Fool Me Twice (2 page)

But we realize, also, that the continued success of Barack Hussein Obama depends on concealing his true nature, his radical policies, and his second-term goals. We are about to blow the lid off all of that.

Obama is notorious for blaming his predecessor, President George W. Bush, for the current economic woes, as well as a host of other failures. One joke going around Washington after the rare earthquake of August 2011 was that Obama had proclaimed it: “Bush's fault.” Yet it was Bush who must be credited with dusting off an old American saw that well applies to his White House successor: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Will we, the American public, allow ourselves to be fooled again? Let us pray, not. For even a politician most adroit at manipulating democratic elections (see
Chapter 9
) cannot succeed to “fool all of the people, all of the time.”

Aaron Klein

I
MAGINE THE FUNDAMENTAL
transformation of the U.S. Armed Forces into a social work organization designed to combat “global warming,” fight global poverty, remedy “injustice,” bolster the United Nations, and increase “peacekeeping” forces worldwide.

This messianic fantasy of “swords into ploughshares” is to be implemented in our dangerous world, driven by the think tanks of '60s radicals and their disciples who have infiltrated the highest levels of American—and global—power.

The major leagues of progressive groups with deep ties to the Obama administration got together to produce a comprehensive, ninety-six-page report with these and other specific recommendations for how Obama should reform the U.S. military during his second term in office. This detailed blueprint, titled “A Report of the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget for the United States” (or 2012 Unified Security Budget), lays out a future Obama “defense” agenda.
¹

The Unified Security Budget is a joint product of the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Throughout this book, we will thoroughly examine CAP's deep influence in framing White House policy under Obama, indeed in directing Obama's initial transition into the White House, aiding in the selection of administration officials,
and crafting Obama's specific first- and second-term plans. It is fair to say CAP, led by John Podesta, is the de facto policy nerve center of the Obama administration.
Time
magazine called CAP Obama's “idea factory,” noting that “not since the Heritage Foundation helped guide Ronald Reagan's transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway.”
²
Time
reported it is “difficult to overstate the influence in Obamaland of CAP.”

It is instructive that CAP got together with the IPS, a policy group infamous for its Cold War-era support of the Soviets and its long–standing crusade to diminish the U.S. military, all while pushing for the elimination of our nuclear arsenal. Later in this chapter we will detail Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's ties to the IPS, including his past advocacy for the group's specific military recommendations. We will also document how key members of other organizations sponsoring the Unified Security Budget, such as the Connect U.S. Fund, can now be found at the top level of the Obama administration. Another Unified Security Budget report sponsor deserving special attention is George Soros's Open Society Institute.

The 2012 Unified Security Budget itself recalls how the group's policy recommendations from some other of its recent defense papers have already been adopted by Obama's Sustainable Defense Taskforce, which has notoriously recommended $1 trillion in cuts over ten years.

The Unified Security Budget project has contributed to this debate by outlining a set of cuts in unneeded military programs that formed the core of a proposal by the Sustainable Defense Task Force … A majority, though not a supermajority, of the members of the President's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform adopted the annualized figure of $100 billion, and many of the recommendations from this proposal.
³

And it continues:

These figures—the $100 billion annual benchmark and the 10-year accumulated total—were not invented by the Commission's staff. They aligned closely with the two major blueprints released during the Commission's deliberations that had given military spending a
role in deficit reduction commensurate with its dominant role in the discretionary budget. The first, the Sustainable Defense Task Force (SDTF), expanded on the recommendations for military cuts from the 2010 Unified Security Budget (USB) report.

The report revels in the overlapping membership between the two policy groups: the “Unified Security Budget and Sustainable Defense task forces share several members, including both USB principal authors.”

We do not believe Obama would adopt every defense recommendation in the 2012 Unified Security Budget, including some shocking suggestions we will soon reveal. But what is certain—given these groups' influence within the administration until now—is that the report would serve as a defense policy wish list for a second Obama term and that its concepts will inform Obama's military approach if he wins reelection. We will even show how much of the report has already been incorporated into key progressive House and Senate legislation.

The Unified Security Budget proclaims its goal as the “rebalancing” of our country's security resources to “strengthen our capacity to prevent and resolve conflict by non-military means, and to constrain terrorist threats not by waging a ‘war on terror' but by finding and isolating terrorists and bringing them to justice, protecting ourselves from future attacks, and strengthening the capacity of the United States and other nations to resist terrorism.”

Of immediate concern is the stated objective of transforming our armed forces to stress conflict resolution and diplomacy. For most Americans, the entire purpose of military spending is to maintain the capability of using force when such action becomes necessary. The resolution of conflict by non-military means—diplomacy, economic aid, technical assistance—is the proper focus of other government (and nongovernment) agencies. In other words, the very premise of the report—minimizing defense capacity and redirection of resources—is deeply flawed and dangerous.

The report sets the tone of its lofty agenda by demanding immediate reductions in the military's already heavily slashed budget. But there is one interesting exception requiring massive
increases
in funding—any spending that funds “alternative energy” or that focuses Defense Department resources on combating “climate change as a security threat.” The report authors recommend investing “the lion's share” of the few allotted increases in addressing the “threat” of so-called climate change.

Half of all savings from military cuts, the report recommends, should be used for investing in “job creation,” while the other half is to be allocated to deficit reduction. The report does not spell out exactly how Obama should “invest” this money in “job creation.” Perhaps this is an allusion to a future massive “stimulus” or to various other second-term progressive economic machinations and spread-the-wealth schemes to be exposed in our coming chapters.

