Never before had the United States had the chance to back a popular democratic movement of this magnitude in a country that was unremittingly hostile to America and its allies. Yet Obama refused to support the protesters. He called for patience. He said he did not want to violate the sovereignty of Iran. He said that there was “an extraordinary debate taking place in Iran.” He expressed respectful solicitousness in noting “some reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.” He said that “the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised.” He said that the best course of action was to wait and see. The U.S. government would “monitor and see how this plays out before we make any judgments about how we proceed.” And Americans waited and saw on television as the mullahs and their thugs beat the protesters into submission. Eventually the protests dissipated and the “debate” concluded. Obama’s counsel of patience proved to be a counsel of inaction. The window of opportunity closed.
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Even many Obama supporters will not defend Obama’s conduct during the Iranian revolt. Yet one Obama cheerleader, Jonathan Alter, insists that Obama was right. “It made sense.... He avoided full-throated support for the dissidents,” Alter explains, “which would give the regime the excuse to say the revolt was inspired by the United States.”
18
Perhaps it would, but at least there was a chance in Iran to turn things around. Obama’s decision to leave the protesters on their own in 2009 ensured their defeat. Two years later, demonstrations in solidarity with the Arab Spring were crushed by the mullahs, arresting 1,500 people. Once again, Obama was silent and offered the protesters no support whatever.
From the contrasting situations of Egypt and Iran, we can conclude that Obama does in fact support democracy, but only a particular kind of democracy. He opposes popular Muslim movements that advance American interests while backing popular Muslim movements that oppose American interests. He rejects calls for democracy when they undermine radical Islam while affirming those same calls when they affirm the prospects of radical Islam. None of this is to suggest that Obama is himself a Muslim, but rather, that Obama seeks a diminution of American power and influence in the Muslim world. He has acted decisively and consistently to achieve that goal. And today America is far weaker in the region than it was four years ago.
So what’s next? In my view, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is not only a crucial American ally, but also America’s largest foreign source for oil. If Saudi Arabia falls, this would be a devastating blow to America’s economy and foreign policy, and if the Islamists gained Mecca and Medina it would be the greatest victory of radical Islam since the Khomeini revolution in Iran. So here is my prediction. In a second term, Obama will work with Islamists in Saudi Arabia and in neighboring countries to support a rebellion against the Saudi royal family. When it occurs, he will say it is time for the Saudi royals to move aside in favor of democracy. If the Saudi royals refuse to abdicate, Obama will cut off American aid. Absent American assistance, the House of Saud could fall just as Mubarak did. Then there would be elections, which would bring the radical Muslims to power.
While a transition of power in Saudi Arabia would be a very big deal, I believe that Obama has an even bigger objective in the Middle East. There are three major countries in the region: Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Since 1979, Iran has been in the hands of the radical Muslims. Now, with Obama’s help, Egypt is moving into the radical Muslim camp. Saudi Arabia is the only one left. So once Saudi Arabia falls, the radical Muslims have a chance to achieve what they have long dreamed about: a complete unification of the Middle East under a single Muslim caliphate. If Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia unite, the smaller countries, from Jordan to the Gulf Kingdoms, would quickly succumb or be overrun. And what can we call this new nation? Let’s call it the United States of Islam. The term is not mine. It was coined by Kamal al-Helbawy, a former spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, who is calling on Arabs to eliminate the borders “drawn up by imperialist nations” and over the next few years “have a country called the United States of Islam.”
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What is necessary for this to occur? Just one thing: the Sunnis and the Shia have to work out their differences. The theological differences are minor, but the historical enmities are real. There may be clashes between the two, or even a war, as between the American North and South, but eventually America came together, and so could the Muslims of the Middle East. I predict that if they have the chance, they will come together in the name of Islam as a global power. This way the Muslims can put up a single front against the United States and Israel. So while history will credit Ronald Reagan with producing the dissolution of the Soviet empire, history might credit Obama with producing the unification of Islam.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DEBT AS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION
The poorest Americans are better off than more than two-thirds of the world population.
1
—Branko Milanovic,
The Haves and the Have-Nots
T
hus far we have been examining various ways in which Obama has pursued his anti-colonial ideology by undermining and shrinking America’s economic, political, and military influence. Still, America could, even in this shrunken state, dominate the world for a couple more decades. If Obama wants to change that, how can he do so in just four more years? Actually, there is a way. To do this Obama must go beyond promoting decline and work to create collapse. Yes, collapse would really change the global equation. In this chapter we explore an intriguing and somewhat frightening idea. I call it debt as a weapon of mass destruction. That’s because at a certain level of debt, America is ruined as an economic power. Not only does that change life for Americans, causing a sharp fall in our standard of living, but it also changes America’s place in the world. America ceases to be a superpower; perhaps America ceases to be a first world country.
From an anti-colonial perspective, debt is a beautiful weapon to deploy. Consider a revealing statement by one of Obama’s former students. He said that when Obama taught law at the University of Chicago, the topic arose whether America and the West should pay reparations for slavery and other historical injustices. The student said of Obama, “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.” In order to have racial reparations you would have to settle such questions as “who is black, how far back do you go, what about recent immigrants,” and so on. Considering such complexities, Obama told his class, “That is why it’s unworkable.”
