Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter: Unseen Power Struggles in the Middle East

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Scott Ritter: Unseen Power Struggles in the Middle EastSee 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, February 6, 2024. Scott Ritter joins us now. Scott, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for all of your time and your analysis. I'd like to start with Ukraine. What is your take on this almost musical chairs, but somewhat instability at the head of the military in Ukraine? President Zelensky says he's going to fire General Zaluzhny. Zaluzhny is still there. The troops want him to stay. Zelensky announces there was a replacement it's going to be. The replacement is a tool of MI6 and probably the U.S. State Department. How do you read this? Are these signs of the end game in the Ukraine government? Well, first of all, it's a sign of crisis within Ukraine. And the crisis is twofold.

One is the crisis of reality. The fact is Ukraine is losing this war and losing this war badly. You know, you and I have been speaking for some time now about what I've called the impending collapse. Well, the collapse is occurring as we speak on the battlefield. Ukrainians are virtually defenseless in the face of Russia's military. They don't have artillery. You know, Ukraine, for all of its faults, and I've always spoken highly of the professionalism of certain Ukrainian units and their long range artillery was very good, very good at keeping the Russians at bay. Russia was unable to mass their artillery because of the accuracy and the lethality of Ukrainian

artillery strikes. But now that the Ukrainians have run out of ammunition, Russia is able to mass artillery and once again, just literally devastate Ukrainian military positions before sending in their infantry to occupy it. And then the Ukrainians are unable to launch an effective counterattack. So, you know, Russia will take territory, not get pushed out of it, then take more territory. So every day we're seeing just the incremental advances across the front by Russia, and there's nothing the Ukrainians have in response. And so we're looking at a military collapse, which is engendering political crisis inside Ukraine. And the crisis is of a civil-military nature. Look, any American who studies history, you know about the struggles between General McClellan and Abraham Lincoln during the Civil

War, where McClellan thought that he could do it better than Lincoln. But at the end of the day, when Lincoln relieved McClellan, McClellan stepped aside without question. We know about Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman and how MacArthur was convinced that he knew best. Truman did not. But when Truman summoned MacArthur and fired him, MacArthur stepped aside because that's the way it works in democracies. Ukraine is not a democracy. Ukraine is a dysfunctional, you know, oligarchy, kleptocracy, but it's not a democracy. And what we have here is a situation where General Zeluzhny, the commanding general of the Ukrainian armed forces, believes he can do it better than Zelensky. He hasn't. You know,

Zelensky's saying, well, wait a minute, we've got Bakhmut. You chewed up a whole bunch of our guys there. We got the failed counteroffensive and we got the ongoing disaster at Advyevka. And Zelensky's saying, it's not my fault, man. You wouldn't let me fight the war the way I wanted to. If you let me do it my way, we could have won. We could have gone on the defensive, wore the Russians out, flipped the script on them. But Zelensky's also positioning himself politically, like McClellan did during the Civil War, saying, I on them. But Zelensky is also positioning himself politically, like McClellan did during the Civil War, saying, I can do a better job of running this country. And so Zelensky did what any rational political leader would do at that point in time, eliminate

this man who has forgotten what his role is. But Zelensky didn't go away. Zelensky called him in and said, I want you to resign. And Zelensky said, no. And therein lies the problem, because once you get a general standing up to the ultimate civilian authority and saying, no, you have a crisis. This is why Victoria Nuland flew into Kiev, because she needs to go in and negotiate the outcome, let everybody know who's in charge. And here's the third aspect of this crisis. There's no Ukrainian democracy. Ukraine is simply a functionary of the United States,

doing that which the United States tells it to do. And even though the United States is unable or unwilling to cough up the additional $64 billion that Ukraine desperately needs to survive, the Ukraine can't declare its independence from the United States politically or militarily or economically. And so they do Victoria Nuland's bidding. But what we're seeing right here is the political version of the collapse that's taking place on the battlefield. This is the end of Ukraine. We're watching Ukraine implode from within. Do you think that Victoria Nuland was there to put her blessing on, I forget his name, you know his name, the general that's the head of the intel whom Zelensky wants to replace Zeluzhny?

