Judging Freedom - [SPECIAL] Matt Hoh : On the Futility of War

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

[SPECIAL] Matt Hoh : On the Futility of WarSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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That's an equivalent to $15 a month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited. plan. Taxes and fees extra, see Mint Mobile for details. You may know frontotemporal Degeneration or FTT as the disease that recently forced Bruce Willis to retire from acting. While it's the most common form of dementia for adults under age 60, many people, even doctors, aren't familiar with it. Uncharacteristic personality changes, apathy, and unexplained struggles with decision-making, movement, speaking, or language comprehension are the most common

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And he ends it with one word. Help! Exclamation point. Completely at odds with what the public had been told. Privately, people were saying this war was a total disaster. It was off the record. But we offered anonymity to people who couldn't speak the truth publicly. We were never going to succeed.

This isn't going to work. The White House says we're winning the war, but these interviews, it's clear we're not winning. We are winning, winning this war. What? Oh, shit. Officials were under pressure to report only good news. This goal is achievable.

But people knew the war could not be won. Every measurable activity is failing. We're spending $300 million a day for 20 years. 25% is being stolen, and it's ending up in the hands of, the insurgents corruption bribery stealing and the embassy said oh don't go down that road don't go down that road how about fixing the problem there was this exaggeration after exaggeration of what we accomplished and it went all the way up to the president we have liberated village after village we broke the Taliban's momentum we are winning responsibly and

liberally and safely they're lying to you they didn't care about what the reality is we was they cared about whether or not their narrative was going to be upset by somebody speaking to the press sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies i don't want to be quoted on this Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, September 23, 2025. I'm especially thrilled to have Matt Ho back on the show. Matt, it's always a pleasure. What we just saw was the two-minute trailer to your new movie,

A Body of Lies, about which we will speak in a few minutes. But welcome back to the show. You look great. And we'll talk to you about that fascinating, captivating film that you're involved with soon. But before we get to it, and before we get to the futility of war, particularly the futility of the war in Afghanistan. Your thoughts on the now near universal recognition of a Palestinian state, is this substantive or just performative?

I like Judge Russell, it's great to be back with you. It's good to see you. I've been listening to you these last six months, all my colleagues as well. I think Al-Dazir put it the best in a bit. bit of a dead pan, dry, dark humor sort of way with their headline, a hundred and eight years after the Balfour Declaration, Britain recognizes Palestine, you know, almost like an onion type of satirical headline there. You know, I think that's the reality of this. For me, I know others feel it has some weight, some merit, and I'm sure it does. It is a slap in the face of the Israelis,

but it is ultimately to me performative in many ways it plays into what the Israelis and many Americans and some Europeans want they want fortress Israel they want us versus them the idea of the world ganging up on Israel the world recognizing the enemy of the Israeli people the Palestinians as a state well that fits into their cosmic or universal or biblical understanding of the world in which they live, as well as their obligations and their responsibilities. So if anything, you know, one concrete thing that may come out of this is the annexation of the West Bank or Judah and Samaria, as, you know, the United States government in Israel calls it. And so, you know, you have that type of aspect where is this

going to play into the hands of those who just want to further estimate? escalate the situation, as well as view the idea of a fortress Israel, Israel against the world, of course, with the United States backing it, as what is necessary in order to keep a pace or to keep constant with the way the world order is supposed to be based upon biblical history, right? I mean, so for me, that that's what I come back to. And of course, the reality is it doesn't do anything, anything for the dozens of Palestinians murdered today by Israel, the dozens that were murdered yesterday, et cetera, et cetera. I'm really in a place where I don't think anything will occur with Gaza other than the

completion of the Israeli and the American plan for it, and that for those of us who are invested in this, who care about this, we have to start doing something about the West Bank now. It's already a bit too late for that, but because what has happened in Gaza will happen in the West Bank, it won't look exactly as it did in Gaza, but it's certainly, will be very similar to the genocide we've seen in the last couple of years in Gaza. Does the Netanyahu regime follow any moral standards or any acceptable body of international law? No, I've certainly no body of international law. And their moral standards are their own.

