There were warnings that if New York gets the Games -- and it was a big if, with other major cities of the world still in the running -- the Olympics might become a target for terrorists, residents and small businesses might be displaced by Olympic building projects, and the games might bring pollution, higher taxes and nightmare traffic.
So perhaps we can look forward to a new branding campaign with its hallmark juxtaposed images – but this time of a terrorist and a small boy, both quizzically labelled "risk".
Another buzz arose when he warned that parts of the world "are going to hell". He also vowed to "crush loser terrorists" and condemned a "small group of rogue regimes," including Iran, for threatening global stability.
Jenna Jordan, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Aaron Mannes, of the University of Maryland, have separately reviewed dozens of past campaigns by governments to destroy terrorist organizations and found that culling leaders works in some instances — especially when terrorist groups are young and small — but not in others.
Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, "the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years".
Yet, conservative members of Congress forced DHS to withdraw its report finding that "lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States".
The memo combines obvious observations with a lack of substantiation for its assertion that "the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years". But it's no broadside attack on veterans.
"The IRS has used a law that's meant to catch drug runners and terrorists to instead punish farmers and small business owners," Rep. Peter Roskam, who chairs the subcommittee, said at the hearing.
Not only are they unsuited to crushing counterinsurgencies and small bands of terrorists or irregular fighters, but mass armies are simply too cumbersome to deploy on short notice.
"We are in a new phase of terrorism, including lone actors and small groups of terrorists, like those in San Bernardino," Obama said.