Yeah, I think Budanov is the guy's name. And, you know, it's not her blessing. I think she, she's not blessing anything. She's dictating. I think she went in there and sat them down and she dictated the outcome. She said, this is what will be. And so they accepted it, you know, because it's not just about getting, you know, Zelensky and Budanov together on the same sheet of music. It's getting Zeluzhny to accept this outcome without causing a civil war. Remember, when Zeluzhny refused to step down, he was backed by the totality of the Ukrainian armed forces. Right. He basically said, yeah, we back Zeluzhny.

That's the beginning of a civil war. I mean, that's the beginning of the end. That's what precipitates a coup d'etat. So Nuland flew in there to stop a coup, to remind Zeluzhny that if he tried this coup, it would be all over. America would never back him, that he needs to step aside. And then for her to sit there and play kingmaker and say, this is who's going to be, this is going to be, because it's not just in the military. The shakeup is systemic in nature. It's every aspect of the government, civilian and military, is going to collapse because the current government doesn't have a solution to the problem. And Zelensky desperately needs to come up with people that will do his bidding. He's lost the confidence of the Ukrainian military and he's lost the confidence of the

majority of the Ukrainian political establishment. So he needs to recreate a government that will, you know, at least adhere to, you know, his instructions as dictated to him by the United States. This is the ultimate form of American control. We've come in and we're basically eliminating any notion of Zelensky as an independent political actor. What this does is prove that he is little more than a modern day Pinocchio with a bunch of strings attached and his puppet masters are telling him what to do. Is Budanov a Nazi or a nationalist or one of those hard right, from one of those hard right groups in the Ukrainian military?

Well, he's a nationalist. Whether he's a right sector Nazi, I don't know. He's a man who's committed war crimes. He's, you know, he's the man behind the assassination of Darya Dugina Tartarsky. He's the man who's trying to kill me. So Budanov, yeah, I know who you are. But I will also say this, as much as I despise the man, I had a very interesting conversation with a Chechen general who commanded Chechen forces in Mariupol.

And he spoke highly of Budanov as a leader, as a commander, as an opponent. And so whether or not I like the guy or I like his politics, it doesn't matter. Budanov is a very effective leader. And I think if he were able to take control and have the army listen to him, that he could solidify. But at the end of the day, Judge, Ukraine is building a sandcastle. Right now, the tide is out. And like the little kids going forward, they're building the most elaborate sandcastle. Burdanov can come in and put a spire here and flag it.

The tide is going to come in. There is no way to convert what they're building to anything other than a sandcastle. And it's going to disappear under the Russian tide. parliament was considering a draft. Who are they going to draft? They don't have the human beings if they're going to consider males within a draft worthy age. Well, one of the things they're trying to do is gain access to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men who have fled the country and to create a foundation of law that gives them the ability to go out and ask nations to allow them to bring these people back, to make it compulsory to threaten people with the loss of privileges of rights, the ability to have employment if they don't come back. So I think that's the basis. But the other thing is to open up to categories that

previously, you know, were closed. Children of the age of 17 or younger, even 16. Women. I mean, you know, I try, I'm a father of two daughters and I believe that they have every, I don't believe in glass ceilings. I believe that women should be allowed to do whatever they're capable of doing. And if they, you know, to compete with men and if they're better than men to get the jobs. But war is a separate category and combat is very physical. And very few women have what it takes physically to function and survive on the modern battlefield. And today you see Ukraine forming entire women units, sending them off to battle and they're going to die. I mean, that's the reality of these women will not survive.