Again, in line with their biblical understanding of who they are of the world of history, the cosmic or universal ecology in which they exist. So morality-wise, for them, it makes perfect sense. You know, this is a premisesist religious-esque political agenda, Zionism. You know, this is the violence or action aspect of apartheid that we're seeing carried out here. This is ethnic cleansing, all based upon racial and religious superiority. So within that, there is a set of. moral a morality, a set of codes that enforces the foundation that these people believe in

why what they're doing is right and just and ultimately ordained by God. So to them, yes, there is a morality, but for those of us who are witnessing this, there is nothing, nothing more about what's happening, even if you can't understand why they're pursuing it. wow there's really no palestinian no palestine left to save is there i fear judge that's the case with gaza that we are going to be for the next couple of years witnessing the continual degradation of the people of palestine in gaza that we'll be talking about this next september september after uh the the whole plan is as we've seen it laid out they're very clear they're overt about this. They're not hiding anything. Push the Palestinians into concentration camps into these

tight little places. Amawesi on the coast there, which many people are probably familiar with, because that's supposedly the safe zone, even though Israel bombs it every day. But there are a million people in Amoswe. To understand how big Amoswe is, it's for those of you who've been to Washington, D.C., It's roughly, I believe, nine kilometers square. So three kilometers by three kilometers or what's that, 1.7, 1.8 miles by 1.8 miles, something like that, right? Nine kilometers square. That is the same space as from the Capitol through the Lincoln Memorial

and tuck in the White House grounds. You've got a million people living in tents getting bombed every day on the coast with no water and no food and that's where Israel wants them all to go to. And so that's the plan. We see the plan and eventually maybe it's so bad that these people make a break through Egypt or maybe something happens and Jordan lets them in or maybe these ships show up and take them all to Madagascar to Ecuador or someplace like that. That's the plan.

That's the hope that underlines this plan, this American Israeli plan for Gaza. will be carried out. And if it just five years from now, they're still bombing people every day in these concentration camps in Israel. Well, so be it. You know, that's, we didn't, we didn't fulfill it the way we exactly wanted to, but it's good enough. We've gotten most of Gaza and we've made the Gaza problem, the Gaza nuisance into, yeah, it's a drag, but it's something that we can manage. And of course, the Israelis, for the Israelis, this includes Lebanon, includes Syria, includes Iran. Their chief goal, objective has always been the West Bank. And so we see as Israel pushes into Lebanon, they want to create a safe zone. They're going to destroy villages in Lebanon do that. They say they've taken

control over the southern third of Syria. Of course, issues with what we've seen happen with Iran. All that is what would be called a shaping operation to make, to get things in place, to get things in order so that when they begin the annexation of the West Bank, those problems or those potential problems that could emanate from those places are no longer there. And of course, the West Bank, again, has always been their chief principal objective. And so I think, well, we've already seen the annexation begin. When I was there a year ago, you could see that the annexation was beginning. But I think in the next few years, what they will do is begin that annexation in the West Bank. In further, you'll see essentially Gaza-like operations in the rural parts of the destruction of the villages,

the genocide, the cleansing of the people. They've already put forward plans that say roughly only five Palestinian cities will exist. And those cities will just basically become besieged. And they'll be left to die in the vine. And the door will be open to go into Jordan. And again, the hope will be that these people take that exit. And I believe that will be the plan that the Israelis and the Americans will carry out for the West Bank. And so we will see this.

We will have play to talk about, Judge. for years to come unless something changes and god help me i don't know what that is though why did we fight the war in afghanistan oh gosh judge that's a that's a long complicated question i mean there are so many reasons for that war the way i like to describe it is say there's a family that has a favorite restaurant and the father likes to go there because she likes the steaks the mom likes the fish uh the son the waitresses are good looking so the son likes to go there There were so many compelling reasons, none of them good reasons, but compelling reasons for the war in Afghanistan to continue it, particularly in the months following 9-11. You know, following 9-11, of course, the political realities for the George W. Bush administration, he had to take some type of military action.

Now, Al-Qaeda at that point, according to the FBI, was between 200 and 400 people worldwide. so does anyone think the invasion of a country that's been at war at that point in 2001 they've been at war for 25 years essentially it would be a good idea to jump into the middle of a civil war but that's what we chose to do because that's what seemed to be the best thing politically for the americans and then once that began whether it was the neo-conservatives people like zalnyk al-zad right paul wolfowitz others who dominated the george w bush foreign policy uh uh apparatus, their chance to see their theories tested out for real. Because remember, this is following the end of the Cold War and this is following the publication judge of two really important books in the 90s, Sam Huntington's clash of civilizations and Francis Fukuyama's the end of history, which weren't things that predict, which weren't books that predicted what Washington would think. It was telling us what Washington was thinking. The people in Washington, D.C. saw that they have won the Cold War, saw that our system was victorious,

saw that we now have primacy and we could do whatever we want, not just address threats, but we could make history. And so Afghanistan from the neoconservatives became a testbed to prove that. And of course, there's all the other more mundane but equally sickening and important reasons, such as the amount of money made off of the Afghan war. You know, like in the clip, you hear me say there, we spent $300 million. a day for 20 years on the Afghan war. A lot of people got very, very wealthy. So that inertia, right?

