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Col. Douglas Macgregor torches Trump over support for bill funding wars in Ukraine and Israel

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12 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

” He’s essentially throwing his principles overboard and his supporters under the bus.

If I were working for him right now and he were president I would have advised him under no circumstances to support the bill and instead focus our attention on the on the borders of the United States [and] restoring the rule of law. “

With another interview appearance, retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor has warned the United States is no longer in control of the wars it continues to fund, against overwhelming public opposition.

According to Macgregor and host Clayton Morris, a former Fox News anchor, “70 percent of the American people” now oppose sending money to fund wars present and future in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

What is more, Macgregor says that given Donald Trump’s “catastrophically stupid” support of the $95 billion funding bill passed by Congress on April 20, if he were working for Trump now he “would have to resign.”

Speaking of Trump’s approval for the bill, Macgregor said, “What he did… is essentially align himself with the money pigs in Washington who were interested in everything other than the American people.”

Macgregor’s verdict on Trump was damning:

He’s essentially throwing his principles overboard and his supporters under the bus.

If I were working for him right now and he were president I would have advised him under no circumstances to support the bill and instead focus our attention on the on the borders of the United States [and] restoring the rule of law.

So why did Trump go ahead and endorse billions more for two wars which are widely acknowledged as having been disastrous – if not genocidal – failures?

“I think Mr. Trump wants desperately to be president,” explained Macgregor. “So, he is turning to everyone and anyone who has money willing to support him and will promise to do so – whatever they’re asking.”

The retired colonel is the CEO of Our Country, Our Choice, an organization which appeals to Americans “to come together to save America.” It’s motto is “Truth sets you free,” echoing the Christian roots of the American dream which is, according to Macgregor, verging on becoming a nightmare.

Instead of supporting the funding bill, Macgregor says Trump “should have stood with the 21 members” of Congress who opposed it because, “quite frankly, most of America stands with those 21 members.”

Macgregor is aware that this is about political power, not the interests of the people – whether they be in the U.S. or in Ukraine. He is practically alone in noting that throughout the proxy war, the Ukrainian people seldom get a mention.

“No one expresses any interest in what’s happened to the Ukrainian people,” he said, before citing the horrendous toll of deaths and injuries which has devastated the Ukrainian populace.

“Ukrainians are exhausted. They’re tired of this war. They’ve lost now, we think, 600,000 dead and another million or two wounded.”

Added to these sobering figures is the fact that much of the surviving population has fled.

“Millions have left. The country is destroyed. It desperately needs peace.”

As the Washington Post claimed last December, up to “90 percent” of the money given in “aid” stays in the U.S. anyway. On April 21, the U.K.’s Financial Times concluded that the aid package “would not stop Russia.” On April 23, it reported that Ukraine now “pressures draft-age men abroad to join the war effort,” following a Politico report of last month titled “Draft-dodging plagues Ukraine as Kyiv faces acute soldier shortage.” The report cites the BBC in claiming up to “650,000 military aged men have fled the country” in the past two years, despite a law forbidding them to do so.

Former humanitarian volunteer and Catholic convert Ryan Miller told LifeSiteNews last month of how human traffickers operate freely on the Ukrainian border, preying on women and children separated by this law from their husbands and fathers.

This news portrays a grim reality behind the Ukraine flag-waving seen on the United States House floor. It is a narrative of ugly truths supporting Macgregor’s assessment of a war he has consistently claimed could never have been won. Against the notion that America must “stop Putin,” he said:

We’ve never had any option other than to accept his [Putin’s] victory because, as we said from the very beginning, Ukraine had no more chance against Russia than Mexico would have against us in the United States.

The second war funded in this package has, according to Israeli media, already ended in “total defeat.”

Israeli newspaper Haaretz published this story on April 11, “Saying What Can’t Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat”

The story by Chaim Levinson displayed a remarkable level of candor.

“The war’s aims won’t be achieved, the hostages won’t be returned through military pressure, security won’t be restored and Israel’s international ostracism won’t end.”

Macgregor shares this assessment, which he couples with a warning that “Biden is not in control” of events in the Middle East, and neither is the U.S. “Mr. Netanyahu is in control. And he cannot back down. If he does not escalate, he is finished.”