2
But I believe Obama has found a way to achieve global reparations. This has nothing to do with race. It has to do with using debt to bring down the colonial oppressor and level the standard of living between America and the developing countries. Through debt we become beholden to the rest of the world. Debt will make them richer and us poorer; thus debt evens the scales. Debt is especially useful for Obama: he can use the accumulation of financial debt to settle the historical debts that America owes other nations on account of imperial aggression and exploitation.
Obama well knows how debt can paralyze a country. We know that he knows, because he wrote about it. In
The Audacity of Hope
, Obama attacked the Bush deficit. “We now have an annual budget deficit of almost $300 billion,” Obama said. He called this “the most precarious situation that we’ve seen in years.” Obama then considered how deficits add up to pile on debt upon debt. “So far,” he added, “we’ve been able to get away with this mountain of debt because foreign central banks, particularly China’s, want us to keep buying their exports. But this easy credit won’t continue forever. At some point, foreigners will stop lending us money, interest rates will go up, and we will spend most of our nation’s output paying them back.”
3
When Obama published those words in 2006, the national debt was $8.5 trillion.
While $8.5 trillion is a huge amount of money—around 60 percent of America’s annual GDP—that level of debt is still manageable for a rich country. Rich countries can do irresponsible things, like run up the national credit card, and still recover. Under Reagan, for example, deficits ran around $200 billion and America added $1.5 trillion in debt in eight years. Bush was even more profligate, and debt rose nearly $5 trillion during his two terms. Obama, however, has taken things to a new level. He has added $5 trillion in debt in less than four years. So Obama is adding to the debt at twice the pace of his predecessor Bush. While Bush’s deficits never topped $500 billion, Obama’s have averaged more than $1 trillion. In fact, between 1789 and 2000, America accumulated a national debt of less than $5 trillion. Incredibly, Obama will in four years have added more to the national debt than all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Bill Clinton combined.
4
America is currently $15 trillion in debt. That’s a gargantuan number, a number that seems more suited to astronomy than to economics. And it may be considerably understated.
USA Today
reports that the U.S. government uses all kinds of accounting legerdemain to hide its true level of indebtedness. The article concluded that “if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit . . . the government ran red ink last year equal to $42,054 per household—nearly four times the official number reported.” So what was Obama’s real deficit for 2011? Not $1.3 trillion as the Obama administration declared, but $5 trillion! Essentially the government avoids this frightening number by refusing to count promised retirement benefits. In theory, these aren’t legal obligations since Congress can pass laws that scale back or get rid of these retirement obligations before they are due .
5
But let’s not haggle over accounting practices; let’s go with current U.S. government accounting and set the debt at $15 trillion. That’s still more than 100 percent of GDP; we are reaching the point where debt is unmanageable. If Obama is re-elected, he’s likely to add another $5 trillion in debt—more, perhaps, if he can get away with it. At this point America would be over $20 trillion in debt. That point could be reached by 2016, and it’s the tipping point, the point where America’s economy faces total and irreversible collapse. At that point America is like Greece, except there is no one in the world to bail us out. There will, however, be countries that would like to take us over, or at least to prey on the spoils of our ruined nation.
We can understand the problem better by comparing the national situation to one faced by a typical American family. Imagine that you have an annual after-tax income of $100,000. So you are pretty well off, compared to most people. Yet you have been spending above your means, each year adding $15,000 to $20,000 to your family’s debt. Now that total debt is $110,000, so it is higher than your annual income. You would have to work for a whole year and turn over all your earnings, just to pay it back. This would already be a bad situation. It would call for a serious reexamination of the family budget. Yet let’s imagine that, instead of a doing this, you actually increased your spending. While previously you spent $20,000 above your income, now you spend $40,000. You are already in real trouble, yet one year you buy a new Lexus, the next you go on a $50,000 vacation, and so on. You show no sign of changing these habits; if permitted by the rest of the family, you would actually spend more. When confronted by others, you speak of “promises” you have made that you somehow feel obliged to keep, even though you don’t have the money. Such behavior would not merely be irresponsible; it would risk financial disaster. You would be setting up for the day when people come to repossess the family house and take away the family cars. Now there are only two reasons why someone would actually do this. The first is that the person was insane. The second is that for some reason he wanted the family to be bankrupt.
One might be interested in Obama’s take on all this. Unfortunately, Obama’s statements on the subject offer little illumination. Recently Obama responded to allegations that he has, as a big spender, been running up the debt by saying that he is not a big spender and he has not been running up the debt. Rather, he said, he is like Bill Clinton, a Democrat who has “actually reduced the pace of the growth in government spending.” Moreover, Obama laid the blame for America’s debt squarely on the Republicans. “What happens,” he said, “is the Republicans run up the tab, and then we’re sitting there and they’ve left the restaurant, and then they point and say: why did you order all those steaks and martinis?”
6
Now anyone can easily verify that Obama’s levels of spending are dramatically higher than Bush’s. The deficit in 2008, Bush’s last year, was $458 billion. And here are the Obama deficits:
2009: $1.41 trillion
2010: $1.29 trillion
2011: $1.30 trillion
2012: $1.33 trillion
Obama is the biggest spender in world history, so why won’t he admit it? Charitably we may say that he is engaging in election-year obfuscation. But Obama’s ability to flat-out fabricate suggests to me a deeper problem. He is displaying here the same fabulism that his dad was known for. He thinks that if he spins his fables often enough, and says them convincingly enough, then people will fall for them. And some do.