They're not in rear area support. They're going to be frontline soldiers and they're going to be slaughtered. And if I were a Ukrainian male hiding in Germany or Poland, I would be forever shamed by the fact that I'm hiding while the women I'm supposed to be protecting are fighting and dying. Ukraine is falling apart as a society. When you have women doing the fighting for the men, there's something wrong. Switching to the Middle East, What kind of power struggles do you sense are going on within or among Israel's neighbors, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, as a result of the slaughter in Gaza? Well, understand that prior to October 7th, the Middle East had reached a state of relative equilibrium. And what I mean by that is that nobody was talking about a Palestinian state, not viably. That issue was laid to rest. That's one of the reasons why Hamas did

what it did on October 7th, is to put that issue back on the table. Israel was preparing to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia. Turkey was making various compromises to create the kind of geopolitical stability necessary for them to position themselves to become a regional and global energy hub to get gas lines through there to work with Russia so that Turkey became a price setter for energy for Europe. Everybody was looking towards stability. Benjamin Netanyahu was out showing charts about how cargo was going to flow from India through Dubai, through Saudi Arabia, through Jordan, into Israel and onto Europe. And Biden was doing the same thing. Now, what Hamas has done is upset that entire apple cart. Not just Hamas, but the axis of resistance, Iran and its regional allies, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq, Yemen,

countries that had largely been ignored by this other power structure that we talked about. Hamas has basically said, we count, we're standing up to be counted. And Israel was unable to put them down. Remember Netanyahu said, we will destroy Hamas politically, they will not exist as an institution. And militarily, they'll never be able to repeat what happened on October 7. What we see now is the Israelis acknowledge they can't defeat Hamas militarily, only 20% of the tunnels have been accounted for. That means if you say 20%, that means the implication is you know what 100% is, but the Israelis say we don't know what 100% is, which means they have no clue what they've done. What we do know is that Hamas continues to resist and is

killing Israeli soldiers in large numbers, compelling Israel to withdraw. Israel lost the military fight. Hamas still exists as a military force capable of doing an October 7th type activity. And politically, Hamas politically is stronger than they've ever been. If there was an election today, Hamas would win amongst the Palestinian people. And so this is the reality that the world is trying to grasp. Look at the Biden administration. According to Thomas Friedman, New York Times, he says they've come up with a new Biden doctrine. But what the Biden doctrine does is to try to get back to the status quo that existed before October 7th,

ignoring this new reality, saying that we have to keep Iran down. No one's going to keep Iran down now. Iran is up. The axis of resistance is up. Hezbollah is elevated. Hamas is elevated. The Houthi are elevated. The militias in Iraq and Syria are standing up to the United States and winning.

You know, we've launched this big bombing attack to deter them. There is no deterrence. They're not afraid of us anymore. They continue to attack, and this is the reality. So the Middle East has changed fundamentally, and all of these nations that were profiting off of the old system are now struggling to define a new system, and you see how weak they are in terms of their imagination. Instead of recognizing the reality and trying to build on this reality and move forward in a way that brings about stability, they're desperately trying to go back to what was, and that's not going to work. You're not going to make Hamas go away. The idea of a two-state solution, which is the United States promoting, where you demilitarize

the Palestinians, that means you're asking Hamas to give up that which allowed Hamas to survive, their military capability, and also which depoliticizes Hamas, eliminates them from the table. It's unrealistic to begin with. There is no plan right now in place to resolve the many issues that face the Middle East today. Here's the Russian ambassador to the UN, highly critical of United States bombing in the Middle East. Number 12, Chris. We heard against the backdrop of an escalation of violence in the Palestinian-Israel conflict zone with an unprecedented number of casualties, in support of which Washington is playing far from a secondary role. And the night from the 2nd to the 3rd of February of the US, using four tactical bombers of the US Air Force, F-16s, and two supersonic strategic bombers,