Macgregor warns that the “world has turned against Israel, we are increasingly isolated, but we are not in control. Mr. Netanyahu owns us. What do we do?”

Macgregor stressed that U.S. backing for Netanyahu is the result of his having more influence in the U.S. government than the president. This means, in effect, that the U.S. is funding a man whose only option is to escalate to war with Iran.

“Mr. Netanyahu is in a difficult position,” explains Macgregor, “we can’t help him. All we can do is tell him to back down. He can’t back down.”

“Netanyahu has to escalate or he’s finished. So I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the Israeli-Iranian confrontation.”

Warning that Netanyahu is likely going to “kill women, children, and men with no connection to Hamas in Gaza’s Rafah area,” he foresees a real potential for the outbreak of a major regional war involving the U.S.

I don’t think we’ve even seen the beginnings of what could happen in the region because, if anything, we’re seeing more and more and more solidarity across national lines inside the Muslim world.

As this develops, Macgregor claims even the Western military alliance is leaderless:

NATO is essentially a battleship with no one on the bridge and engines that don’t power the ship anymore. It’s adrift.

He says in previous years the “stupid comments” of French President Emmanuel Macron to threaten to send French troops to Ukraine would have been unimaginable. Responding to claims that French and American soldiers are now on the ground in Odessa in Ukraine, he replied, “A Russian this morning contacted me… and said that he sees no French or American troops in Odessa.”

His relief at this news was tempered by a stern reminder that such an action would lead to a U.S. war with Russia, which has the largest nuclear arsenal on earth.

I sincerely hope that that condition does not change. If it does, then I think the Russians will accelerate all of their movements and we will find ourselves at war with Russia unnecessarily.

He asks, “For what particular purpose?”

The direct funding of two major flashpoints for a global war left the host, Clayton Morris, unable to explain Trump’s support of the move.

“This rises to the level of coming out and supporting the COVID vaccines,” he said, speaking of Trump’s recent praise for the mRNA injections.

“I think there was a lot of MAGA Republicans who said ‘Wait a second – did Trump just praise COVID vacc [sic] – wait did I hear that right?’”

The news of Trump’s backing for the war funding has left Morris equally baffled, as he quoted Trump’s recent comments:

In the same week [Trump] says we’ve spent 7 to 9 trillion dollars on boondoggle wars in the Middle East… where we have blood on our hands… we’ve got nothing but blood and misery, we should have never supported those Wars.

He added, “and then four days later… supporting speaker Johnson supporting all of this money to Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan? I just can’t wrap my head around it.”

For Colonel Macgregor, this is a decision which will follow Trump long into the future.

“So we have to be realistic about this whole business. He’s let a lot of people down. I think it will come back to haunt him.”

The dangerous business of funding death no longer haunts only the politicians – like Trump and Netanyahu – who rely on it to secure their power. If Macgregor is right, the world may be engulfed in a nuclear war as a result of these bargains with the devil.

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conflict

Sec Def Austin Unveils $400 Million Arms Package For Ukraine — But One Thing Is Missing

Published on

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

 

By Jake Smith

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in Ukraine but isn’t bringing the good news Kyiv wants to hear, as the country continues to struggle to hold the front line amid Russian advances.

Austin has been intimately involved over the last two years in overseeing U.S. military aid to Ukraine, of which there has been approximately $70 billion. The Defense Secretary touched down in Ukraine on Sunday in a show of continued support and announced a new $400 million arms package, but won’t be giving Kyiv what it really wants — the ability to use U.S.-provided long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory, according to multiple reports.

The request to use the missiles for such a purpose has been something Ukraine has asked for for months; as Ukraine can’t produce such weapons, it is looking to the U.S. and Europe for help.

Austin arrived in Ukraine without signaling that the request would be filled, and that’s likely to leave Kyiv unsatisfied. The administration has been hesitant to allow Ukraine to use U.S. or European-provided missiles to conduct long-range attacks against Russia, in part because it could escalate the war and drag the U.S. further into the conflict.

“We think it is wrong that there are such steps,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in early September, according to The Washington Post. “We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the occupied territory of Ukraine but also on the Russian territory, so that Russia is motivated to seek peace.”

The idea has been frequently discussed between U.S. and Ukrainian officials but nothing has come to fruition. Austin has also previously said that he doesn’t think it would significantly improve Ukraine’s odds of victory, noting in an early September press conference that “there’s no one capability that will in and of itself be decisive in this campaign.”

Ukraine is also pressing the administration for NATO membership, but Austin had no new updates to give on that request either, according to reports. The Biden-Harris administration has said that Ukraine’s fate is eventually to join NATO but hasn’t provided a timeline for when.

However, the U.S. is providing Ukraine with $400 million worth of weapons systems, Austin announced on Monday, including munitions, armored vehicles and tanks, according to reports. The aid will certainly meet some of the needs of Ukraine’s military but is not as large as some of the prior multi-billion dollar packages.

“The United States understands the stakes here, Mr. President,” Austin told Ukrainian Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Monday, Reuters reported.

President Joe Biden’s options to help Ukraine are starting to run out as he prepares to leave office in January. Even with U.S. and European-provided military aid, it has done little more than help Ukraine maintain a defensive position against Russia, which has shown no signs of stopping its invasion campaign.

Russia launched sweeping missile and drone strikes against targets in Eastern Ukraine over the weekend ahead of Austin’s visit, according to Reuters. Ukrainian forces staged a successful incursion into regions in Western Russia at the end of the summer but Russian forces have started to retake some of the territory in recent weeks, The New York Times reported.

The odds that Biden can secure substantially more funding from Congress to aid Ukraine are slim; it was already difficult for the president to secure the last $60 billion aid package in April, as the sentiment among some lawmakers is that the administration doesn’t seem to have a plan to end the war and move Ukraine toward victory.

It will be either presidential candidates Donald Trump or Kamala Harris who will have to pick up where Biden left off. Harris would likely mirror Biden’s approach to the war and continue strong U.S. support for Ukraine’s military campaign, but some critics fear that she lacks the needed foreign policy wisdom to properly maneuver the conflict.

Trump has vowed to end the war before January if he’s elected in November, touting his ability to negotiate with both Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has also signaled he may end military aid to Ukraine in favor of seeking a peaceful settlement between Kyiv and Moscow.

Austin on Monday dismissed ideas that U.S. support for Ukraine would end if Trump were elected in November.

“I’ve seen bipartisan support for Ukraine over the last 2-1/2 years, and I fully expect that we’ll continue to see the bipartisan support from Congress,” Austin said, according to Reuters.

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Middle East War Shows No Signs Of Stopping One Year After Oct. 7 — And No Clear Path To Exit

Published on

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

 

By Jake Smith

The chaos of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel is still being felt one year later as the broader region grapples with a conflict that has shown no signs of stopping.

Hamas Oct. 7 terrorist attacks caught Israel by surprise and resulted in the murder of approximately 1,200 people and the kidnapping of hundreds of others, including American citizens. Israel retaliated and launched a war against Hamas in Gaza, which a year later has not ended but instead spilled into the broader Middle East and drawn in other bad actors such as Hezbollah and Iran.

“We’re still stuck in Oct. 7, 2023, in one unending day of terror, of fear, of anger, of despair,” Yuval Baron, an Israeli citizen whose father-in-law is still being held by Hamas in Gaza, told Reuters.

Israeli forces have largely occupied Gaza and killed thousands of Hamas operatives, largely crippling the terrorist group’s capabilities, although it has come at great humanitarian cost to the enclave, according to Reuters. The conflict has displaced millions of Palestinians and wreaked havoc across Gaza, leaving many areas uninhabitable, Bloomberg reported.

The effort to build Gaza after the fighting ends — whenever that may be — will likely be an incredibly costly venture that could take years and require joint cooperation between several Arab states, according to Bloomberg. Millions of tons of debris will have to be cleared from the enclave while buildings are repaired or replaced.

“We thought it would be two months [of fighting] — at most,”  Mohammed Shakib Hassan, a Palestinian civil servant who fled his home after Israeli forces entered Gaza last year, told The New York Times. “Twelve months have passed in front of our eyes.”

Israel, with the help of the U.S., has on several occasions made offers for a ceasefire in Gaza conditioned on the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas and the surrender of the terrorist group, but these proposals have been rejectedmultiple times. Yayha Sinwar, the leader of Hamas who has been hiding underground in Gaza, reportedly believes that he is not going to survive the war and has zero intention of reaching a ceasefire deal with Israel at this point in the conflict, according to U.S. intelligence assessments reviewed by The New York Times.

The Biden-Harris administration has spent months brokering negotiations between Israel and Hamas and working with regional mediators to try to reach a deal, but these efforts have largely been fruitless. Though President Biden has on several occasions predicted that a ceasefire could be reached in short order, his own officials now privately believe it will be near impossible to get a deal done between now and January, the end of Biden’s term.

“They’re probably not going to get one before the election, or before January either. But that’s not on them, per se. It speaks to the difficulty of how far apart [Israel and Hamas] are,” former State Department official Gabriel Noronha told the Daily Caller News Foundation in September.

There have been various roadblocks to getting a deal done. Specifically, Israel wants to leave troops along the Gaza-Egyptian border, arguing that it would stonewall Hamas from trafficking in weapons, but Hamas has rejected this term.

Though the prospects of a deal are unlikely at this point, Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza has largely come to a close as the terrorist group’s capabilities have been vastly diminished.

“Hamas is a shadow of its former self. Israel is going to continue to try to eradicate them, but it’s sort of a guerilla campaign. Hamas is being starved and smoked out. I suspect that you’re going to see Hamas go underground somewhat — more figuratively than literally at this point,” Noronha told the DCNF last month.

Instead, Israel has shifted much of its forces and focus away from Gaza and toward Lebanon, which houses the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. Hezbollah is Iran’s largest terrorist group in the Middle East and has engaged in cross-fire skirmishes with Israel since last October out of support for Hamas, displacing thousands of civilians near the Israel-Lebanon border, according to NPR.

Hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah have reached a boiling point in recent weeks, as Israel has launched sweeping airstrikes against the terrorist group in southern Lebanon and killed the group’s leader in an airstrike in late September, according to The Washington Post. Israeli forces have begun ground raids against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, in what could be the prelude to a much larger ground invasion.

The Biden-Harris Administration, along with other allies, also put forward on Sep. 26 a separate ceasefire proposal for Israel and Hezbollah, although it was seemingly ignored by both parties.

“It’s clear that Israel is determined to rid Lebanon of Hezbollah,” senior fellow at the Strauss Center and former Pentagon official Simone Ledeen told the DCNF. “They need Hezbollah to lay down their arms and surrender… the Israelis [are] really focused on getting to that objective.”

The multi-front Middle East conflict extends also to Iran, which — though it has helped orchestrate and fund the various terror attacks against Israel — made an unprecedented move in April and launched a sweeping missile strike against Israel from directly within Iran’s borders, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Iran launched a similar attack against Israel last week in the form of roughly 180 missiles, most of which were intercepted by U.S. and Israeli forces.

Israel is expected to respond with an attack directly against Iran, although the timing and nature of the move is publicly unknown. The Biden-Harris administration is helping coordinate the attack with Israel, though it wants Israel to avoidgoing after the country’s nuclear facilities.

“The launch of over 180 ballistic missiles by Tehran requires a decisive reaction to prevent future attacks,” Israeli intelligence agent Avi Melamed said in a statement on Monday. “Currently, it seems that Israel is finalizing its operational plans while the U.S. prepares munitions to defensively counter any potential Iranian counterstrike.”

The conflict extends even further into Iraq, Syria and Yemen, all hotspots for other various Iranian-backed terrorist groups that have attacked U.S. and Israeli forces in the region since last October, according to Axios. Israeli forces have launched a series in those regions, too, in recent months.

Until the current Middle East conflict comes to an end, the possibility of regional peace may be too far out of reach, even as that remains a goal for other key Arab states and Western nations. Iran’s “axis of resistance” has taken severe blows since last October, according to Axios.

But Israeli forces are stretched across multiple fronts in a conflict with no clear end game, and the Israeli people seem to be growing more and more weary of the conflict; 23% of Israelis considered leaving the country in the last year, according to a recent poll cited by Axios.

“This war won’t end because nobody is willing to blink,” Thomas Nides, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, told the Times. “In the meantime, everyone is losing — hostages and their families, innocent Palestinians, Israelis displaced from northern Israel, Lebanese civilians. And it’s truly tragic.”

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