And then it became an issue as well for the U.S. military. We have lost the war in Iraq. So what does Barack Obama do? He escalates the war in Afghanistan. This gives the U.S. military a chance to get a win because nobody's going to give the U.S. military credit for Iraq, right? That was Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates. That was his, as far as I understand, his primary.

reason for backing the surge in Afghanistan was to give the United States military a chance to make up for Iraq, right? I mean, so you had all these different reasons that were percolating through Washington, D.C. that made it a good idea to go in, a good idea to stay, a good idea to escalate. And then, of course, why we never got out was because President Obama simply didn't want to take the political risk of pulling troops out of a Muslim nation when there's, you know, there could be a Muslim guy who detonates a car bomb in Times Square. So we'll stay there the entire time out of domestic political concerns. And that's how it becomes America's longest war,

ends up costing over $2 trillion directly. Three and a half trillion dollars when you count the long-term costs of the war, whether it be continuing to pay for the debt we inherited from that war or paying for health care for guys like me. You know, it's going to be $3.5 trillion for that war. 2,500 American soldiers were killed, at least 2,000 American contractors were killed, the tens of thousands who were wounded. And, of course, I even mentioned the horror that has befallen the Afghan people. What they went through those 20 years and the fact that they're now saddled again with the Taliban.

So the reasons were all selfish, they were all greedy, they were all vanglorious. And they were multiple, and they all converged on a point that this makes sense for us to stay, even though we're losing, even though there's no chance for us to win, even though this hurts us in a myriad of ways, we're bankrupting ourselves, we're hurting our own people, we're still waiting for the blowback that should come from that more. Right. So, yeah. I'm going to play another clip, this one featuring you, but this movie is. called the Body of Lies at Premiers Today, September 23rd on Paramount Plus. It's Matt and his colleagues investigating America's 20-year war in Afghanistan and how the public was materially and substantially lied to by the government. Chris?

Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Right now. Come on! Officials were under pressure to report only good news. So you look on the latest assessment report, and you see, well, that district, it's colored that we control it. But you go out to these small little outposts. And they're being a lieutenant, you know, so a kid who's 23, 24, 25 years old, he'd have 30 or 40 American troops,

maybe about the same amount of number of Afghan troops, maybe less. troops maybe less and you'd ask them what part of this district do you control and they'd say i can control what's in the line of sight of my machine guns you know that'd be it and you'd hear that over and over and over again and you saw the impossibility of the tasks put to the u.s and nato troops sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies i don't want to be quoted out Did George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump know the truth, or was it kept from them? That's a really good question, George. I don't know about Bush. I believe Obama understood it generally.

If you go and you look at what Bob Woodward reported about the decision making in Barack Obama's first year in office when the U.S. escalates the war. We can't forget how big of an escalation that was. We went from having about 30,000 American troops, about 15 or 20,000 NATO troops and roughly about 30, 40,000 contractors in Afghanistan in January 2009 when Barack Obama comes into office. A year and a half, there's 100,000 American troops, 40, 40 or 45,000 NATO troops, and 100,000 contractors, many of them American, all working for the U.S. We're spending $120 billion a year on the war at that point. So we put a, Barack Obama put a quarter million man army into Afghanistan and lost.

Now, he, in Woodward's reporting, he pushes back on that plan very much. And he gets seems as if he's boxed in, that he has no support. And I know this. I know when I resign, so people who are unfamiliar with me, I was in Afghanistan, 09, during that escalation of the war, I left. I resigned in protest over the escalation. I got to know a lot of people who were also against it, which was pretty much everyone besides top senior leadership, who all have their own reasons for wanting to see the war escalated, right? Hillary Clinton wanted to see it escalated because it was good politically, right? Showed that when she went in 2016, she was the Secretary of State that oversaw the United States win in Afghanistan, right? Also why she's so such a cheerleader for Libya and then for Syria. I explained about Bob Gates before earlier. Of course, generals like David Petraeus and Stan the Crystal, their vane glory, as we know of them, speaks entirely for why they want to see a war like that escalated. And so I'd hear from the ambassador to Afghanistan, special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So the president's civilian advisor on this at that time, it was Richard Holbrook. The American ambassador was Carl Eichenberry, a former three-star American general, who had come. man did in Afghanistan, you know, and they would say to me stuff like, look, Matt, we go in there and we're not allowed to talk. It's just a cheerleading squad for the escalation. They're all so imbued with this idea of counterinsurgency and how we learn the lessons of Iraq and that this time are going to get it right. And so in Wilbur's reporting, he reports how Obama pushes back. He says, you talk about this counter, Obama paraphrase him, you talk about this counterinsurgency. And you say it's worked, but you can't show me anywhere it has work.

