Judge Andrew Napolitano: Biden Doesn’t Have Coherent Strategy in Ukraine
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The Biden Administration’s Ukraine strategy is increasingly disconnected from political and military realities on the ground, Judge Andrew Napolitano told Sputnik's New Rules podcast.
"Joe Biden cannot articulate what the goal of the American military involvement [in Ukraine] is," Judge Andrew Napolitano, former New Jersey superior court judge and host of the Judging Freedom podcast, told Sputnik. "The neocons around him just love the concept of war, particularly war against Russia, particularly against Russia while Vladimir Putin is in office."
Delusional Neocons Set Biden's Ukraine Agenda
The US has been involved in the Ukraine conflict for 17 months and has already transferred over $68 billion. Nevertheless, Kiev cannot boast any considerable progress on the ground with their much-discussed counteroffensive having eventually stalled. As the conflict is continuing to drag on, Biden administration officials and the US president are still asserting to Kiev that Washington will support it "as long as it takes."
"If you ask him, as long as it takes to do what he can't answer the 'To do what?' As long as it takes to produce a stalemate? As long as it takes to produce a cease fire? As long as it takes, if you ask Victoria Nuland, to drive President Putin from office? I mean, they can't answer that question," Napolitano noted.
The Ukraine conflict has been presented in the Western mainstream press as a way to bleed Russia dry and drain President Vladimir Putin's "political standing with the Russian people," the judge opined.
In February 2023, President Biden made a claim in front of a Polish crowd that suggested he wanted to see the Russian president deposed: "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power," Biden stated. The White House later downplayed this rally cry as a gaffe.
Still, what Team Biden and their neocon allies "don't understand is that President Putin is enormously popular, that he's fighting a patriotic war for a return of land, for which there is a valid legal argument, it has always been a part of Russia, culturally a part of Russia, linguistically a part of Russia," according to Napolitano.
"They think they can use Ukraine as a battering ram to drive President Putin from office. They're crazy. It's not going to work. Joe Biden does not have an off ramp. He doesn't have the ability to say, okay, we've we've succeeded. It's time for us to stop. There's no goal and there's no off ramp. His internal goal is to run for reelection as a wartime president like his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1940. But this is not a war like World War Two. This is not a war that the American public perceives as a threat to American national security. All the politicians will argue that. But they're so tied up with the military industrial complex that, you know, you have a majority in the Congress, Republicans and Democrats, that like all wars because it enriches the military industrial complex and keeps people working in the factories."
What's more, there is no American national security interest at stake in Ukraine, despite US neocons arguing to the contrary, according to the judge.
US war hawks are continuing to claim that Washington's military aid to Kiev is a great investment since Russia is being bashed without American lives being lost. "The Russians are dying. The best money we've ever spent," as US Senator Lindsey Graham said back in May. As long as no American body bags are coming home, the public is buying into this argument.
Still, it's no longer a secret that a limited contingent of US servicemen has been operating on the ground in Ukraine. "We know the US military is there in Ukraine out of uniform. We know it is there in Poland, operating equipment that is shooting projectiles at Russian boys," noted the judge. US mercenaries have also joined Ukrainian battalions on the battlefield.
And these Americans are dying in Ukraine: a sad statistic has already found its way out, indicating that dozens if not hundreds of US citizens have been killed in the conflict zone since February 2022.
Dissent is Brewing Within the US Military and Intel Community
Meanwhile, the US president and his administration are continuing to assert to the American public that Russia is losing and that Ukraine is going to prevail.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently insisted that Russia had "already lost" while speaking to an American broadcaster. However, this triumphalist stance is not unanimously shared by US Department of Defense officials and the US intelligence community. The so-called Pentagon leak – that caught the headlines in April – shed some light on what the US military and spies really think about the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
"There is a 21 year old young Massachusetts National Guardsman sitting in a federal jail cell as we speak, named Jack Teixeira, who is accused of leaking secret documents - to which he had access by virtue of his work in the National Guard - to a chat room," said Napolitano.
