Judging Freedom - Ukraine War - Same Fate as Afghanistan & Iraq Wars w/Matthew Hoh

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

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Thank you very much for coming back to the show. You have a very telling piece out, I think either today or in the past day or so, called Red Meat to Ravenous Dogs. What is that all about? This is about the corruption of war, the money making, the profit taking, the benefits that go to a select few, both in the war zone and here at home that propels these wars. You know, I believe there are two sides to this coin of why do we have this warfare?

Why is the United States in a permanent state of war? You know, you can basically count with your digits how many years in America's history it has not been at war. And why is that? And for me, there are two reasons. It's the money and it's the megalomena. It's the power, which is more dominant, I think depends upon your perspective. But this is something that is as old as the United States is. People want to look up the Naval Act of 1794, which was one of the first acts of our Congress. It meant to create an American Navy because we didn't have one. And it was a complete racket. And I encourage people to see how the United States Congress ensured that every state got a bit of the spending, how the boats that they wanted to buy ended up being twice as expensive as they originally were

contracted for and took twice as long. And they only got, it didn't get as many as they contracted. So no different now, 250 years later than it was in 1794. And the case can be made throughout all periods of American warfare that there is a profit taking that is so immense. It's such a good deal. It's a gravy train, right? That this is a common occurrence. You're a former Marine. I got to correct myself. You're still a Marine. There are no former Marines, if I remember the teaching. I think it's a Marine Corps General Smedley Butler who said, war is a racket. He must have been talking about exactly what you're talking about. That's exactly right. General Butler, who was most decorated Marine in history, if the rules were different, he would

have had three medals of honor. He only ended up with two, but he famously decried and defined war as a racket. And his time in uniform, he wrote very eloquently, and I'll paraphrase, was that he was a muscle man for Wall Street, that his job was to go and ensure that American profits were safe abroad. And that's what you see here in many ways, not just the imperial ambitions of war, the conquest, the taking, the making sure that the world is safe for the plundering by ExxonMobil, but also, too, that the corporations that under Over half of that will go to the weapons industry, to the arms contractors, the Raytheons, the General Dynamics, et cetera. I was interviewing Governor Christie, former New Jersey Governor Christie, a Republican candidate for president the other day, and he seemed startled when I told him that we have 903, at last count, military bases around the world.

No human being could possibly name all of them. No single human being has ever been to all of them. And yet Congress votes to fund all of them. prospect that this is going to shrink? Or will it take Douglas MacGregor as Secretary of Defense or Rand Paul as President of the United States for that to happen? Well, I'm not being glib when I say if either of those men were in those positions, they'd have to wear a bulletproof vest every day. I mean, the affront of such a thing to the industry. Look, I work for the Eisenhower Media Network, of course, named after President Eisenhower. President Eisenhower's farewell address 60 years ago, more than 60 years ago, when he

warns about the dangers of the military industrial complex, he was not looking into a crystal ball. He was not making a prediction. He was stating it as it was from his perspective at the moment, what he had seen both as the Supreme ally commander of Europe and as the president of the United States for eight years, this danger of the arms industry, this danger of the corruption of the generals and that willingness to utilize whatever it takes to include sending young men and women abroad to kill and be killed in order to ensure that that cycle continues. So what we're up against is something that's

incredibly nefarious, very, very dangerous. And of course, we see that with the constant state of warfare, with the deterioration of a hollowed out American economy, with the devastation of the American role abroad, where all we can bring to other nations is war or the selling of weapons. I mean, look what's occurring in Africa these days in terms of the violence in Africa. You know, when I was getting on the Marine Corps in 2008, we were just standing up Africa Command. At that point, before we started putting all these commandos and trainers and drones into Africa, Africa was experiencing a few dozen terror attacks a year. Last year, Africa experienced 7,000 terror attacks. They had almost 20,000 people killed in terror attacks.