B-1B Lancers, carried out by order of President Joe Biden, no less than 85 so-called retaliation strikes on the territory of sovereign Iraq and Syria. The mass airstrikes of American air forces, as a result of which civilians and soldiers died, caused the destruction and damage of tens of facilities. And this demonstrates once again to the entire world the aggressive nature of US policy in the Middle East and the full disregard of Washington for norms of international law. Surprised, A, that the Russian ambassador

had at his fingertips the technical details of what was done, the number of strikes and the military equipment used, and B, would take to the Security Council to call out the U.S. the way he did. Does Russia suddenly have a dog in this fight? Well, I mean, Russia, first of all, you know, Russia is taking advantage of a situation where it doesn't have to do anything other than what it should be doing, which is standing up for the United Nations Charter, standing up for international law. You know, the United States is making it easy for Russia to look like the good guy, to look like,

you know, the rational player. I mean, Russia has been a rational player for some time now, but, you know, at least make Russia earn it. Right now, it's just a freebie. You know, Russia, all they have to do is state the facts, straightforward recitation of what happened. And it's clear that the United Nations and the United States is in violation of the law. Look, Russia has an interest in regional stability. Russia is not out to engender more instability in the region. So Russia wants a peace to break out throughout the Middle East. Believe it or not, Russia doesn't like it that the United States is creating a

situation that further delegitimizes America because Russia is not about the collapse of America. Russia is about getting America to learn to work together as part of a multilateral approach to solving global problems. Russia recognizes that America is a very big nation, a very powerful nation, a very influential nation, and Russia would like to work with America on the global stage to bring about stability because Russia needs America to accomplish that. A world without America is a world that will not function properly, but Russia is not going to, you know, cave to America. Russia knows what it stands for. It knows what its allies stand for. And so it's

going to stand for the right thing, the rule of law, not the rules-based international order. And this is what Russia is doing. But Russia is not trying to position itself for some sort of zero-sum game victory where an American defeat is a Russian victory. Here, an American loss is a loss for all of humanity, and that's what the Russian ambassador is saying. Why is the United States, I assume it's considering, listening to Lindsey Graham, although it turns my stomach as it does yours, even considering bombing Iran? It's ideological in nature. Lindsey Graham understands that, you know, in the big picture, let me answer it this way by talking about another one of my favorite senators, Senator Marco Rubio. When he talked about Brazil, back when Brazil was talking about joining BRICS and going through de-dollarization, he said, we can't let them join BRICS and de-dollarize.

If they walk away from the dollar, if they walk away from the swift, then our sanctions will never work. We won't be able to force them to do what we want to do through sanctions. Ah, now you understand why Brazil was doing what it was doing. Lindsey Graham understands how the world works. And he understands the rule-based international order that the United States has created. And he understands that the threat to this rules-based order that Iran represents, you know, if Iran gets to do what it wants to do, A, it's going to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, which eliminates the possibility of large-scale conflict in the Middle East between those two powers. B, it's going to work with the axis of resistance to bring about changes within the other nations, Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and others, to get them to gravitate

away from the policies driven by the United States, towards policies, multilateral policies, the kind of policies that China and Russia are promoting that brings about peace and stability. And this will further weaken the United States. Lindsey Graham understands the desperate situation that we face and knows that the only way that we can prevent this slide is to directly attack Iran. And so that's what he's promoting. But it's unrealistic because Lindsey Graham, unfortunately for him, the Pentagon doesn't agree. The Pentagon knows that if we attack Iran, we initiate an escalation of violence that

we can't sustain. This dates back to the time of Donald Trump when he wanted to retaliate after the Global Hawk was shot down, the drone. He wanted to bomb Iran. The Pentagon told him, you can, here's the targets. But if you do this, it begins a cycle of violence that will lead to general war. And Mr. President, we're not ready for that. It will take us months, maybe years to muster the force necessary to confront Iran in a meaningful fashion. Meanwhile, they will destroy everything we have in the region. And even once we get our forces there, there's no guarantee that we're going to win. Meaning, you know, we may lose this thing. So why do we want to start this?