The report takes issue with the use of forces on the ground in various countries to secure or influence the longer-term strategic position of other nations. And how to minimize that influence? For starters, by scaling back all U.S. ground forces by 20 percent; reducing the Navy's surface fleet by 20 percent (including two carriers and carrier combat air wings) and reducing the Air Force by two combat air wings—while cutting standing peacetime overseas deployments (Europe, East Asia) by up to 50,000 troops at a time.

The Unified authors are just getting warmed up. Another recommendation, which the report claims will save $21 billion, is to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to no more than 292 deployed nuclear weapons and the complete elimination of the Trident II nuclear missile—a process President Obama already initiated in April 2010 when he signed a deal with Russia reducing stocks of weapons-grade plutonium. The accord was signed at a nuclear summit in Washington arranged by Obama, at which leaders of forty-seven nations committed to reducing the world's nuclear stockpiles even as Iran drives ever closer toward nuclear weaponization, a development likely to spark a multi-country Mideast nuclear arms race.
⁴
One week earlier, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and Obama signed the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, committing both countries to reducing their deployed nuclear arsenals.

Obama had broadly proclaimed his disarmament intentions during a 2007 campaign speech: “Here's what I'll say as president: America seeks a
world in which there are no nuclear weapons.”
⁵
By 2010, as president, he was arguing: “We need to change our nuclear policy and our posture, which is still focused on deterring the Soviet Union—a country that doesn't exist.”
⁶
Unfortunately, Obama's declaration came just as Russia was signing a major arms deal with Syria and began to revive its Cold War–era naval bases in the Middle East, including in the Syrian ports of Tartus and Latakia on the Mediterranean. Moscow had also maintained bases in Damascus during the Cold War, but post–Soviet Russia's military posture in the region weakened for a time. As of this writing, Moscow had resumed giving diplomatic cover, along with its military assistance, to the murderous Assad regime.

And just as Iran, North Korea, and other aggressor countries (e.g., Venezuela) aim to develop or enhance intercontinental missile capabilities, the IPS report next recommends the U.S. cease all further development of missile
defenses
. Yes, you read that correctly. The report goes through a list of current missile defense programs, including Ground-based Midcourse Defense, Airborne Laser, Kinetic Energy Interceptors, and a number of others, pushing for all programs to be cut. “It is unwise to fund more advanced systems for missile defense while current ones have yet to be proven effective against their targeted threats,” complains the report. In other words, it is desirable for Obama to invest billions and billions in taxpayer funds on questionable solar and other “green energy” projects, even as many of those projects prove impracticable or go bankrupt, but investment in “unproven” national defense systems is to be slashed with abandon.

The military's vital Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation program is to be cut by $10 billion across the board. After all, why should the armed forces research, develop, test, or evaluate weapons or programs when the money can be better reinvested in wind turbines and “peacekeeping” forces? (We're not being sarcastic here—keep reading.)

Next on the chopping block: the complete cancelation of the second SSN-744 Virginia Class submarine. While the Unified Security Budget describes the new model as “unnecessary to address any of the threats facing the United States today” and “a weapon looking for an enemy,” the SSN-774 is designed for covert collection of intelligence, transportation of special operations teams, and launching of tactical Tomahawk missiles—flexible capabilities tailored to rapid responses required by the 21st-century's
conflicts with irregular combatants. Similarly targeted for cancelation are the V-22 Osprey helicopter and the Navy and Marine Corps versions of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. And, as mentioned earlier, the report calls for the massive reduction of active-duty personnel stationed in Europe and Asia as well as the cutting of two active component air wings and two carrier-battle groups along with their associated Air Force air wings.

And what to do with all these savings? The Unified Security Budget provides a helpful graph that shows how the money can be used to “meet the State Department's request of $2.14 billion for the Contributions to International Peacekeeping Activities account.” The savings can also be used to “support Egypt's burgeoning democracy through economic and humanitarian assistance.” Yes, the same Egyptian democracy currently seeing the Muslim Brotherhood, along with Islamist parties to the right of the Brotherhood, taking power. Another progressive recommendation: Use the savings to “increase the government's investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency to a level that would achieve the Obama administration's stated climate security goals.”

For now, Congressional oversight serves as a check to some of Obama's ambitious calls for defense budget reductions. Some would even give Congress more power in this realm. The progressive groups, however, have concocted a plan to wrest budgetary control from Congress—where it is vested by the U.S. Constitution—and instead place our military's purse strings in the hands of an “independent panel.” “Congressional power isn't the solution,” contends the report, which then offers a range of options that “think outside the box of existing structures.” How “outside the box” is their thinking? The report first endorses a recommendation, from the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, for an “independent panel to review the military's procurement budget every year.” Membership would exclude both current and retired military officers who “have any financial ties to defense corporations or reserve the right to forge such ties in the future.” Another option for bypassing Congressional oversight would be a “Select Committee
on National Security and International Affairs” to examine our overall security needs and the best balance of available tools to achieve them. And it could be empowered with making changes to the committee's own structure. Congress—especially one under the control of progressive Democrats—could also authorize a “Commission on Budgeting for National Security and International Affairs” made up of “similarly committed members, to examine the current balkanized budget process, and recommend a restructuring that would enable decision-making on security that more effectively considers the overall balance of security tools and puts the national interest over parochial interests.”