Movie project documents campaign to destabilize economy, military
Driven by the alleged anti-colonialist ideology of a father he barely met, President Barack Obama systematically is undermining America economically and militarily – leaving it vulnerable to financial collapse, and even as unlikely as the possibility may seem, nuclear attack.
CP note: ‘2016 Obama's America’ opens in many cities today, 8/24/12
By Troy Anderson
That’s among the claims in a politically explosive book and documentary hitting theaters nationwide this week by New York Times bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza.
The production also notes during Obama’s first term, the national debt soared from $10 trillion to $15 trillion. At this rate, the federal debt will have doubled to $20 trillion if he wins another term.
And it charges as he slashes the defense budget, Obama is simultaneously pushing to reduce the nation’s nuclear stockpile to as low as a few hundred missiles – even as other countries like China, Russia and North Korea are modernizing and expanding their arsenals, and Iran – widely believed to be close to developing nuclear weapons – is threatening to annihilate Israel.
The film, “2016 Obama’s America,” is based on D’Souza’s highly controversial 2010 book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” and his new book, “Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream.”
In the first book, D’Souza explored how Obama’s upbringing and early career molded him into a man who viewed America as the “great colonial exploiter, oppressing and taking advantage of the rest of the world.” Now, in his sequel, D’Souza reveals how Obama’s anti-American worldview has given the nation everything from Obamacare to Solyndra – and “what disasters the next four years will hold if Obama wins a second term.”
D’Souza, a former fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, author of “Illiberal Education,” “What’s So Great About America” and “What’s So Great About Christianity” and a prolific writer whose articles have appeared in Forbes, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, New Republic and National Review, said Obama is attempting to “downsize” America, and the nation is “now on the short path toward becoming the shortest-lived superpower in world history.”
“Obama is an anti-colonialist and what that means is that he has a Third World ideology that is anti-capitalist,” D’Souza told WND. “He wants to shrink America’s influence in the world.
Obama’s downsizing of America is not an accidental result of his policies. It’s the deliberate objective of them.”
The White House did not respond to calls for comment.
In the film arriving in theaters nationwide this week, the former Reagan administration policy analyst takes viewers on a global journey to uncover Obama’s past, understand his current actions and answer what America will be like in 2016 if he is re-elected. The film, produced by Gerald R. Molen – the Academy Award-winning producer of “Schindler’s List” and “Rain Man” – will be released on DVD in October, just before the presidential election.
“I think it’s important for people to know who our president really is and what he stands for,” Molen says. “I don’t think the American people really know who the man is.”
Pulling no punches, D’Souza, the man described by New York Times Magazine as one of America’s most influential conservative thinkers, warns that giving Obama another four years in the White House could be catastrophic for the country both economically and in terms of national security.
A recent Federal Reserve study found Americans lost 40 percent of their wealth during Obama’s first term. If this trend continues, Americans could experience a two-thirds reduction in their net worth by 2016, and the U.S. would cease to be a First World country, said D’Souza, president of The King’s College in New York City.
If re-elected, D’Souza said the national debt is likely to soar to $20 trillion by 2016. That means the nation would accumulate more debt under one president – Obama – than every president from George Washington to Bill Clinton.
“Now, if America has $20 trillion in debt, that goes beyond decline and begins to risk what you could call collapse,” he said.
Even more disturbing, D’Souza explained, is the president is eviscerating military spending and attempting to end America’s nuclear superiority – pushing to reduce the nation’s nuclear stockpile to possibly only a few hundred missiles and ultimately none. Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, in part, for his vision and work toward a “world without nuclear weapons.”
Now, Obama has asked the Pentagon to study sharp cuts in the nuclear force, including a possible reduction of up to 80 percent in the number of deployed weapons, according to a May 23 letter sent to Obama by U.S. Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Strategic Forces Subcommittee.
“Never before has a president done something like this,” Turner said during the fourth annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit earlier this year. “Yes, presidents since Truman have updated the nation’s nuclear war plan. But I cannot find a precedent for a president to tell the national security team that, regardless of the nuclear weapons modernization programs of China, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea and others, the U.S. should plan to reduce to as low as 300 nuclear weapons.”
In May, retired Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright, chairman of the Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission, called on the nation to reduce its arsenal to a maximum of 900 nuclear weapons over the next decade. In the report, “Modernizing U.S. Nuclear Strategy, Force Structure and Posture,” Cartwright called on the U.S. and Russia to “bring all the nuclear weapons countries to the negotiating table for the first time in history in multilateral negotiations to limit nuclear arms.”