The idea that you line that up with the United States' objectives and the way they're pursuing those objectives by doing everything through a militarized foreign policy, you see that tragedy occur in Africa. And then, of course, then you have things such as the coup that just occurred in Niger, where American-trained Nigerian soldiers are the ones conducting the coup, which is absolutely what's been occurring year after year. Since 2008, again, since when African command stood up, there have been 11 coups in African countries conducted by African militaries that were trained by the United States. So not only is the amount of money that's being made just absolutely obscene. But the results that are coming from this are catastrophic and only predict further catastrophe. How corrupt is it for a four-star general to retire from the military, join the board of Raytheon, second largest producer of military arms in the

country, maybe in the world, I don't know, you would know, earn seven figures while he's at Raytheon, then become the Secretary of Defense. And of course, we don't know what will happen after he leaves that job. Isn't there just an inherent institutional corruption in that course of behavior, which is arguably prohibited by federal law and for which Congress granted an exemption? I'm speaking, of course, of Secretary of Defense and former General Lloyd Austin. That's absolutely the case. And our friend, Ray McGovern, who comes on your show every week, he'll talk a lot about how Austin, when Austin was in charge of Central Command, the U.S. warfighting organization for the Middle East, that he doctored intelligence, that he had a revolt of his intelligence agents, of his intelligence analysts, more than 50 of them, who said, look, the intelligence that we are giving you, you are changing it and manipulating it for your own purposes, to make the world seem as if it's to make it fit your narrative.

And so this is the type of person who then goes on to Raytheon, has that job he described, comes back in as Secretary of Defense. So do you think that kind of person is ever going to make a decision that is not going to benefit him personally or his future perspective, right? I mean, so if you ask what he's going to do next, it all depends upon how well he does for Raytheon, how well he does for Lockheed Martin, how well he does for the rest of the military industrial complex. And you see that all throughout below him. He's just at the top, but the rest of the Pentagon and to include the State Department, the CIA, because they have all their own

complexes adjacent to them, intelligence, development, what have you, that also allow for these people to go through a revolving door where their interests are not the interests of the United States, but their own personal interests and maybe to a degree institutional or parochial interests as well. What is Raytheon likely manufacturing as we speak from and as a result of this crazy policy of the governments in Ukraine? Oh, certainly you have seen the tens and tens of billions of dollars in not just weaponry and munitions that have already been sent to Ukraine, so weapons and munitions that have come out of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and navies and

air forces stocks, but also tens and tens of billions of dollars that have been ordered. So if you look at how the aid has been divided, you see about 40 some odd billion dollars in aid delivered. But there's also been about 45 billion dollars in military aid that has been ordered that will be delivered in six months, a year, two years. And so these countries are all benefiting from that. But they're also benefiting too from the NATO interest in the war. So as you see NATO members expand their military, increase their defense spending, they're ordering their products from these companies. Does the American military industrial complex produce weaponry and ammunitions directly for foreign countries?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And actually, if you look at it, Judge, U.S. military exports last year were the second biggest export of the United States. So the first was fossil fuels by a huge amount, $440 billion, $540 billion, something like that. After that, you had about $206 billion in U.S. military exports, some through our government, some directly between the weapons industry and foreign governments. And then you had agriculture at about $195 billion. So last year, the United States' second biggest export was weapons. It wasn't corn and rice and beef and the other things that you would traditionally assume with a healthy American economy. So Lloyd Austin has quite an incentive to keep us in the war. And Raytheon really has a no-lose, because if there is no Ukraine

to supply a year from now, and there probably won't be at the rate things are going, or if there is, it will be a country that will not have military weapons. Raytheon also already has built-in purchasers for that which it's making now. Right. I mean, I can guarantee you one of the things we've seen, right, is this discussion about the F-16s. And now NATO in the United States says we will train F-16 pilot, Ukrainian F-16 pilots. We still haven't seen where the F-16s are going to come from. My belief, my guess would be the delay in this is because those arrangements are still being made. So whatever countries give up their F-16s, they're going to want to get new whose entire purposes were selling weapons. So Tony Blinken, when he leaves government service in 2016 or early 2017, he starts up the West Exec. The organization called West Exec, West Executive, right? And what that whole thing is, is a conduit. These are influence traders. These are people who live and profit off of their Rolodexes.

