And that's when everything starts to go very, very bad.

When the smoke finally clears, all but two of the American soldiers are dead, victims of a diabolical trap. The enemy knew we were coming.

But how?

Unknown to all but the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, his assistant, and the IT guy who had to fix the problem, the Deputy Chief of Staff's BlackBerry had gone missing two days before. No one was really concerned about security since this particular White House staffer did mostly political work. That's why he never reported the missing BlackBerry to anyone else. From the IT guy's perspective, it'd be a pain to hook the DCOS up with a new BlackBerry, but other than that, no great loss.

Except, of course, for the American lives. You see, an email message had been sent to the BlackBerry. The email message contained an attachment. That attachment was a converted Word file containing a draft of the press release that would be issued after the attack, for the Deputy Chief of Staff's approval or editing.

Although the press release didn't detail everything about what, by then, would have been the over-and-done attack, anyone connected to al-Qa'idah, reading it before the attack began, would have been able to piece together some important details -- enough to set a trap.

Two days earlier, much of the White House staff had been traveling with the President, staying at a hotel in Tucson, where the President was going to give a well-publicized speech about the environment. Having had only about three hours of sleep (usual for the job), and rushing to catch the plane (also usual for the job), the Deputy Chief of Staff accidentally left his BlackBerry in his hotel room.

When the BlackBerry went missing -- retrieved out of the hotel room by a maid with a nephew with a brother-in-law in al-Qa'idah, no one knew that the press release would fall into enemy hands.

After all, it was just a BlackBerry.

Scenario 2: a damaging foreign relations screwup
When dealing with crackpot dictators, subtlety requires you to walk thunderously and use a really big stick. But when dealing with nations like the French Republic, with a history going back to the Treaty of Verdon in 843, subtlety is often the best form of diplomacy.

Imagine, for the purposes of our scenario, that the United States is readying for a retaliatory war. Following the dictates of good international relations, the U.S. has sent envoys to its allies, seeking support for an attack. A lot is going on that year, the build-up to war is far from the only thing keeping the White House busy.

The U.S. is already running an invasion in another country, a former FBI agent was caught selling secrets to Moscow, a former U.S. president is flying all over the world, talking to leaders officially on our shit list. We've also got domestic problems, with snipers running around scaring the crap out of our citizens, one of the biggest companies in the world self-destructed, and, oh, there are elections this year as well.