“There is no conceivable situation in the contemporary world in which it would be in either country’s national security interest to initiate a nuclear attack against the other side,” Cartwright wrote. “Their current stockpiles (roughly 5,000 nuclear weapons each in their active deployed and reserve arsenals) vastly exceed what is needed to satisfy reasonable requirements of deterrence between the two countries as well as vis-à-vis third countries whose nuclear arsenals pale in comparison quantitatively.”
However, so far, Obama has failed to bring the world’s nuclear-armed powers together to reduce their arsenals, Turner said.
“What he has done instead is just reduce our nuclear weapons,” Turner told WND. “The New START Treaty was one where, unusually, he entered into an agreement with Russia whereby only the U.S. was required to reduce its nuclear weapons. Now, he has come forward with looking at whether we should reduce our number of weapons even further without an agreement with anyone, perhaps even unilaterally.
“At the same time, he has delayed needed investment in our nuclear weapons infrastructure that he had promised the Senate and House he would undertake as part of the ratification for the New START Treaty. Our concern is that we are seeing not just reductions in the nuclear weapons that we have, but also in our capabilities to sustain and produce modern nuclear weapons for a sustained deterrence.”
In another recently released book, “Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Shocking Plans For The Next Four Years Exposed,” authors Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott reveal the blueprint for Obama’s second term, including “further gutting of the U.S. military.”
“A time of escalating world tensions is an unwise moment for reducing U.S. military preparedness,” said Klein, a New York Times bestselling author, journalist and radio host and a senior reporter for WND. “With Iran racing toward nuclear weapons capability, Syria on the brink of all-out civil war and Russia rebuilding its Cold War-era bases in the Middle East, now would be the time for any president to push for increased funding for U.S. forces.
“Instead President Obama’s plans for military cuts, should he win a second term, make his drastic first-term defense slashes – about the only realm in which he’s reduced government spending – look like child’s play.”
These potential cuts in the nuclear arsenal come as many of the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities have fallen into disrepair and neglect. Most of the nation’s nuclear weapons are 15 years older than they were designed to last, and the U.S. is the only major nuclear power not modernizing its weapons, according to Senate Armed Services Committee member U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.
“What we have developed over the last couple of decades is a systematic atrophying of our nuclear deterrent,” said Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. “It’s the dirtiest little secret nobody has ever heard of.
“I think most Americans would find this appalling if they knew the truth, but they simply haven’t been told. They are operating on the assumption that we are the world’s last superpower and for most of them that reflects a confidence in having an unsurpassed and highly effective nuclear deterrent. But it’s simply not true and it’s becoming less true by the day. That’s in part a result of the president’s reckless determination to rid the world of nuclear weapons, starting with ours. And the trouble is nobody else is following that example.”
At the peak of the Cold War in 1986, the U.S. had about 30,000 nuclear warheads, according to the Arms Control Association. President Ronald Reagan shifted the nation away from ever-higher nuclear stockpiles and the U.S. and Russia arsenals have since been reduced by two-thirds.
During President George W. Bush’s eight years in office, the U.S. arsenal shrunk from 22,200 weapons to about 5,000, according to the association. As of March 1, the U.S. deployed 1,737 strategic nuclear warheads and 500 operational tactical nuclear bombs, along with an estimated 2,700 non-deployed warheads. Russia has 1,492 strategic nuclear warheads deployed, with an estimated 2,000 operational tactical nuclear bombs and 2,000 in storage, for about 5,500 total, according to the association.
Under the New START Treaty, the U.S. and Russia will be limited to 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons by 2018 or seven years from entry into force of the treaty, a U.S. Department of Defense spokesman said.
These limits are based on an analysis conducted by Department of Defense planners in support of the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. The review calls for reductions in the numbers of intercontinental ballistic missile, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, heavy bombers and the warheads and launchers associated with them, so that by 2018, each side will have no more than 700 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs and heavy bombers equipped with nuclear armaments; and no more than 1,550 warheads on deployed ICBMs and SLBMs, and nuclear warheads counted for deployed heavy bombers.
“The (Obama) administration is committed to maintaining a nuclear weapons stockpile that is safe, secure and effective,” the spokesman said. “Over the past three years, the (Obama) administration has worked with Congress to develop a sustainable, bipartisan commitment to a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent to defend and protect the United States and our allies against any potential adversary.”
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said France has about 300 nuclear weapons, Great Britain has about 200 nuclear weapons and China has about 300 nuclear weapons, but only about 50 that are long-range ballistic missiles.