It stopped Donald Trump from bombing Iran. And I believe that it's preventing Joe Biden from escalating to conflict too. Lindsey Graham is irrelevant. Like I said, he's just a perfume princess that sits around and lets his mouth run, but nobody pays attention to him anymore. I've heard a lot of criticism of Senator Graham, but never that one. God bless you. What happens if we do attack Iran? What happens if the crazy neocons prevail on Joe Biden? Does Iran attack Israel? I will say this, that the Iranians are very realistic, and they have been struggling very hard over the past decades to dig themselves out of this

sanctions-based economic hole that the United States has put them in. And they have won. They are now, they've normalized relations with Saudi Arabia. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran are members of BRICS. Iran is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Its economy is drifting eastwards towards the Eurasian Economic Union, and things are looking good for Iran. So the last thing Iran wants to do is throw this away in a war that can be avoided. So I'm not going to sit here and say that any American action against Iran would automatically trigger a massive Iranian response, because the Iranians are in the escalation management business too. What I will say is that they're not going to take it lying down so that

if we strike Iran, they're going to make us pay in a meaningful way. They're going to take out an air base. They're going to take out a naval base, and then they'll wait to see what we do. And again, we get into the escalation ladder. We bomb up, they bomb up, and they're going to win that one. But they don't want to go straight to war because that undoes everything. While Iran can hold its own, Iran can do damage to the United States. Understand, we can do damage to Iran too. And Iran does not want to initiate something where American cruise missiles in the hundreds are taking out economic targets, destroying the economy that Iran has so painstakingly built over the course of the

last decade. So I think the Iranians are playing a very responsible game. They withdrew a lot of their resources. The United States gave them five days. And so Iran pulled a lot of resources back into Iran so that the United States could bomb without killing large numbers of Iranians. But, yeah, can't say they weren't warned. Yeah, that's a good quote. But, you know, they're still striking us. I mean, the bottom line is, you know, you can call them terrorists. Some people call them freedom fighters.

They're not. I'll tell you this. All the militias that operate in Iraq operate legally. All the militias that operate in Syria are there legally. Every American that's on Syrian soil is there illegally. Even Americans in Iraq are there illegally now because the government has ordered us to leave and we refuse to do so. It's interesting. Terrorists and freedom fighters. To George III, George Washington was a terrorist. Depends on where you stand. Obviously,

at the moment you're making the characterization. What is Joe Biden gaining? What is the United States gaining by these pinprick assaults on warehouses and storage sheds? Nothing, because the whole purpose of this is deterrence. The whole purpose of this is to create the notion that if you strike American targets, you will pay a price. But the point is they're not paying a price sufficient to deter. And for America, I mean, what our potential foes and our actual foes have learned is that we have a very low threshold for pain. So, you know, when the boys and girls start coming home in body bags in sufficient numbers, we lose the will to continue a fight, especially when the fight is not of an existential nature. There's literally nothing going on in Syria worth the

life of a single American, let alone the lives of hundreds or thousands of Syrians there. There's nothing going on in Iraq worth the life of a single American. And yet we're there because it's legacy. We're there. We're trapped by past policy and we're trapped by people like Lindsey Graham who can't admit that we did wrong and therefore retreat because retreating is a sign of weakness. No, getting out of an unsustainable situation is a sign of strength. I'd love to have strong American leaders who are confident enough in their leadership to look the American people in the eye and say, there's no reasons for us to be in Syria. And I want the boys and girls that are there to come home to their families. So I'm withdrawing. And it's not

weakness from withdrawing. It's strength. It says we don't do things that are bad, things that are wrong. But we have weak leaders who are afraid to say they've done something wrong. So they're going to bomb more targets, inviting more attacks. And the sad thing is we're going to lose more Americans in the end trying to deter these forces from what they did, killing three Americans, than we would if we just said, hey, those three Americans lost their lives because this is an unsustainable situation. We need to withdraw. Scott, we have 57,000 troops in the Middle East. Not a single one of them should be there. Does the U.S. government, does the United States military ever intentionally put troops into harm's way in order to use them as bait, sort of a reverse false flag, so that like John Kirby says, well, we don't need an authorization for use of military force. We're defending ourselves.

