AMB Chas Freeman : Will Iran Get What It Wants?

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1:01And did I mention that iconic purple shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world? That's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It also helps boost conversions, meaning less carts going abandoned and more sales for you. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash freedom. Go to shopify.com slash freedom. That's shopify.com slash freedom. Undeclared wars are commonplace. Gradually our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood

2:02and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi everyone, Jadjandran Apolitano here for judging freedom today is Tuesday, April 7th, 2026 Ambassador Chadz Freeman joins us now. Ambassador thank you very much, always a pleasure to chat with you. We now know from internal sources, not from CIA leaks that the weekend rescue

3:04of an as yet unnamed kernel, not as the pilot but in the rear of a jet was the unexpectedly happy ending of an enormous undertaking that went wrong. We know that the kernel was commanding an effort to invade and capture the nuclear enriched material at Isfahar. The government of course wants us to think that the kernel was shot down in another place and it just happened to be a kernel looking to see how his lieutenant was flying. I don't know who's going to believe that. What's your take on all of this? Remind you, is that you were once deputy secretary of defense. Yes, I think it's pretty obvious that the scale of the operation and the number of troops involved and so forth was vastly in excess of what would have been normally a month to retrieve a downed

4:11pilot or in this case a weapons officer from an F-15 that had been shot down. I think basically we had tremendous success for which we should all be grateful and out of our military achieving it, retrieving this injured man from an apparent hiding place in a in a cleft in the mountains. But it's pretty clear that the operation used the recovery of that pilot as a cover for a much larger purpose which was to identify and locate and steal take I guess the enriched uranium that we believe was stored in his farm or somewhere near it and it didn't go terribly well. We did get the pilot these weapons officer back which as I said is quite an achievement then we should be justly acting over that but the rest of it went badly around with the destruction

5:20of a number of aircraft casualties and by the way it is quite apparent if you talk to people in the region as I have done recently that there is a massive cover up of the number of American dead and wounded in this this operation. I don't think we have an accounting for what actually happened in those terms on this particular operation. Larry Johnson says that a female pilot was either captured injured or killed in this entire operation. The movement into Iran and then that movement turned into a rescue operation for the colonel. From your own experience how unusual would it be for a colonel to be flying number two to a lieutenant in a jet pilot unless the colonel

6:25had vastly more responsibilities to address than just that plane in which he was flying? Well it would be very unusual indeed to have ranks reversed in that manner so that does add to the case that this was something a great deal more than what it has been portrayed as. I'm surprised that Larry Johnson says there is a female officer who has been taken captive. I thought he'd hexeth had gotten rid of all the women in the health service. Hankseth's stupid rules of engagement are front and center today because the president is threatening war crimes. So Hankseth's characterization of something as profound as the Geneva conventions

7:27written in response to what American Soviet French and British prosecutors learned that the Nuremberg trials written largely by Swiss and American legal experts signed by president Truman ratified by the United States Senate. I mean I don't have to go through the history of history as long and well established and yet in one stroke the president has authorized his secretary of defense to call himself the secretary of war to disregard these things. Would it be a war crime for American forces to target power plants in Iran? Yes and it should evoke the Nuremberg rules and require our military to disobey those orders not to execute them. I mean the idea that international law equals stupid rules of engagement is

8:29itself monstrous but the attack on power plants and desalination whereby the way the president seems to be utterly misinformed is clearly a war crime. There's no question about it and I know no serious lawyer who would consider it anything else. The misinformation or disinformation about desalination is simple. Iran is about 2% dependent on desalination. It depended in places like Peshawm Island which is just off under a bus the main port in the state of Hormuz. There's some 30 villages there that were deprived of water by an American strike on the desalination. But by contrast with Iran which is minimally dependent on desalination

9:30its neighbors across the Gulf are so-called allies. Kuwait for example 90% dependent on desalination. The one of the main desalination plants in it Kuwait has been struck taking out about 38% of Kuwait's water supply. The Iranians say they didn't do it and the Kuwaitis have every reason to believe that it was in fact a false flag operation by Israel which has never had a good relationship with Kuwait but would like to get Kuwait and the other members of the Gulf Operation Council into the war on its side. Israel's also amounting quite an extensive disinformation campaign alleging that the Saudis are aligned with the United Arab Emirates the UAE in arguing for doubling down on this war. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Of course