And so Obama essentially gets boxed in. And what's left out of Woodward's reporting, which is really important, I think that what the absence is critical is any political conversation about the war. So Woodward is reporting stuff that's classified in that book. He's in the secure, you know, the tanks, as they recall, the secure conference rooms, right, while these discussions are being had. But where's the conversations between Obama and his chiefest Dhab, Rahman Manuel, or his senior political advisor, David Axelrod? And we know, though, through other reporting, as well as include, you know, this is why Obama leaned so heavily into the drone strikes. That again, as I said before, right, if Mr. President, if you pull troops out of Afghanistan and a bomb goes off in L.A., they're going to blame you for it, and you're not going to win in 2012, right? And so that's, that's what occurs, I think, to push the president at that time to make a decision he may not have wanted to make.

Now, I also know that the information that he was receiving was nothing like what I was saying, what others like me were saying, what anyone you talk to who've been over there was saying. You know, and I know this because Chuck Hagel, who became the Secretary of Defense, former senator, former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I had to go in to the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, which Hegel, along with former Senator Dave Boren, shared. And the President's Intelligence Advisory Board does exactly that. It's supposed to look at the information that the President's receiving and is this honest, real information that he's getting or is it biased? Is it political? And that's what Hagle and Boren wanted to know. They had me in there.

I had to testify to them. Why is the President getting stuff? Is it 180 degrees different than what you're saying and what we're hearing at that? time, both Hegel and Borne were at universities, but we're hearing from all these captains and majors and lieutenant colonels from the Army and the Marine Corps and the Air Force who are coming through our schools and telling us what's really going on Afghanistan. How come what the president is getting on his desk doesn't resemble at all what you are saying? And so I think those two things, the political as well as the deep state, if you want to call it that, the institutional aspects of this.

You know, I mean, these are these people who are running these institutions and many of them who populate them, the career people in these national security institutions, well, look, I'll just put it this way, Judge, you'll be, I don't know if you saw this or not, but Dave Petraeus interviewed Akman al-Sherar, the al-Qaeda boss in charge of Syria now. He interviewed him yesterday in New York at some conference. And among other things, General Petraeus said to Shirah, who used to people known as Al-Jolani when he ran the al-Qaeda ban in Syria, I'm a big fan of yours. So that gives you an idea the type of people we're talking about here who are. Wait a minute. Who said to whom? Petraeus said to Sharah, I am a big fan of yours. There's a murderous thug who killed Americans who Petraeus fought against. Right. This is an outsider leader who was in U.S. in Iraq for five years for trying to kill American forces who, you know, so this is a type

of people we have who are in power, right? And they maintain that privilege. They remain that access. You know, they're going to, I'm sure David Petraeus is on CNN or MSNBC multiple times again this week, right? So it's, it's, you know, it goes beyond just the momentary aspects. And that's why I think this film Bodyguard of Lies, and that expression comes from Winston Churchill. He says, you know, as right, as they quote Rumsfeld there saying, you know, in wartime, truth is so precious, it must be defended by a bodyguard of lies. Churchill was talking about, yeah, so don't say when the D-Day landing is going to be, you know, don't say where the day, right, like that's the idea, not what these people came to believe

that what they were doing was so precious, was so right, was so justifiable, that the ends justify the means. So very similar. We were talking before about the morality of the Israelis. The Americans have that same type of morality. And it's often a very selfish, self-righteous, vanglorious type of morality, but it's one that they guide themselves on and upon which they have these supposed principles and values. I heard you talking to Ray Montgomery yesterday, and you asked Ray about the rules-based order. And Ray, answered that very well. That was a way, particularly for the Biden administration, to justify what they were doing, to give themselves some type of righteousness, to give themselves some

type of intellectual and moral credence as to their actions, when in fact, they were completely contradictory to any type of intellectual and moral integrity. Right, right. Matt, we have to go, but we'll pick up this conversation when it's convenient for you, hopefully, a next week. Where can people see bodyguard of lies? Judge, it's on Paramount Plus starts streaming today. So very easy. If folks who don't have Paramount Plus, you can do a free trial for a week. I don't work for Paramount, so feel free to watch it and then get rid of your free trial as far as I'm concerned. But I also want to give a, I do want to mention the filmmakers involved. Alex Gibney, the producer, Dan Krause, the director, Jigsaw,

is their studio, they're a production firm. These are men and women who've been working on this film for more than five years. And they put their heart and soul into it. And the movie, for a lot of us who are nerds about this, you'll learn things, but you won't be surprised. But what I'm saying to people is get people who don't know a lot about that war to watch this because it's an excellent, excellent entry into that war. But then overall, why we talk about these things, why judge.

you and I and all our colleagues and most of the good folks who are watching this share the same principles that war is a terrible, terrible decision. Thank you, Matt. God bless you. Look great. We look forward to seeing you again soon. All the best. Thanks, Judge. And coming up later today on all of this, the futility of war, the slaughter of innocence in Gaza, and the naivete of the Americans in Ukraine. at 3 o'clock, Colonel Karen Koukowski at 4 o'clock, Scott Ritter. Johnson Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.