"The documents, the authenticity and accuracy of which have never been challenged by the government, reveal the government's own internal deliberations as showing it expects Ukraine to lose. To lose. So if the Department of Defense expects Ukraine to lose and the Secretary of Defense goes before a Senate committee and says under oath 'Ukraine is going to win', who are you going to believe? You're going to believe their candid, unvarnished statements recorded in documents that they believed would forever remain secret."
28 July 2023, 16:39 GMT
Prior to the scandalous leak, American army and intelligence veterans voiced their skepticism with regard to Biden's Ukraine strategy in their podcasts or interviews with alternative media.
"On my podcast, Judging Freedom, where we have a number of ex-CIA and ex-military harshly critical of the current CIA and the current US government, who are, I believe, giving a far more accurate version of what's happening there," Napolitano pointed out, referring to former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter, retired US Army colonel and government official Douglas Macgregor, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson and ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern. All of them have stated loud and clear that "it is inconceivable that the Ukraine military can prevail," the judge underscored.
On top of that, it has been almost impossible for the US and NATO military officials to ignore massive casualties sustained by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in terms of military equipment and manpower since the beginning of their counteroffensive.
As of mid-July, Ukraine had lost 26,000 servicemen, 21 airplanes, five helicopters, some 1,244 tanks and armored vehicles, including 17 Leopard tanks, five French AMX wheeled tanks, 914 units of special vehicles, two air defense systems, and 25 MLRS vehicles, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Thus, unsurprisingly, Western leaders in private conversations cast doubt on Kiev's odds of winning at the recent Aspen Security Forum despite publicly trying to put a positive spin on Ukraine’s military efforts.
Why is US Public Buying Into Biden's Ukraine Narrative?
Meanwhile, the Western mainstream press has been busy spreading the one-sided Biden administration's Ukraine narrative since the outset of the conflict. Judging from polls, most of the public in the West appear to have swallowed the bait.
"The American public still seems to be in favor of the war. Again, they only hear one side," highlighted the judge.
"While the Biden administration, through the American Central Intelligence Agency and British MI6, has succeeded in taming the press," continued Napolitano. "So the press and the American media, even my friends and former colleagues at Fox, are giving a version of these events which is not based in reality on the ground. The version of events that Americans are getting is that the so-called spring offensive, even though we're now in the middle of the summer, is slow, methodical, but but a steady movement eastward by the Ukrainian forces, Whereas in reality, as you just pointed out, the Russian military has established three runs of defenses and the Ukrainians haven't even approached, much less breached the first of those three rings. So the American public is not getting a true and accurate view of the so-called spring effect offensive from mainstream media."
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What's making the West's Ukraine narrative even less credible is that there are very few American journalists on the ground, according to the judge.
"The military won't allow them there, Napolitano said. "The Ukrainians won't allow them there. They don't want the true story to be told. So the American public hears that same drumbeat over and over and over again, which you so nicely articulated. But in reality, it is not our war, it is not our fight. We shouldn't be losing any blood and we shouldn't be losing any money over it. And we are losing."
In addition, most US presidential candidates from both sides of America's political aisle are also promoting the US proxy war in Ukraine. Just two major candidates – Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – are against the conflict. "Everybody else is lockstep in favor of it for a variety of what I think are nonsensical reasons," Sputnik's interlocutor added.
However, over the past two weeks or so, a growing number of mainstream media outlets have started to release unflattering reports about the Ukraine situation on the front lines. They are even publishing interviews with Ukrainian soldiers where they talk about how this counteroffensive is not exactly going to plan. This could be a harbinger of some potential change, according to the judge, even though Team Biden is still wearing a brave face.
"It's very telling that that is beginning to happen. So that would mean the president's political advisers are taking polls saying the American public's getting tired of this war. There doesn't seem to be any progress. We need an off ramp. The off ramp is not going to come all at once. The off ramp is going to come gradually and slowly with the American public acclimated to the coming off ramp. If if the Biden administration were to say, that's it, we're not involved anymore, well then everybody would say, what about the $68 billion already spent? Are we going to get that back. I mean, was it wasted? What was accomplished by it? So in order to prevent that kind of a blowback, they need this gradual acclimation to the likelihood of Russian success and Ukrainian defeat," Napolitano concluded.