10:30everyone in the Gulf is concerned not just about the immediate consequences of the spread of this war, not just about the obvious retaliation against their power plants that Iran will carry out if we actually go through with our criminal intention in striking Iranian power plants. But they're also concerned they're much more concerned about the long term. In the UAE for example argues that well no outcome to this war that leaves Iranian abilities to attack the Gulf countries intact is acceptable but there is no outcome to this war that would not leave Iran capable of that. So there's a certain logic here that is developing their rumors perhaps false that Qatar has joined China, India, Japan and others Turkey

11:30in working out an arrangement with Iran to allow its exports to go through the straight of our moves. Apparently if that is the case if those discussions are going on they're not complete because two gothary gas carriers, natural gas carriers made for the straight and then turned around obviously not allowed pass through it. So there's a lot going on under the surface but I think people in the region are beginning to focus on the long term and they don't like what they see as the consequences. Let's go back to the events of the weekend and let's assume for the sake of this conversation that in the Ishvahar facility was a substantial amount of Iran's enriched uranium material. Is it now safe? Now that the Iranians know what the

12:31Americans would do in an effort to get it, is this project now off the table? Well the project is obviously not off the table quite the contrary. The effort to cripple the Iranian nuclear program has in fact galvanized it. Iran will now build a nuclear weapon and put it on the missile capable of striking Israel and eventually it will probably build an ICBM to deliver it to us just as North Korea did and for the same reasons that this is the only way you can apparently survive in a world where international law does not in immigration and where even standards of decency are ignored. I mean we are looking at the extension to Iran of military doctrines developed by Israel now adopted by us in Gaza in southern Lebanon.

13:31And that is a doctrine which Dan Steinbock, a critic of dynism has justly called the obliteration doctrine. The idea that you don't seek a political solution to problems through persuading your adversary to negotiate you simply murder your adversary. So we have some 250 Israel claims. It has assassinated some 250 senior Iranian officials. One wonders if 250 Israeli officials were assassinated by Iran whether they would consider that or they justifiable as retribution or as simply another instance of quote anti-semitism. Unquote. I'm going to play a clip for you put together originally by my friend and colleague Tucker Carlson and edited somewhat by Chris. This includes a horrific statement by Mark Levin

14:41urging the president of the United States to use nuclear weapons on Iran and of course Tucker's inimitable surgical response to what Mark Levin said. But some of the things that Levin said and the president's encouragement of Americans to watch Levin's show is horrifying. This is about a minute and a half long it's riveting. You got to sort of hope to keep your breakfast down while we listen to Mr. Levin. But here we go. Chris number seven. The Battle of Okinawa 50,000 plus casualties over 12,000 nearly 13,000 killed on that island which is what convinced Truman that we would lose a million men if we didn't drop the atomic bombs that we did. So this is a war, a peace mission to stop nuclear weapons that can blow away millions of Americans.

15:48Embedded in there are some of you need to know it's an argument that is being test driven and since no one to our knowledge is pushed back against it may be in full operation now it's an argument for nuclear weapons. Here's what he said nearly 10% of all casualties in the second world war happened in the Battle of the Bulge which of course at the end of the war. The Battle of Okinawa 50,000 casualties nearly 13,000 killed on that island which is what convinced Truman, Harry Truman, that then President 1945, we'd lose a million men if we didn't drop the atomic bombs that we did. Did you hear that? That's Mark Levin's counsel to our sitting President Donald Trump right now. You are looking at a choice between the catastrophic loss of your troops in a ground war or the use of nuclear weapons which in a sense if you think about it just think about it for a second it's actually an act of peace. It's an act of peace. The most humane thing you could do is to end this now with nuclear weapons. That's the case Mark Levin is making

16:53to the President who just last week recommended that all Americans watch Mark Levin show. Okay. This is not like crazy dot connecting here. This is one to one. This is really obvious where we're moving. And again we're moving toward the use of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction possibly nuclear weapons. What do you think Ambassador? Well that is truly horrifying. I'm sorry to say that it's part of the process of deliberately erosion of what was called the nuclear allergy. The recognition that another use of nuclear weapons would open their use openly possibility that they would become a regular feature of warfare. And in the context of Iran there are two obvious issues. One is of course that nobody really is arguing for a ground war

17:59unlike Japan which attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Iran has not attacked us. In fact if you go back and look for evidence of Iranian attacks on Americans you have to go back to the early mid-80s to find anything. We have had incidents in the United States including for example of the Lebanese man in Michigan who attacked a synagogue which are called inspired by Husbal or Iran. The man's family had been wiped out a couple of days earlier by the Israelis and I think that's utterly preposterous. But in any event we are planning a major we are engaged in a major nuclear modernization with a view to fighting a nuclear war with China. And China has responded by building its own much more massive nuclear force and adopting our doctrine of mutual assured instruction.