“So, the U.S. could take our total nuclear arsenal down quite significantly from 1,700 into the hundreds of deployed strategic warheads on a variety of platforms – submarines, which are basically invulnerable to attack, bombers and land-based missiles – and still be able to threaten Russia and China with near total annihilation if they were for some inexplicable reason to wake up one morning and decide to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S,” Kimball said.
But Turner, Gaffney and D’Souza disagree, saying the president’s proposal to dramatically reduce the nation’s arsenal would leave the nation vulnerable to nuclear attack.
“The whole concept of deterrence is that the other nation is deterred from taking action or attacking you,” Turner says. “Any time you lower the number of weapons you have you increase the likelihood that someone would do the calculation as to whether or not if they were to attack you they could come out of it either unscathed or without a substantial risk. There is a point at which lower numbers actually are riskier because you run the risk that someone might initiate a strike.”
D’Souza said 300 nuclear weapons is not enough to serve as a deterrent.
“It’s a very small number because the key to nuclear deterrence is to have enough bombs that if you are hit in a first strike you have enough to strike back,” D’Souza said.
For instance, one scenario the Pentagon has studied for decades involves a Russian-Chinese first strike nuclear attack on the U.S., D’Souza said.
“What do they do? They target all our 300 missiles,” D’Souza said. “They launch a first strike, not on our cities, but at our silos, which are holes in the ground containing nuclear bombs. They won’t get all 300 missiles because we’ll have missiles on submarines and we’ll have some on bombers. They won’t get them all, but they will get a lot of them.”
Let’s say, D’Souza said, the U.S. has 50 nuclear missiles left after. America would have to decide whether to strike back.
“We can bomb 50 cities – 25 in China and 25 in Russia – but we don’t do it. Why not? Because after knocking out the majority of our nuclear arsenal, the Chinese will say, ‘If you strike back, we will then obliterate all your cities.’”
In other words, the Chinese could deter the U.S. from responding to a nuclear attack by the fear of a second strike that would kill hundreds of millions of Americans, D’Souza said.
“Now, this is a nightmare scenario, but it’s not a fantasy scenario,” he said.
“It’s exactly the scenario American policy thinkers have been playing out for 50 years since the dawn of the nuclear age.”
Meanwhile, Phillip A. Karber, an adjunct professor in the Government Department at Georgetown University, and his students released a 363-page report in September 2011 titled, “Strategic Implications of China’s Underground Great Wall.” In the report, the former Pentagon strategic forces expert and his students estimated China may have up to 3,000 nuclear weapons in a vast network of hardened tunnels stretching over thousands of miles.
Although the report was initially met with some skepticism by nuclear experts, a retired Russian general, Col. Gen. Victor I. Yesin, former chief of the Main Forces of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces and now a professor at the Academy of Military Sciences at the Russian Federation, corroborated the report’s findings in a May article in a Russian publication, the Military-Industrial Courier.
Based on an assessment of the capacity of Chinese factories to produce uranium and plutonium over the years, Yesin estimates the “Chinese nuclear arsenal may consist of up to 1,800 warheads.”
“This analysis shows that the nuclear capability of China is clearly underestimated,” Yesin wrote. “It is substantially greater than assessed by the Western expert community…. This means that it is necessary to take into account the Chinese factor when considering any of the next Russian-American agreements on the further reduction and limitation of nuclear weapons. It is time to bring China into multilateral negotiations on nuclear disarmament. Without accomplishing this, such negotiations will be unlikely to bring results.”
As to why China might have developed a larger number of nuclear weapons than commonly believed, Gaffney said his “working assumption is that they think the U.S. is a declining power and they intend to supplant us.”
“They have a formidable economic effort underway, but they recognize they need to upgrade dramatically their military capabilities as well,” Gaffney said. “It’s prompting them to expand pretty much across the board. We are endlessly surprised by the level of effort they are making and the things coming off their production lines.
“But the thing that is unmistakable is there is a determination both to field a nuclear capacity that will neutralize ours, and increasingly, it’s about being able to threaten our country directly to project power elsewhere around the world. I think they seem to see themselves as the next ‘world’s only superpower.’”
Ultimately, D’Souza said the debate about the president’s push to reduce the nation’s nuclear arsenal is about national security.
“Part of what keeps us top dog is that we have a big economy and we also have a more powerful military and nuclear arsenal than anyone else,” he said. “I believe Obama is trying to change all those things, not because he hates America, or that he’s a traitor, but because he is ideologically committed to a world in which economic, military and nuclear power are widely shared, a world in which America is not the one, but simply another nation at the great, if you will, dining table of nations.”
