First off, huge disclaimer up here this is not a serious diary. I am totally taking the piss with this, not to be taken seriously at all. This is literally something I came up with in the shower this morning. I've always been a fan of Marvel's What If? books and DC's Elseworlds. In fact hey Marvel: bring back What If? and eXiles, dammit. Those were fun reads.
So. Imagine if you will...
What if you were a strategist for a person highly interested in ousting the current leader of a country? Let's call him Carl Jove. Your side is not so thrilled with the crop of candidates that have come up and the frontrunner is a person who even your own party doesn't like. You'll need to gameplan for this. You'll need some distractions. People like shiny objects right?
More below Picasso's Cheeto
Carl and his friends covet something in a foreign country, some natural resource you want to control. You've wanted an excuse to invade said country for years but were told it would not be a wise thing to do, but those people are chickens, right? Carl totally knows better. It would be a great distraction to foment unrest around there forcing some sort of action. You've already got some guys in power that are aligned with you ideologically on board with this over there. You just need to ignite a spark.
What if you have the ears of several billionaires who really don't mind blowing several hundred million on a project like this and have several dozen shell companies to play with? Hmmm...maybe you could finance a really large distraction when it looks like the opposition is winning. You could, say, make a movie that would be patently offensive to a large section of the world but only release a snippet of it on the internet on the same day as the anniversary of a terrorist attack? With many people sympathetic to said terrorists still around in this section of the world? And with our country still hunting said terrorists?
But wait, you may ask. The simple act of releasing a previously-unknown film shouldn't instantaneously enrage that section of the world population, right? Well of course not. That's why a few days before the film's mysterious "release" you leak some details about it to certain sympathetic ears in that section of the world. Maybe your billionaire backers even grease those wheels a little bit to make sure the "spontaneous" demonstrations look on the up-and-up. And knowing the population is easily enraged and don't like the country that much in the first place, it will start to snowball.
But what if the terrorists got wind of your plans? Seems like a good opportunity to do some damage, right? You see your plan go into motion. A demonstration has erupted. Sound and fury signifying nothing but enough to get the media's attention. You're pleased. You let your candidate know to go on the offensive because you think the situation is under control. Then the terrorists strike. They kill people, maybe an Ambassador. Your candidate now looks like an insensitive jerk who should have kept his stupid mouth shut and dug himself a deeper hole.
On top of this the shell game you played with the movie starts to unravel. Things you thought were hidden can suddenly be traced back to you. The people in said foreign countries realized they were duped and are calling for your head. The sitting President's Secretary of State calms the tensions and opens up new doors for negotiations and cooperation to the hostile states. The people of the country in which your embassy was bombed come together to hunt down the folks that did it. Justice is done without your country's intervention.
What if?