18:59So the direction of this isn't it is going wrong man. The fact that someone can seriously argue that circumstances in the Persian Gulf don't justify the first to use since World War II of nuclear weapons against a population which is entirely innocent and which we in fact claimed initially we were arriving to enable them to struggle for their freedom and against a government that we don't like and they don't like them. So this is really just utterly unacceptable and the fact that the president would urge that Americans watch such stuff is a mark of how low we have fallen morally in this country. What has this war achieved so far for Trump? regime change?

19:59No. Confiscation or destruction of nuclear materials? No. Confiscation or removal of ballistic missiles? No. Open or moose as it was before the war? No. What has Trump achieved? Well he's actually enabling Iran to achieve some things. So first of all we've lifted the sanctions on Iran in oil exports which has been a long-term objective of the Iranians. Second we haven't effect recognized or acknowledged Iranian control of the straight of our moves. We're not going through it. The president has said he understands that we can't open it militarily. We need to find some other way to do it. His preferred course evidently follows his own experience as a real estate mogul in New York. That is he learned two things in that earlier experience. One that

21:06if you have Roy Cohn as a kind of attack dog, one of the most despicable human beings, every walk of the planet, you can achieve deals through coercion. You don't have to be nice. You apply every dirty trick you can think of and if you are resisted, you resort to the courts, you bankrupt your opponent. The second thing he learned was that if you fail which you did on numerous occasions, six bankruptcies, you go bankrupt, you defile bankruptcy, you walk away with no obligations. So what he seems to be doing now is the combination of these things. I want to mention if I could, one of the consequences of saying on the one hand, we can't open the straight militarily. You must find a way to do that. On the other hand,

22:06the reality is that the countries in the Gulf, the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, really cancer and Saudi Arabia can't survive without access to that straight for their exports and the imports. So basically what he said is a syllogism. Okay, I recognize you, everybody is dependent on that straight and it needs to be open somehow. Okay, I can't do it militarily. You can do it diplomatically. You can make a deal with Iran. They're willing to do a deal if you get rid of the American forces on your territory. They will provide you with a code to allow your ships through and you won't have a problem. You just pay a fee in Iran and re-also Chinese currency and you're clear. So three, you damn well

23:08better do and negotiate a deal with Iran. It was inadvertently by threatening the use of forth in this context. He has incentivized everyone to employ diplomacy to solve a problem against himself. Wow, here's an interesting montage of someone you know and I doubt you got along with Paul Wolfowitz. Yeah, there's an email out of the past and President Trump, Chris, cut number 11. Iranian people, when they don't hear bombs go up, they're upset. They want to hear bombs because they want to be free. They are just unanimous in their hope that we will help to liberate Iran. These are Arabs, 23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world who are going to welcome us as liberators. The notion that we're going to earn more enemies by going in and getting rid of what every Arab knows is one of the worst tyrants and they have many governing them is just nonsense. To the contrary, we'll have millions of people witnessing on our

24:12behalf. It'll be a great step forward. How profoundly erroneous he was. Well, I can't believe, I think we can be quite sure that the intelligence community did advise the President that he's utterly wrong about in his thesis that somehow rather bombing people leads them to embrace you rather than hate you. And in the case of Iran, much like the case of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, there may be many people who fear and loathe both the leader and the system. But if you attack their homeland, they care more about that than they do about the regime. We have and we have discredited that notion thoroughly. There was a huge effort, the President even admits that we tried to get weapons to the violent protesters against the Iranian government.

25:20That effort, which was most also discussed openly, failed. That is to say, protests engineered by the Secretary of the Treasury who claims credit for crashing the Iranian currency were turned violent by agents of influence when we aren't. And that didn't work. So there's absolutely no basis for imagining that Iranians, much as many of them may admire the United States as it used to be, would want us to come in and take over, or would want to pitch late to the United States. There's going to be a negotiation of some sort. At the end of this, that's the normal way wars end. That is how the defeated are reconciled to their defeat. At the moment, it does not look like the defeated will be Iran. It looks like it could be us.

26:22Ambassador, thank you very much. Tough days, dark days, and probably going to get darker, who knows what Trump will do next. I just hope he doesn't listen to that character, live in, and thank you for your patience who listening to him. All the best to you, Ambassador. Thank you for what you do, Judge. Thank you. Coming up later today, if you're watching us live in 34 minutes at 9 o'clock this morning, Professor John Meersheimer at 10 o'clock this morning, Colonel Bill Astory at 2 this afternoon, Matt Ho, at 3 this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kutkowski, Judge the Lieutenant for Judging Freedom.