And so it's not just confined to the Pentagon. It's throughout the entire federal government at the most senior levels. You have this relationship between the arms industry and then with the decision makers. But then also, too, this permeates into Congress as well, because you have an entire think tank industry that is funded by the arms industry. A recent study by the Quincy Institute found that of the top 10 think tanks that are based on foreign policy, all of them received defense industries funding. And of the top 50, almost all received defense industries funding. And these are the people who are going into Congress to tell members of Congress what they should think about Russia, what they should think about China, what they should think about Venezuela, etc. To add one more layer on top of this to show us how capable the defense industry is

in all of this, they ensure that their weapons are produced across the entire country. And what they will actually do is judge, say, if you were in Congress and you were not one who was normally beholden to the military industrial complex, not in favor of spending almost a trillion dollars a year on weapons and war. They would make sure that many of their plants, many of their factories, many of their employees were in your district. So it would be almost impossible politically for you to vote against them. And then they make sure all the people who are going on CNN, MSNBC, who the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, etc., are interviewing about these things are either directly or indirectly funded by them. So it's quite nefarious, but it also is, you have to give them credit, very capable.

It is very astute, very shrewd, largely not transparent, and largely corrupt. We both know a think tank that we know didn't get a nickel from the Defense Department. You may have mentioned it a few minutes ago, and that is the Quincy Institute run by our mutual friend, the great Colonel Andrew Bacevich, who obviously makes the same arguments that you and I do, and is probably a thorn in the side of his former bosses. Why is it that there is no oversight of the money going from the federal treasury to Ukraine, given Ukraine's well-established reputation as one of the most corrupt governments in the world. Why is it that Rand Paul in the Senate and Thomas Massey in the House have tried several times to get an inspector general appointed, And in the Senate, this loses. In the House, they don't even bring it to the floor for a vote. Well, in Paul's case, in Senator Paul's case, his bill or his

amendment to the defense bill got all of 20 votes. So one fifth of the Senate thought it was a good idea to have oversight. They've already appropriated $113 billion. We've already seen a number, at this point, countless news stories about where the weapons are going, how they're ending up in the black market, how they're ending up in places in Africa, you know, and back in this hemisphere. You know, so you look at it and you think you look at two and you see that there's already been a $6 billion accounting error several weeks ago, a month or so ago, the Department of Defense came out and said, you know what, we've been doing our math wrong. Our accounting's off. We actually have $6 billion more in the kitty here than we thought. And of

course, that $6 billion was was the Department of Defense's favor. So all that. But then, Judge, you know, just take a step back. Right. Why? Why can't they do this? And look at what occurred in Iraq and what occurred in Afghanistan and the theft, the failures of those wars. Because of the corruption, because of what we did in those countries, we essentially built houses of cards. If people remember in 2014, when the Islamic State makes those great advances into northern Iraq, they'd already taken western Iraq by that point, but they take Mosul and they're pushing south towards Baghdad, an existential threat to the Iraqi government. The Iraqi army, which we have built over a decade, spent thousands of American lives, tens and tens of billions of American dollars, just completely collapses, completely folds. And the Shia paramilitary forces in Iran have to basically save Baghdad from the Islamic State. The same thing then occurs in Afghanistan, where as soon as the American presence starts to be removed, particularly the American money starts to disappear, the Afghan army collapses. And you have to look at

the houses of cards built. To get back to my question, Matt, why is Congress afraid to hear what you've just said? Why is Congress afraid to have an inspector general? It's not going to decrease the amount of money that's going there. It's just going to tell the American public where it's going. It's almost as if Congress knows that Zelensky and his people are crooks and they want to line their pockets. Yeah, I believe it's a case of the emperor has no clothes. They simply do not want to have to face the reality of it. They know it. They prefer to go along with the lie.

It's easier. In the Democratic Party's case, they are taking their orders from the White House. The White House doesn't want any disruption for their Ukraine war. So they don't want any more negative commentary, negative news, negative perspective than it already has. The war is going terribly for the Americans in Ukraine, going even worse for the Ukrainians who are dying and suffering, of course. But, you know, they don't want this story. They don't want this truth out there. They don't want people to realize that this really is a racket, just like the war in Iraq was, the war in Syria was, the war in Libya was, the war in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, in the Philippines, against Mexico,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because they want to go along. I said that I used to add a gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps. He used to describe it this way all the time. You know, it's just not that these guys are on the gravy train. They're on the gravy train with biscuit wheels. I mean, things are so good for them, you know, so you go along to get along. And so you want to be the squeaky wheel that sticks to your squeaky, you know, and stick your hand up and get slapped down by the White House and the speaker and the majority leader. You know, you don't because on the same side, on the GOP side, they're just as invested in the war narrative with the exception of some members like Rand Paul, Matt Gaetz, and others. Not how long can this go on? Because I think you and I both believe that the war party is about 95% of the American Congress, irrespective of whether they have R or D after their names. How long can this go on in Ukraine?

