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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29767 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?

I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.

I get it.

Many people would rather have had us not get here. But we are here. The ship has sailed.

If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.

So we are stuck.

But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever. Many probably don't expect it to happen, they are just trying to set up Trump looking bad. An example of this is probably the war powers resolutions.

But at that point you have overt politicking putting American, Israeli, Middle Eastern lives (and maybe everyone else?) at risk because you want to slightly increase the chance you can spend two years repeatedly impeaching Trump.

I think that's kind of treasonous? Maybe not the executing kind, but definitely the "holy shit what are you doing kind."

Like the war. Hate the war. It's happened. Criticizing how we got here is understandable, but I think we need to be careful.

Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

  • -23

When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?

Never? Unless you're trying some bait and switch with "criticism" in scare quotes.

I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.

If you're asking that question, I'm not sure that you do.

We've got an unpopular president starting a war in the middle east while conservatives close rank and accuse anyone against it to be unpatriotic traitors. Is it 2001 or 2026? I'm eagerly awaiting the return of freedom fries and politicians being pressured into wearing US flags on their lapels.

A significant part of the case for Trump in 2016 was people swearing up and down that Trump was a non-interventionist, that Killary Clinton was a mad warmongerer in the lineage of Bush who would kick off WW3 and MAGA was the only political faction that wouldn't send us to war. Trump's second term has been nothing but foreign intervention and saber-rattling! Where are those people who told me this would never happen? Weren't you one of them?

If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.

'Hey, I just made the case for why the guy I voted into office made a terrible decision that I swore he never would that could easily cost us trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. But ignore all that! Now that it's happened, you have to put aside your silly bickering and support the president and flag.'

Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

You mean like we left the job half done in Afghanistan? Do you think some better domestic PR magically would have defeated the Taliban?

I have to admit, this is one of the funniest timelines. A year or so ago conservatives here were smugly telling me that Biden and Harris had ushered in a golden age for conservatives, that the left was imploding and Christianity was ascendant. Today Trump is massively unpopular, immigration agenda in shambles, and he literally decided that taking a page out of the Bush's playbook was a good idea. If he manages to preside over another financial crisis or recession, well, that would just be the cherry on top.

I'd say that I'm looking forward to hearing what those people think about the war in Iran, but if I'm being honest, it's probably just going to be more blackpills and fedposting about the fourth box of liberty.

Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

You mean like we left the job half done in Afghanistan? Do you think some better domestic PR magically would have defeated the Taliban?

More like we left the job half done in Vietnam. Afghanistan was a counter-insurgency and nation-building fight, whereas this is a pretty straight-forward destroy-the-enemy fight. We don't even need our own troops on the ground to provide advisors and support to the Artesh, communications tech has come a long way since the 60s. And yet the media is once again trying to make the US lose a war that it can pretty easily win.

We left the job done in Vietnam, though- the war goals never included the destruction of the north Vietnamese commie regime.

Judging by the assessment of John McNaughton (assistant secdef for international security affairs) in March 1965, we achieved 20% of our aims.

  1. US aims:

70%—To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).

20%—To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.

10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.

Also—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.

Not—To “help a friend,” although it would be hard to stay if asked out.

And with the US withdrawal from the conflict, we left with 90-100% of our war goals accomplished- South Vietnam remained an independent state for several years following American withdrawal, and North Vietnam promising to respect its territorial integrity was a key promise to obtain that withdrawal. That North Vietnam reneged on that promise was perhaps predictable, but when the US agreed to withdraw all of American war aims were met at the time of withdrawal.

If in 1947 Nazi Germany somehow reconquered continental Europe then the US 'winning' WW2 is rather irrelevant and minimal even if American troops marched through Berlin and went home with a peace treaty. The political goal was a failure.

And yet the media is once again trying to make the US lose a war that it can pretty easily win.

Yeah, I don't think the media is problem here. The media loves a good war.

The problem is that war is fundamentally about willpower, not firepower, and Trump has made no effort to build public support for this war. This has, in fact, been a more general aspect US foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era. The American public isn't willing to tolerate casualties or pain because they don't believe enough in the causes their support is being demanded for, not because they're soft or because the troops are being stabbed in the back by the media.

I don't think the media was the main factor that made the US lose in Vietnam. The main factors were:

  1. Fear of Soviet and Chinese intervention prevented the US from invading North Vietnam.
  2. Conscription made the war more than just an abstract political event for the American population. There had been conscription during the Korean War, too, but that war ended quickly enough for conscription to not become a major political problem.

I would argue that the war ended because of media coverage of the Tet offensive. Most media treated it as a massive blow to the US, a surprise attack that showed the strength of the enemy. But militarily the offensive was a failure. It didn't meet its objectives and was very costly for the Vietcong. The media portrayed this incorrectly because they were already ideologically against the war. I agree there are many factors, but ultimately I think the US lost that war because of demoralization and successful psyops from the Vietnamese.

But the US continued waging the war for 5 years after the Tet Offensive. It still had plenty of time to win the war, and/or to make the South Vietnamese military capable of defending South Vietnam, and it failed. The US did draw down its troop strength after the Tet Offensive, which likely played a role in its failure to win the war. But even 2 years after the offensive, the US troop strength was higher than it had been in 1965.

I do think the Tet Offensive and media coverage played a large role, just not a decisive one.

