Obama Rocked By Triple Scandal -- Will He Survive? Will WE Survive?
IntroductionAs those who have been following the news have probably noticed, the Obama Administration has recently been hit by three big scandals, coming all together. Of these, the oldest (and most severe in terms of his primary role as Commander-in-Chief) is the Benghazi Embassy terrorist attack, and his incredibly incompetent and dishonest ( Read more... )
On the other hand, the one thing I have noticed about our modern-day ‘men on horseback’ types is that they really are astonishingly stupid - also lazy and hesitant; they set out with a great show of panache on a campaign that can logically end only in conquest or disaster, and stop short of the conquest, so guaranteeing the disaster. Such a one was Saddam Hussein in 1990, when he invaded Kuwait. He ought to have known that invading a treaty-bound ally of the United States would provoke a big military retaliation; he also ought to have known that the only value of Kuwait was to help him control the international oil trade - but as long as Saudi Arabian oil remained on the market, that help was insufficient.
All economic and geopolitical logic dictated that Saddam keep his armies sweeping on through Riyadh (against what would have been desultory opposition), seized the Saudi oilfields, and closed the Straits of Hormuz to all but his own preferred shipping. I myself believed that was what he would do. Then the U.S. and its allies would have had a long and perhaps hopeless struggle to march and supply a large army all the way up the Arabian peninsula from Aden to Kuwait, merely to restore the status quo ante - and while the Americans might have had the stomach for it, their allies almost certainly would have lacked it. This move alone would have given Saddam’s act of grand larceny the element of geopolitical logic that it so obviously lacked.
If Mr. Obama is as stupid as Saddam was, and contents himself with the half-measures he has already taken, he has already doomed himself. (Not that that doom will come in time to save your late Republic. The machinery of corruption he has built will survive for his successors to use against you.) I never consider it wise to assume that degree of stupidity in my opponents; and therefore I think it would be better for you to frame your plans on the assumption that Mr. Obama intends to finish the coup from above that he has begun, and safeguard his gains by the same means or worse.
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If you were and did, you'll remember the outcome was far from certain.
Democrats, liberals, the media warned with great fanfare how Saddam would deal with our military in desert warfare. How all our guns and technology would be useless in the sand and heat. How those Iraqi Scud missiles would kill thousands of Israelis and civilians in bordering countries.
Bush was warned how crazy it would be to take on Saddam.
In addition, you cannot predict how these Arab leaders think and act which is entirely different from the way Western brains work. It turns out he was mostly bluff and bluster and that is a characteristic too of the proud Arab mind. He continued in his bluster after defeat as he remained in control while Clinton beat Bush in the 1992 election.
Saddam was the big tough guy people feared, annointed by God to lead, to strike fear in the enemy, and that was enough for him - Iraq and its people be damned.
Obama stupid? Well, to be a radical leftist you have to be someone stupid or delusional because your ideology cannot work but that doesn't matter to him. It's what he's doing to America. Plain and simple and, in his mind, he'll always be able to sweet talk himself out of any blame or responsibility.
Remember - he thinks he has "a gift".
Just like Saddam though he had.
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I therefore knew that the warnings by Democrats, liberals, and media were nothing but hot air, born of their desire to relive their apotheosis of the Vietnam years. (Every single war that the United States has been involved in since 1975 has been greeted by these people with warnings that it would inevitably become a ‘Vietnam-style quagmire’.) These people are not only ignorant of military matters, but proud of their ignorance; they regard it as a positive virtue to know nothing about the subject on which they are pontificating.
I also had the ability to count guns and read maps. So long as the U.S. Navy could run its supply ships freely into the Persian Gulf, and the Army could use eastern Saudi Arabia as a staging area, there was nothing Saddam could do to prevent a U.S. counterattack in devastating force. I was not in the least surprised when the Republican Guard disintegrated under fire, nor when every prediction of disaster by the American Left failed to come true. If Saddam had taken Riyadh and the U.A.E., and interdicted the Straits of Hormuz by air and artillery power, only a long and bitter ground war could have dislodged him from his position. If he had then put pressure on Oman and concluded an agreement with ‘Democratic’ South Yemen, he could have closed the ports of Muscat and Aden to the Allies and made their strategic position virtually hopeless. But as I have said, he was too stupid to finish the job he started.
