What If?

I am not a believer in elaborate conspiracy theories. When the far left wackos tried to make the case that George Bush was intentionally ruining America, I laughed. I also laughed when the far right wackos accused Bill Clinton of outlandish intent. I am confident that Clinton would have pulled the trigger when he had Osama in the crosshairs had he known what was to come. Bush was not a conservative president. His decision to push for TARP1 was a disappointment. Both of these presidents made mistakes. I believe that each came to work each day with the intent of doing good. Neither approached their day thinking of how they could screw up the country. Intentions were pure. Approach, strategies, and sometime their decisions were flawed.

I am having an increasingly difficult time maintaining this mindset under the current presidency. Obama’s programs and decisions are very difficult to explain. While I would agree that he is doing nothing that he did not communicate during the campaigns, the totality of his spending and certain decisions that border on the irrational make his intent hard to square with the well being of America. So if his intent is not to improve America, what is it? Let me pose a hypothetical.

Let’s start with Gulf War 1, Desert Storm. Despite Hussein’s threats of how, if invaded, he would turn the country red with American blood, the truth was far different. The Iraqi army was decimated. The short-lived war was a clinic in proper battle strategy, planning and execution. The American losses were in the low hundreds (even lower except for a lucky SCUD strike), while Iraqi losses were in the hundreds of thousands. Trenches dug to slow American armor became mass graves for the Iraqi army. Aircraft pounded, softened and demoralized a poorly equipped Iraqi army that surrendered in mass. It was a turkey shoot for the better trained and equipped coalition forces.

Militant Islamic, such as Osama bin Laden and his fanatic ilk, certainly would have notice the vastly superior military might of the USA. It no doubt became apparent that battling America head on would never be a successful strategy. So without a military option, they would only have individual terrorist acts as a tool to defeat America. America is an expansive country with millions of people. They would never be able to inflict significant damage to American civilians on American turf. Even if they tried this approach, the resilience of the American people would have risen to defeat them. They were left with no feasible strategy to defeat America through violence. So what if they moved in a completely different direction, such as attacking the US economy? How could that be done? After all, America’s military might is a product of its economic might. Just as American defeated the USSR during the cold war, if you cause the collapse of the American economy, you defeat the military. You would also demoralize the American people as their wealth and way of lives evaporate.

The attacks of 9/11 were definitely terrorist attacks, but what if the true intent was not to generate terror, but instead to collapse the US economy? The twin towers were the hub of our capitalist system. The actual damage from the attacks did close our markets for a week. The architect of 9/11 may have thought their attack was enough to cripple the US economy. However the behemoth economy, largest in the world, could recover. While personal wealth did suffer, (and continues to), the markets rebounded and began a slow recovery. The 9/11 terrorists had vastly underestimated what would be required to kill our economy. So they went back to the drawing board.

Next they decided on a play taken from the communist playbook. The USSR had long worked to place their agents into high positions within the US government. The CIA had Aldridge Ames, and there were others. During the cold war, rumors of communist congressmen and other high ranking officials abounded. McCarthyism was a product of these rumors. The damage caused by a single communist agent in a prominent position would be massive. If Islamic terrorists could recruit a rising star in American politics that also happens to be Muslim, they would have a weapon that would potentially bring down the US economy. What if Barrack Obama was that politician they found and recruited?

Beyond their wildest dreams, this Chicago community organizer gains an important ally in the mainstream media and begins a climb to the state house, the Senate, and finally the Presidency. The potential of this attacker could be greater that a nuclear bomb in every major US city. As president, the strategy is developed. First, relieve the pressure overseas by pulling troops out of the country the terrorist use as home base. Second, disembowel the intelligence community by removing every tool (Patriot Act, Guantanamo) that has proven successful in identifying Al Qaeda members and their plots since the attacks of 9/11. And finally, take the kill shot by running the US debt load to unsupportable levels. With a quadrupling of the yearly deficit and a doubling of the overall debt, this one act has the potential of bankrupting US credit. If we cannot get loans, we cannot fund the military. Without the military we are venerable to many outside enemies.

So what do you think? Are Obama’s actions those of a man trying to improve the USA, or that of an attacker?