came in. Well, this is the way the U.S. this is the way back to Kissinger. This is the way the U.S. treats its friends when they no longer suit the dominant political narrative. We betray them. Switching gears to the other, of course, hot topic, arguably hotter, has Israel codified into its public policy the concept of collective punishment? Oh, I think so. I think it's a hard argument to make against that idea that what we're seeing here is punitive. You have had for years now,

Israeli policies that the consequences of action against the Israeli military, against the Israeli state, against Israeli civilians will be many fold that of what was incurred. So as you've seen, you know, say in Gaza's case, this is the fifth major aerial assault, the second ground offensive into Gaza. Certainly this is much larger than the previous ones, but the level of destruction, the level of violence, the level of wrath that the Israelis have placed upon the Gazans before far, far outweighed what, you know, Hamas or Islamic Jihad had done. So, I mean, this is punitive. This is vindictive. This is meant to cause the people to try and prevent Hamas from doing anything further because the idea, but this is folly. It doesn't work. This is the same idea behind our sanctions regime, our unilateral coercive measures, as it's described under international law,

that somehow we are going to starve the population. We're going to miserate the people. And they are then going to turn against the Iranians. They're then going to turn against the Venezuelan government. They're then going to turn against the Russian government. And they are then going to turn against the Iranians. They're then going to turn against the Venezuelan government. They're then going to turn against the Russian government and they're going to pull the government down. They're going to turn against Cuba. Exactly. How did that embargo work? Wow. Yeah. Well, yeah. But but can anybody with a sense of right and wrong accept the Israeli argument that it is somehow appropriate to drop six 2,000-pound bombs on a refugee camp, knowing there are homeless, helpless people in there, in order to kill one Hamas person? Can Benjamin Netanyahu expect people to believe him when he says, this is collateral damage to the death of civilians and is unintended?

I think the only reason you're in line with that is, well, maybe you've never read international law before. It's clear, you know, ideas of distinguishing between military and civilian, the need for proportionality, protected locations, all these types of things. So clear violation of international law, which I want to say because people poo-poo this idea of international law. What we're talking about here is the laws, the international treaties, the covenants that were signed on to by the United States by men like Truman and Eisenhower. So the victors of World War II, the allied leaders of World War II were the ones who put in place this international law. So all these people who are saying how international law is for weaklings or it doesn't count in the real world, the men who won World War II were the ones who put modern international law, as we're talking about here, into place.

I get frustrated because I hear these things. No, I share the same frustration. My friend, Justice Anthony Kennedy, once cited some principle of international law in a Supreme Court opinion. The law was right. He was right. The way he used it was right. But all my conservative buddies at Fox went crazy. Why is he going citing international law? We can't control it. It happens to be a principle of law that we created and we embraced. And of course, Israel is a signatory to all of this, as is Russia, as is Ukraine, when they signed the United Nations Charter and the treaties emanating from it as well. Do you think that Hamas banked on and intended this severe overreaction on the part of Israel in an effort to goad places like Turkey, Jordan, Iran, and Lebanon into considering violence on their own against Israel? I think it comes back to this idea that Hamas needs Israel and Israel needs, or at least Netanyahu government needs Hamas.

I think the predictability of Israel's response was there, right? The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. And you see how Israelites responded as well as their pronouncements, as well as doctrine, both written down and kind of that exists, you know, informally. So I think Hamas, this idea I struggle with, what was Hamas trying to do here? We've got to be very careful that we don't forget that Hamas has a theocratic leadership, that they have hero complexes, that they see themselves as the great

liberation struggle of their people. So just when Benjamin Netanyahu refers to biblical passages, stories from 3,000 years ago, the Hamas leadership and other groups will draw on similar types of theocratic stories, narratives. But the idea, but the idea too, is that maybe they thought that they could get two things. One, Israel to come in, they bloody Israel's nose, they suck them into a brutal, ugly, horrid urban battle that eventually the Israelis have to retreat from just as Israelis had to retreat from Lebanon in 2000 and 2006. And then the other aspect is maybe the strategy was, this will get Hezbollah to come in the war. This will get Syria to come in the war. This will get potentially Turkey to come in

the war. I think those things are not going to happen unless there is some type of accident, something that causes dominoes to fall. There's an involuntary, you know, pull of these nations into the war. But I think that's what Hamas was calculating, as well as that they want to be viewed as this solidifies their domestic political reputation. it's viewed from the outside because they were sidelined during the Abraham Accords. You had all the conversation about Saudi Arabia and Israel normalizing relations. The people of Gaza are just being punished. The fact that Israel killed a record number of Palestinians in the West Bank in 2022, they were on track to kill a record more in 2023. And now, of course, they've done that in terms of the number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank. There were more than 200 killed prior to October 7th, about 150 killed since then. So I think they were looking to solidify their place as the leader of the resistance, both as viewed from outside Palestine and from inside Palestine. But certainly you look at this and you say, my God, why would you do this to your people? Why would you bring the house down around you?

Tell me about your former colleagues at the State Department. They work for Antony Blinken and he works for Joe Biden, two people who have stated publicly over and over again that they have unconditional support and the government that works for them will have unconditional support for Israel. Yet, dozens of full-time non-political civil service employees in the State Department appear to be rebelling against this because of the brutality and ferocity of the IDF in Gaza. How does that work? I think what you're seeing here with these dissent cables and Politico just reported on one, I guess Politico got to see it. I wish Politico had published it. But this idea is that there are internal dissent channels within the State Department that were created during the Vietnam War that allow for diplomats, civil servants, career employees to voice their frustration at policy. It's a way

of venting steam. I don't know if any of it's ever had any effect. These decisions about policy with regards to Israel especially come from the White House. They come from Tony Blinken. So you were never going to see where mid-level, even senior level civil servants were going to have effect on the policy. Maybe ameliorate it, maybe change it in some ways, but overall, you're always going to have this support for Israel, this unconditional support. What I think you're seeing, the frustration, besides the fact that they're part of a system that are run by men and women who have no intellectual or moral decency, is the aspect that they understand how counterproductive this is, how this makes regional stability in the Middle East much less likely.

Are they risking their jobs to challenge the president and the secretary of state publicly? These are diplomats. It depends on how vocal they are. If they sign this dissent cable, they're not supposed to be punished or have any retribution. We say that, but we know how things actually work in organizations. So if you put your name down on something, it's very likely that two, three, four years from now, as you're competing for a promotion, as you are trying to get a spot in Paris or wherever you really want to go to, as you're trying to get onto a task force that has a lot of responsibility and

that you really believe in, you may not get because you're not a yes man or a yes woman. You're a liability. You're someone who's going to listen to their conscience and voice your disagreement rather than going along and getting along. So there is a potential consequence for these people who are speaking out. I'm glad to see it. I'm proud that they're doing it. I wish more like Josh Paul would resign. But the same point too, if you have all the good people resign, who are you left with? That's a real issue. I have a feeling that I am speaking with a non-yes man person when he was at the State Department. In fact, it's more than a feeling. I know that's the case. There's something to be said, Judge, for coming from New Jersey and having a big mouth. As if I don't know.

You're the best. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your insight. Thank you for the personal touch. We'll talk to you again soon, my friend. Thanks, Judge. Of course. More as we get it. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski at three o'clock today and the inimitable Scott Ritter at 430. All of this Eastern Times. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.