To cast forward a bit: On the eve of the second phase of the Gulf War (it was really one war throughout, not two, for there had never been any peace treaty, only a ceasefire continually broken by one side), I looked at the map and the nature of the forces arrayed, and correctly predicted that the active phase of the war - the initial destruction of Saddam’s regime and the occupation of the country by U.S. forces - would take about four weeks. That is exactly how long it took Nazi Germany, using a similar concentration of firepower, to conquer Poland, a country of approximately the same size and population in 1939 as Iraq in 2003. The differences of terrain were of little strategic consequence; Iraq’s mountain defences were all on the opposite side of the country from the invaders, and the desert poses no greater obstacle than the lakes and forests that interrupted the Polish countryside.
The invasion of Poland began on 1 September 1939, and ended on 27 September with the surrender of Warsaw - 27 days, counted inclusively. The invasion of Iraq began on 20 March 2003 and ended on 13 April with the surrender of Tikrit - 25 days counted inclusively. The fact that the Americans massively bungled the occupation and reconstruction of the country, while entirely predictable, in no way detracts from the fact that all organized military resistance was destroyed in almost exactly the time I predicted before the invasion began.
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Of course, the sequel to that was the decline of the formerly "mainstream" media to minority market share status. Audiences aren't as stupid as the MSM hoped, and many people noticed they were being lied to.
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I see two general classes of reason why Obama won't seek or get a second term in order to avoid prosecution.
The first is that it would be extremely difficult for him to get a second term. Unless he could get the 22nd Amendment repealed, everyone -- even his supporters -- would assume that he just couldn't serve a third term. That's part of the background knowledge of anyone who follows American politics at all, that there's a two-term Constitutional and traditional limit on the Presidency.
Assuming no repeal of the 22nd Amendment, he would face severe challenges on every step of the road to a third term. Other Democratic hopefuls would challenge him because they'd see him as weak on this point and they would like their turns to run for the Presidency. The Republicans would challenge the legitimacy of his campaign, and probably get most American voters to agree with him. Many voters would not like to vote for him because they would see his candidacy as illegitimate. At least one challenge would probably reach the Supreme Court, which would almost certainly rule against Obama -- the 22nd Amendment wouldn't have much wiggle room regarding a President who had already served out two full terms.
Avoiding prosecution would be much easier. If Obama faced an impeachment threat likely to lead to both impeachment and conviction, he could resign having struck a deal with his Vice-President (presumably Biden, though if something happened to Biden there might be an appointed VP, as was the case with Nixon and Ford in 1974) to pardon him. Once Obama was out trailing clouds of scandal, the Republicans might do better to simply take advantage of the atmosphere of scandal now engulfing the Democrats to gain both the Presidency and the Congress, as happened after Nixon's resignation and Ford's completion of Nixon's second term.
Obama might like to govern like Castro or Chavez, but the American system has strong checks against that sort of thing. Notice the trouble that he's getting into right now -- if he tried something like claiming eligibility for a second term just because he's the Obamessiah and violently suppressing dissenters, he'd be very likely to be ushered out of office by the Congress and Supreme Court in concert with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The signficant analogy here is Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. Remember how horrified Obama was to see Zelaya ushered out of office by the Honduran military at the behest of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court? This was a direct object lesson to Obama with regards to the limits of Presidential power, and if Obama didn't take the lesson, he's even more of a fool than I think.
In which case the first American coup would be a coup-from-above staged by Obama, followed probably within weeks by a countercoup staged by the other two branches of government and the US Armed Forces. But I don't think this is likely -- yet.
Our Republic hasn't yet decayed enough for this to be likely. Though I do think we're on that downward course.
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Avoiding prosecution would be much easier. If Obama faced an impeachment threat likely to lead to both impeachment and conviction, he could resign having struck a deal with his Vice-President (presumably Biden, though if something happened to Biden there might be an appointed VP, as was the case with Nixon and Ford in 1974) to pardon him.
There's another alternative: he could high tail it to Kenya. He still has family among the elite of that country, and they would be loathe to extradite a "native son". That is how they regard the O-ster.
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