Defending ourselves, we shouldn't be there. But my point is, do they do this intentionally? The answer is yes, they're tripwire. But we've done this for, look, our forces in Korea are a tripwire. Our forces in Europe are a tripwire. We deploy forces that are insufficient in their organization, their size, their capabilities to achieve a meaningful result. But they're there so that if the enemy attacks them, they have to do so with sufficient force to deal with the localized defense capabilities. And most people will say, well, it's not worth it.

We don't want to get into a standup fight with America. But in the Middle East, for instance, what we have going on in Syria is 100% a tripwire. We're daring the Syrian government to attack us. They don't, but they use proxy militias and now three Americans are dead. But our response is not sufficient to deter that. So we've literally set Americans up to die in the Middle East. That's the reality. Is bombing diplomacy? Is bombing part of diplomacy? I think having a military deterrent is an effective tool, but the whole concept of military deterrent is that you're deterring irresponsible behavior by promising an outcome

that will be more painful to the perpetrator than any gain they might get from doing what they want to do. So it's always useful to have a military option in the back. But no, diplomacy is the art of negotiation, the art of talking. We could accomplish so much more in the Middle East if we would actually sit down and talk to people, listen to them, and use policies. We spent $500 million bombing those 85 targets. The vast majority of those 85 targets were empty, and we knew they were empty. This was purely a sound and light show that we put on. $500 million. If we took that $500 million, if we took half of that $500 million and gave it to the State Department so that they could have sufficient diplomatic representation, if we went in with aid packages, if we went in with targeted assistance, not military assistance, but economics assistance, agricultural assistance, development assistance, do what the Chinese do through the Belt and Road Initiative, infrastructure development. If we did that sort of thing, we would have a completely different world, a world that liked us, that was beholden to us, that will do our bidding as opposed to the world that we have today, which if anybody does what we want to do, it's only because we

put a loaded pistol to their head and are threatening to blow their brains out. That's not friendship. Has the slaughter in Gaza let up at all? The intensity of the violence has let up just simply because the Israelis are running out of places to bomb. But the horror hasn't. I mean, actually what's happening right now is far more horrible because people are starving to death. People are dying of diseases. And there's civilians right now that are in just absolute state of destitution. And look, Judge, I don't know if people listen to it. The recordings of the family was trapped in their car. The parents had been killed by Israeli gunfire. The Israelis knew they were civilians. The 15-year-old girl was on the phone begging for her

life as the Israelis come in and execute her. The six-year-old girl remained in the car and was phoning in saying that everybody's dead around her and she's starving to death. And the world is trying to get the Israelis to let paramedics come in and rescue them, but the Israelis won't. This is what's happening over and over again. These acts of absolute inhumanity by the Israelis who treat the Gazans as animals, straight up animals. And so while the scope and scale of the violence maybe has dropped a little bit, the level of inhumanity has grown. And in the meantime, an IDF officer since identified took videos of himself torturing a mainly naked Palestinian. the State Department claimed it knew nothing about it. I wonder if this kind of stuff will appeal to the sensibilities of the Israeli people and drive Netanyahu from office.

You know, Judge, there was a time when the United States tortured people after 9-11, a huge program of torture. The CIA was running it. And the American people are aware of what happened. There's been no repercussion for that. And I consider most Americans to be immoral people, just people, but we've never held to account the people who tortured people in our name. I don't think the Israelis are going to hold to account these horrible officers who are committing torture in their name. I am sadly familiar with the American torture. The only person that went to jail is John Kiriakako, a CIA agent who revealed the torture.

Yeah, that's the crime, to reveal the crime. To reveal it. Not to perpetrate it, but to reveal it. Welcome. That was George Bush's America. Scott, thank you very much. You've been on a tear. I know you're busy.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time. I know you're busy. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time. I know how much the audience appreciates your time because they watch you and the numbers that continue to grow and are utterly astounding. All the best, my dear friend. Okay. Thanks for having me. Of course. Coming up for the rest of the week, all of our regulars and your favorites, Phil Giraldi, Professor Sachs, Professor Mearsheimer, Aaron Matei, Max Blumenthal. And of course, at the end of the day on Friday, the Intelligence Community Roundtable. Thank you so much for watching. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm