Read the full transcript of a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter on Judging Freedom Podcast titled “Why Would US Fight in Yemen?” premiered March 24, 2025.
TRANSCRIPT:
The US Bombing Campaign in Yemen
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, March 24, 2025. Scott Ritter will be here with us in just a moment on the US Bombing Yemen and President Trump saying it was very successful and how close are we to war in the Middle East?
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JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Scott Ritter, a pleasure. My dear friend. I know we’ve talked about Yemen in the past, but the president said just a few minutes ago that the bombing in Yemen was very successful. Can you fathom what he meant by that?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, first of all, I don’t have their target list. I don’t have access to the battle damage assessment. So I’m not in a position to provide independent corroboration of what the president claims or to be able to directly contradict him. What I can say is this, knowing what I know about how this thing works, I would give it about a 98% probability that the president’s words do not reflect reality, that the situation on the ground in Yemen is far different than the situation that he has been briefed upon.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the United States Central Command has identified points on the ground and that the US Navy has put bombs on those points. And photographs show that those geographic points have achieved a certain level of battle damage. But I don’t share any confidence that those points on the ground have anything to do with deterring or destroying the Houthis’ ability to continue to carry out military operations designed to interdict shipping in the Red Sea. Or to strike targets in Israel, which should be the military mission of the United States. One would think.
Civilian Casualties and Targeting Issues
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: It’s funny you should say all that, Scott, because in an hour, we’ll be interviewing our friend Pepe Escobar live from Yemen, and he has already sent us a video, which we will share, of course. And what does the video show? Destruction of residential neighborhoods. Doesn’t show destruction of anything of any military value whatsoever. Why would CENTCOM destroy residential neighborhoods? Why would they target residential neighborhoods?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, again, I can only… First of all, the targeting of the residential neighborhoods is beyond me, unless the President, this President, President Trump, is notorious for creating liberal rules of engagement, basically untying the hands of the military so that issues of military necessity outweigh issues of collateral damage, or issues of whether or not you are getting the bang for your buck.
I mean, everybody knows in wartime, civilians pay a very heavy price. But generally speaking, the military is supposed to review targets to determine that if there are collateral casualties, that those casualties are commensurate with the military value of the target being struck. In the past, I have to tell you that the United States, at least when I was in, we would not knowingly strike a target that we knew were going to result in significant civilian casualties. We would deliberately avoid that target.
Where accidents have been made, mistakes have been made, and, of course, civilians have died in large numbers. We struck a bomb shelter in Adamiya in Baghdad during the Gulf War, killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians. But again, that was a mistake, an accident. Here, they’re striking targets, knowing what I know about Middle East procurement.
Intelligence Failures and Target Selection
A lot of the targets that are being struck, I believe, are related to the Houthis’ ability to procure materials from abroad. So you’ll have export import companies that will operate under various fronts for Yemeni intelligence. And we get a smattering of data here and there, and then we build target sets. I can tell you in Baghdad, as a weapons inspector, I inspected a number of facilities that were located in the middle of residential areas. Many of them were former homes that had been converted to export import groups that were responsible for buying military equipment from abroad. It’s the paperwork. It’s where the offices are. The equipment’s not there.
What I’m thinking is that, first of all, I don’t think the United States has a tremendous amount of hard targeting. The Yemeni have been doing this for a long time. The Houthis have been doing this since 2014. They’ve been working together with the Iranians. The Iranians are experts at going underground. I can guarantee you whatever target deck we had about the Houthi or Yemeni armed forces and bases and such is no longer valid.
I would imagine that our intelligence is out of date. I would imagine that as we bomb targets, we’re desperately looking for new targets. So we pull up old intelligence that points us to places on the ground. A lot of times I went to inspect a facility that we thought was an export import control, only to find that had been shut down a year prior or six months prior and moved to a different location. Our intelligence doesn’t update the target list.
And as we expend targets and we’ve been bombing for a long time, we run out of targets. I can tell you that. And so we go and we scrape the bottom of the barrel so we’re bombing targets that we have no confirmation. I can also guarantee you that our intelligence on the ground in Yemen is uniformly poor. The Houthis are a very insular group. We do not have the kind of penetration into the Houthi society, into their leadership, into their industry necessary to produce the kind of targeting that would be conducive to real time targeting of value.
So I believe our target decks are crap, excuse my language, and that we’re blowing up targets that don’t exist, that are incorrect. We know this because we’re killing a whole bunch of civilians.
We’re blowing up a whole bunch of targets that have nothing to do whatsoever with interdicting the Houthis’ ability to fire missiles. And these are what we call relocatable targets, mobile relocatable targets. Historically, we have tremendous problems striking these. During the Gulf War, that was my war, was to try and hunt down and kill Iraqi Scud missiles. And I can tell you, despite diverting thousands of sorties and putting men on the ground and all this, we didn’t kill a single one. And that’s what’s happening today. We’re not killing anything except innocent civilians.
Leaked Information and Iran Concerns
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, somebody who agrees with you and the President was very frustrated at this a few minutes ago. I don’t know. This person is the editor of Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg. Mr. Goldberg says officials in the Trump administration. You ready for this? Scott accidentally added him to a group text chat about strikes against the Houthis. CNN’s National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes says the text chain appears to be authentic. He was as critical of the targeting as you were, and he claims to have had accidental access to the internal decision making.
I’d like your thoughts on Mike Waltz. He was on one of his rants over the weekend. I really think these people are looking for an excuse to attack Iran. And I want to ask you about what that will do with the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
[Video clip comments from Mike Waltz about Iran’s nuclear program and US position]
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What happens if the IDF and the United States attack Iran? What will Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin do?
Russia, Iran, and Nuclear Concerns
SCOTT RITTER: Well, first of all, let me just start off by saying that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is obligated by law and by its own commitments not to have a nuclear weapons program. And as we speak, Iran hasn’t been shown to have a nuclear weapons program. In fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency, even though it decries Iranian non-compliance, it’s non-compliance with an inspection regime that was attached to the Iran nuclear deal which is no longer in place.
So when the IAEA says Iran is in non-compliance, it doesn’t mean that Iran is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. But Iran has developed certain capabilities which according to Iranian officials’ own statements, could be brought together in a very short period of time to make Iran a nuclear capable state. And this is what Donald Trump and of course Israel are worried about.
I will say that in my personal experience in negotiating with people from this region that the Trump administration is taking the absolute worst approach. The Iranians will not back down. They will not concede to threats. I do believe that there’s a window of opportunity there to get Iran to agree to reduce its uranium enrichment program, which would alleviate much of the concerns that Israel and the United States has. But we’re taking the wrong approach. And so this will lead to confrontation.
If we don’t change course, what will Russia do? Russia has a strategic framework, a security framework with Iran, but it’s not a treaty. There’s no Article 5, NATO-like protection where Russia will extend it to. But, you know, the United States is, as we speak, having parallel negotiations with the Russians where we’re trying to tell the Russians that we can be trusted, that we’re worthy partners in peace and such. And then we turn around and are pushing for a war with Iran where we have violated every agreement, where we have no legal framework to do this, no justification whatsoever to do this.
And as you pointed out, the hypocrisy of seeking to hold Iran accountable for a theoretical nuclear program on behalf of Israel, which refuses to sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has a nuclear weapons program that refuses to allow this program to be A, admitted and B, brought under inspections, the hypocrisy is unreal.
Potential for Nuclear Escalation
If we attack Iran, I think the foundation of trust between the United States and Russia will be shattered. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to move forward, but Russia would, I don’t think could ever trust the Trump administration, nor could anybody in the world. We want to have good relations with China, we’ll destroy that. We will become literally that which Donald Trump said he didn’t want us to become. A warmongering nation going out in search of enemies, getting ourselves bogged down, and yet another Middle East conflict that kills hundreds of thousands, costs trillions, and this one could dangerously go nuclear.
The potential for escalation to the use of nuclear weapons is real because as Donald Trump himself knows and as Mike Waltz knows, when Trump was president, last time they did consider striking Iran. And one of the problems they faced was that our conventional weapons cannot penetrate Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. So in order to take out Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, we would need deep penetration, low yield nuclear weapons, which Donald Trump ordered to be built and deployed.
And today these weapons are deployed and I believe are part of any targeting package that we’re preparing to use against Iran. Which would mean that striking Iran isn’t just ripping up treaties. It means that the United States will break the taboo that’s been in place since Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the use of nuclear weapons. And we will become, by definition, the worst Nation in the world, the most evil nation in the world. The nation that can not only not be trusted by anybody, but should be viewed as an enemy by everybody. And that’s not a good place to be.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Does Mike Waltz know what he’s talking about when he says Iran is in the worst place it’s been in from its own national security since 1979? He seems to think that Iran would be would roll over if the Israelis and the Americans attacked.
Mike Waltz and Israeli Intelligence
SCOTT RITTER: Mike Waltz is repeating Israeli intelligence. This is an Israeli-based assessment that reflects what happened in Syria. We still don’t know exactly how the Assad regime fell. We do know that the CIA, working with Israeli intelligence and a variety of other intelligence agencies had been working to bring down the Assad regime. We also know that the CIA with Israeli intelligence, British intelligence, others had been working for decades to bring down the regime in Tehran.
We know that in 2023, the summer of 2023, they actually executed a regime change plan bringing a number of various groups to rise up against the regime after the death of the Kurdish girl in police custody. I spoke with then president, former President Raisi in September of 2023 and he said that that uprising was the greatest threat to Iranian security since the revolution, since 1979. But here’s the important thing. They beat it. They gathered together, they rallied and they defeated it.
I think Mike Waltz is buying into an assessment that’s derived more from what he desires the situation to be than what the reality is. Maybe they know what they’re talking about. Maybe the regime is nothing but a house of cards and if you huff and you puff and you blow, it will come tumbling down like Assad did. Nobody predicted Assad doing that. So you can’t say that Waltz and others are totally off base because we have a precedent that just took place in December.
But what I would say is that it’s very dangerous to predicate your aggressive stance on Iran on the notion that this regime will collapse because the history shows that it didn’t collapse and they have a lot of weapons. This isn’t Syria, weakened nation, weakened military, etc. This is Iran with significant military power, power capable, as they’ve proven, of striking and destroying any American military base in the region. I just have to bring up the Al Assad air base that got hit with a dozen precision guided missiles that hit exactly what they wanted. And had the Iranians not warned us about this attack would have killed hundreds of Americans.
And Israel knows that their air defense shield doesn’t work. The other thing is Mike Waltz is perpetrating yet another Israeli hype, which is that Israel somehow destroyed Iran’s air defense systems in their brief little limited strike in the aftermath of True Promise two, no evidence has been put on the table to back this up. The Iranians don’t act as if that took place. The Israelis have provided no photographs or anything to back this up, nor has the United States.
I think a lot of what Israel and the United States are seeking to do is play psychological warfare right now to make the Iranian regime unsure of itself and maybe therefore more conducive to engage in negotiations. And the last thing I’ll say is this. Iran will never sit down with the United States led by Donald Trump that’s behaving in this fashion. Iran will not respond to this. What Iran will do is talk to the Russians and the Chinese. If Trump had a brain on his head, he would know that the Russians have actually set Iran up to achieve exactly the outcome that Donald Trump wants. But he’s not going to give them a chance.
By this blustering attitude, the Houthis have withstood the American attacks and Iran will withstand the American attacks. The difference is the Houthis can’t strike back the way Iran can. Israel will pay an extraordinarily heavy price. So will the American military, and sadly, so will the Iranian people, especially if we use nuclear weapons.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, the American people are not being served well by Mike Waltz when all he does is mouth the Mossad propaganda. Which is the greater threat to peace in the Middle East? Iran or Israel? That’s a no brainer.
SCOTT RITTER: Israel. Israel is the greatest threat to peace and security in the world today. In the world today. Not just in the Middle East. In the world.
The Human Cost of War
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Over the weekend, the Hamas Health ministry announced that 50,000 people have been killed by the IDF. The number didn’t faze anybody, except of course, the families whose loved ones died. Are we so attuned to Israeli slaughter that a number of that magnitude doesn’t even make the front pages?
SCOTT RITTER: Judge, it’s not Israeli slaughter. We’re attuned to white people killing brown people. I’m just going to cut it down. When Madeleine Albright back in the 1990s, I think 1995, 1996, was confronted by CBS News about 500,000 Iraqi children dying because of the sanctions the United States put on, she said, it’s a price we’re willing to pay. Now just imagine that an American Secretary of State saying it’s a price we’re willing to pay about 500,000 children dying directly because of our policies.
If these were 500,000 Kosovo children or Albanians or white kids from Europe, America would be up in arms. The world would be up in arms because you can’t kill that many white people. You’re not allowed to kill that many white people unless they’re Ukrainians. And then apparently you can kill 1.1 million of them. But those are soldiers, not civilians.
The idea of going in and bombing white civilians and killing them in these numbers is unacceptable. We do it to brown people all the time. We don’t view brown people as being human beings. It’s just God’s honest truth here in America. We don’t. We don’t equate black lives to be the equivalent of white lives. We’re used to having black health figures skewed out. Again, we say, well, that’s just their problem. Their problem. They’re human beings. It’s our problem, a collective problem.
It’s the same thing we have when it comes to Arab Americans. We don’t care. We can slaughter them by the millions, and we don’t care because, my God, you know, and I would sadly say if we ever went to war south of the border, we have zero regard for Mexican lives or any brown lives. If you’re not white, your life doesn’t count. And I’m just being blunt, straight up, honest.
The American people, people can get mad at me and say I’m wrong. Look in the mirror and tell me I’m wrong. Tell me that you know deep inside your heart that a dead brown person doesn’t move you like a dead white person does. Because we are an inherently racist society. Because we still believe in white supremacy. We still believe in the exceptionalism of being white, that somehow we are superior to others and we’re not.
We have had the benefit of history. We’ve had the benefit of opportunity to where we do populate the upper tiers of society. But that’s not because the color makes us inherently better. It’s because the color has been attached to policies that have put the other people down, allowing us to rise to the top. And it translates into foreign policy. We would not allow Americans to bomb white people the way we’re bombing Yemenis. And we wouldn’t allow Americans to talk about putting nuclear weapons on nations populated by white people the way we’re talking about the potential of nuclear.
And I have to tell you, the whole Iraq Experience exposed the racism of the United States. We just allowed that nation to be eviscerated, gutted, slaughtered, murdered, and nobody blinked an eye. The numbers just didn’t cause any concern on the part of America. 500,000 Iraqi children, that’s a price we’re willing to pay. And if any American is okay with that or doesn’t condemn it, we now know what the problem is.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right, right, right. I mean, history teaches that the analysis you just gave us is sadly a correct one. We don’t even have to go back through all the historical examples of this. When President Trump said, we’ll turn Gaza into Riviera in the Middle east and we’ll just find another place for these people to live, your argument is this would never happen if the Gazans were white.
SCOTT RITTER: If we said we’re going to turn Odessa into the Riviera, we’ll just find a way to put those 5 million white Ukrainians, we’ll displace them. We don’t care. Wouldn’t happen. Wouldn’t happen. We don’t treat white people the way we treat brown people.
Preparing for War with Iran
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Are we preparing for war with Iran?
SCOTT RITTER: Oh, yes, we’ve been preparing for a long time now. Central Command has plans, Judge. We’ve been preparing forever. When I was in the Marines back in 1985, the summer of 85, I got a commendation because I rewrote the combat intelligence plan for the war plan to go into Iran. The war plan that we executed during Desert Storm was a modification of the war plan that would be used to flow in military equipment if we were, for instance, instead of landing in Saudi ports, if we were going to land in Bandar Abbas or Chabahar after forcefully taking them.
We’ve been planning this and updating this war plan forever. It’s one of the oldest war plans we have on the books. It’s right up there with Korea. And so, yeah, I think the problem is we don’t have the resources to execute. I can guarantee you we don’t have the resources today to execute the war plan that I was working on back in the 1980s because that required hundreds of thousands of American forces to be flowed into the region, thousands of aircraft, ships that we don’t have anymore.
That’s one of the problems, is that we’re preparing for something that we can’t execute properly. And Trump again was briefed on this. Back when he was first president, he was threatening to bomb targets in Iran. He was told by his secretary of defense at time Mattis, that if he bombs them and it becomes a regional war, the United States, in order to prevail, would have to deploy, you know, 400 to 700,000 troops into the region that we don’t have. It would take months, if not years to mobilize those troops, and then we’d have to bring them into the region.
And again, I want to remind people that we went to Desert Storm or even when we invaded Iraq in 2003, our troops offloaded on the ports that weren’t under fire. We landed at airports that weren’t under fire, trying to move hundreds of thousands of American forces into the Persian Gulf region. Today, every airfield we would land in would be destroyed or under attack. Every port facility we tried to offload on would be under missile attack. Our ships would be attacked as they closed in a completely different scenario.
So, yeah, I think we’re preparing for war, but I also have to say we’re not prepared for the war that we’re preparing for.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Scott Ritter, thank you, my friend. Thank you for an extraordinary analysis from historical, military and moral perspective as only you can give us all the best. We’ll see you again soon.
SCOTT RITTER: Thank you.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Of course. Wow. Extraordinary interview with extraordinary courage from a terrific human being. Coming up at 4:00 live from Yemen with photos of the civilian neighborhoods destroyed by American bombs. Pepe Escobar, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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