In the film “2016: Obama’s America” I advanced what seemed to be a kind of outlandish theory about President Obama – that Obama had imbibed the anticolonial philosophy of his dad, Barack Obama Sr. This anticolonialism shapes Obama’s worldview and helps us to predict what Obama is going to do. It not only explains what he is doing but it allows us to foretell and anticipate things that he is going to do. In the film we made some fairly specific predictions about Obama. This is not a bad time to review those predictions and see if they have in fact come true.
One of the predictions is that Obama would spend money promiscuously to raise the debt in virtual indifference to its impact on American citizens. In fact Obama has been racking up debt at a rate of 1 trillion dollars a year. The debt has doubled in Obama’s term in office. Bush was a big spender, but even in his most profligate days Bush was deficit-spending 500 billion dollars a year. Obama has doubled that. The country is now almost 17 trillion dollars in debt. That’s bigger than our gross domestic product. That’s an awful burden to saddle our children and grandchildren with. It’s also a burden that drags the economy down and redistributes wealth away from America to the rest of the world. Why? Because in the past much of our debt was owed to other Americans, but now a significant portion of our debt, about a third, is owed to foreigners. Our debt is owed to Kuwaitis and Saudis and Chinese. When we incur debt we have to pay it back. At some point you have to pay. This is a transfer of hundreds of billions, in fact trillions of dollars out of the United States into other countries. My theory about Obama was that he wanted and wants global redistribution and debt is a weapon of global redistribution.
My second prediction is that Obama wants to shrink the influence of American foreign policy. This is not the unintentional effect of a blundering president. If you want that you have to go to Jimmy Carter. When Jimmy Carter pulled the Persian rug out from the Shah of Iran, oops, he got Khomeini. He didn’t know he was going to get somebody who would be congenitally hostile to American foreign policy. He was surprised. But when Obama supports the Muslim Brotherhood, he knows that this is the oldest and most powerful organization of radical Islam in the world. He knows that the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to consolidate its power not only in Egypt but throughout the Middle East. And yet when the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, Obama doesn’t seem perturbed. In fact he seems kind of excited. When the military pushes out the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama seems flummoxed. He doesn’t really know what to do. Suddenly you’ve got guys who used to be allies with the United States, the Egyptian military. What does Obama do? He cuts American aid to the military to antagonize those guys. It’s almost like he’s trying to take Egypt, which is a long-time ally, and make it into an enemy.
You might say, wait a minute, he couldn’t help it. There was Tahrir Square, there were the students in the streets, America believes in democracy; surely Obama has no choice but to support democracy in Egypt. But a wait a minute, in 2009 there were massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran. Did Obama back the democracy movement? No. He opposed it. He in fact said “let’s stay out.” He said “let’s leave things to the Supreme Leader” – the Iranian mullahs. They bring out the police, they beat up the protesters, and that’s the end of the democracy movement in Iran.
There is a real double standard in Obama’s treatment of Iran where he opposed the democracy movement and Egypt where he supported it. When an intelligent man does something that’s contradictory, it’s not because he’s a fool. It’s because he’s up to something else. The difference between Iran and Egypt is that Iran is an adversary of the United States. Obama seems to have no interest in weakening our adversaries while he does seem to have an interest in weakening our allies. This double standard can be seen also in the way that Obama has treated Libya on the one hand and Syria on the other. When there was an uprising in Benghazi under Gaddafi, Obama moves into action. He says there is genocide going on in Libya, and we’ve got to stop it. We’ve got to use U.S. airplanes. We need NATO. We essentially need to bomb Gaddafi into oblivion. We’ve got to get rid of the regime, and we did using a massive display of military force.
How many people were killed in Libya by Gaddafi in this action that Obama calls genocide? It turns out approximately 250. Meanwhile in Syria, over the past two years, there has been a real genocide going on in which there is a civil uprising against Assad, the dictator. Assad has been using chemical weapons and brutal force in the face of the world watching. There have been people screaming for intervention, but Obama has flatly refused. Not just tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Syria. No intervention.
Finally Obama says, alright, we’re going to work to stop chemical weapons in Syria. Even though we’re stopping the chemical weapons, we’re doing nothing to remove Assad from power. The question becomes, again, why the double standard? Why intervene in Libya to stop, you may say, mini-genocide while not intervening to stop big genocide in Syria? Well, there is a simple answer to that – Gaddafi, the former dictator of Libya, was doing business with the United States.
I wouldn’t say Gaddafi was an ally. He was actually a bad boy in the ‘70s and ‘80s. But after the invasion of Iraq, Gaddafi shaped up. He was outing terrorists. He helped to out the Pakistani AQ Khan. He was paying reparations to the families who were victims of terrorism. He paid reparations to the victims of the Lockerbie bombing. Gaddafi was behaving himself and we got rid of him. Meanwhile, Assad is our deadly enemy. In fact Assad is allied with the mullahs of Iran. Assad and Iran have been working together to undermine U.S. influence in the region.
If you would try to find a consistent way to predict what Obama is doing in the Middle East it’s very simple – he’s been undermining our allies and he’s been allowing our adversaries to remain in power. This is precisely what we predicted that he would do and this is precisely what he is doing