Where do you see the Ukraine war going? What will it look like six or eight months from now? So as long as, this is what I said last year, Judge, was that if I was advising President Biden, I would tell him to get on a plane and go speak to both Zelensky and Putin directly. And to Putin, I would say, look, we have the world's reserve currency. We can keep this thing going for as long as we want. We just spent eight trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We'll do it again. And if you want to have this type of drawn out war, we can. And to Zelensky, I would tell him, look, you are wrecking and destroying your nation. You are bringing about a suffering that won't end when the last bullets stop flying.

But the thing about this is there is a wherewithal to keep this going. And it depends upon, again, the megalomania and the money is being made and the megalomania, the enjoyment of that power and the greed for more is being satiated through it, then this war can continue. I believe this war is militarily a stalemate. Ukraine, certainly, as we've seen with this offensive, cannot defeat the Ukrainian military. The only way, obviously, the Russian military, the only way they could do that would be with the introduction of a NATO army. And the same, I believe, with the Russians as well. I don't think they have the wherewithal to conquer and subjugate Ukraine a la 19th century or 20th century European war. So I think you have that stalemate, but then you also have the very real danger of outside of the front lines of the escalation. We talked about this last week with how quickly the war escalated in the Black Sea region.

And I think what you could have is you could have either a high intensity or a low intensity conflict occurring along the front lines. Maybe a bit of frozen conflict where they're not actually shooting each other, just kind of staring each other down. But the danger though, is that you have this ability for the war to continue to escalate where it becomes similar to the Iran-Iraq war, stalemate on the front lines

and the two sides turn to start bombing each other's cities. And it becomes an issue of destroying one another's cities one at a time, trying to get the other side to back down. And we know, we know from decades of this, from the American bombing of Germany, from the bombing of Japan, from the bombing of Vietnam, you know, as well as other things you can point to, that populations don't give up just because they're bombed. And very often, the reverse happens. So as you see these Ukrainian strikes into Moscow, certainly, I think the Ukrainians and NATO and Americans are saying, well, this will get people to Moscow to be afraid. This will get them to turn on the war and all force them to give up. It's not going to happen. Exactly, Judge. It's going to make them even more resilient, just as if it was to happen, the people of Ukraine would have given up because they've had their cities bombed for 18 months. So the problem, though, again, comes back to the money and the megalomania. And then, of course, you have the ever real danger of escalation and where they could go. Today, the polls are claiming that the Belarusians have invaded their airspace. If

people remember a while back last year, I think it was, an errant Ukrainian air defense missile landed in Poland. Immediately, you had officials and media all throughout Europe and the US saying, we have to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Charter. We have to get involved. Of course, when it turned out it was a Ukrainian missile, not a Russian missile, that quieted down. But there's that attitude. So very much you can see this escalate. And then, of course, there's a danger of it escalating to the point where nuclear weapons are used. Matt, a great conversation. I had so many other places I wanted to go with you and tapes I wanted to play for you, which we will do next time. But with you and tapes I wanted to play for you,

which we will do next time. But thank you for your time today. And thank you. Thank you for your insight. You're becoming a fan favorite. And I want you to tell the Judging Freedom audience where they can see you and where they can get your work. Thanks, Judge. I'm on Twitter, Matthew P. Ho. P as in Patrick. H-O-H is the last name. You can find me on Substack, Matthew Ho. And then my organization is the Eisenhower Media Network. Just Google that and it'll come up. Thank you very much, my friend. We'll see you again soon. Thank you. Morris, we get it. Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern together, 4.15 this afternoon, Eastern, right here on Judging Freedom. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!