If the US had used an entirely volunteer military instead of using conscription, the war would still have been very unpopular in leftist circles, but the appeal of the anti-war side would have stayed relatively limited compared to the historical timeline. After all, this was the same country that went on to elect Nixon with 60% of the electoral vote in 1972 over the anti-war McGovern, despite the conscription and the failures to win the war. The hardcore anti-Vietnam-War leftists were a small subset of the US population who loom larger than their actual size because they made a large fraction of their generation's enduring movies, music, and writing — and also because the US defeat adds to the tendency to see them as having been right. It was the draft that gave the antiwawr cause resonant widespread appeal among the youth.

If the US had invaded North Vietnam, and China and the Soviet Union did not send land troops to stop the invasion in response, the US would have suffered heavy casualties but would have almost certainly won the war decisively as a result. The fear of China and the Soviet Union sending land troops into Vietnam, and/or the Soviet Union attacking Western Europe, and/or either using nukes, was the main thing that stopped the US from invading North Vietnam.

The ARVN was capable of defending Vietnam, they defeated the first invasion following US withdrawal. But the Republic of Vietnam was an corrupt dictatorship which removed their competent generals for political reasons, leading to the army collapsing in a subsequent invasion.

Would you, personally, be in favor of a ground invasion involving 400,000–500,000 US troops? How many US killed in action do you think we should be willing to commit to? 5,000? 30,000? 50,000?

Personally I wouldn't support a ground invasion at all. If I were the boss, I would be willing to commit troops to special operations and direct action missions that would provide outsized impacts that we couldn't achieve from long range strikes - but it's not clear to me that there are many targets that require that. What exactly would be the purpose of an invasion?

Also, there aren't 500,000 currently deployable ground troops in the entire US military. There may be that many troops in total, but to get most of those units ready to deploy would take months, and then months and months more to ship them overseas a few at a time. For more context, at the peak of the Iraq war we had 170,000 troops on the ground, and less than 5,000 were killed over the course of 8 years. I'm not sure you're really calibrated on this.

I chose the invasion force numbers based on Gen. Eric Shineski's testimony before congress in 2003, when he estimated that it would take between 200,000 and 300,000 troops to control Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfoqitz eviscerated him for this, as they knew that such numbers likely wouldn't fly with the public, whom they were trying to convince that a more nimble operation would be successful. They ended up sending about 150,000 troops for the initial invasion, but those numbers were augmented by 50,000 troops from other countries. I don't know how many troops Israel would be willing to send, but I think it's safe to say that we can't expect much help from elsewhere.

In the end, I don't know why you're bringing up actual troop numbers in Iraq at all, since that's obviously not a war we want to emulate. If we assume that Shineski's estimates were correct, and account for the fact that Iran has double the population and several times the land area, 500,000 seems like a reasonable estimate for what it would take to control the country. I brought up the casualty numbers not because I think any of those numbers are likely, but because we don't know what kind of numbers would be likely. We lost 5,000 in Iraq, but 50,000 in Vietnam and 30,000 in Korea.

I brought all this up because on the one hand you talk about how we weren't willing to fully commit in Vietnam but on the other talk about how this is a fight we can "easily win", and your reply makes it clear that you don't want to commit any ground troops. Well, which is it? Do you want to win, or are you willing to walk away if the air campaign doesn't achieve the objectives (which, it should be said, aren't clear right now). To my knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong, there has never been an instance where a government has been toppled due to air power alone. Libya fell due to a counterinsurgency, and again, I'm not sure that's an example we want to follow here. What do we do after we've bombed every legitimate target and the regime is still in power? Walk away? If so, that's fine, but it's also evidence that "we really didn't want to win". We may not have 500,000 troops at the ready, but we're certainly able to commit that many if necessary. We've committed more when the population was a lot lower.

it would take between 200,000 and 300,000 troops to control Iraq

I think this is the key point. He was talking about invading and occupying the country. I don't think anyone, even the most rabid war hawks, is suggesting we should occupy the whole of Iran. From what I've seen, most of the usual hawks don't want troops on the ground at all.

As I've said before, the aim seems to be to destroy the ability of the IRGC to wage war in the hope that the Artesh or some insurgent group can move in and take control. And in the case that no such group succeeds, we can still be happy with destroying as much of the IRGC military infrastructure as we can. The risk to us seems to be primarily from the economic effects of shutting down shipping lanes, which I think is most likely worth the cost.

Iran is a problem because of:

  1. Their sponsorship of terrorist groups in other countries
  2. Their nuclear program

Neither of these have to do with their conventional capabilities, which nobody was talking about until recently. They were already conventionally weak and destroying these capabilities further doesn't accomplish anything, except to possibly exacerbate the existing problems. If you want those problems to go away, you have to either negotiate or control the country. Trump didn't want to negotiate, and due to his recent actions the Iranians aren't going to be willing to negotiate either, so that option is off the table. We already hit their nuclear sites last summer, and Trump said that anyone claiming that it didn't solve the nuclear issue was reporting fake news. 8 months later and they're back to being two weeks away from a bomb. They aren't going to install a new government without some kind of occupation, and they aren't going to be able to get to the nuclear sites without boots on the ground occupying and destroying them. There's no precedent for a country capitulating due to bombing alone, except maybe Japan in 1945 if you only count the mainland. And even then we had total air and naval superiority and still had to both use nukes and send an occupying force of more than 400,000 for a country that's smaller than Iran. I have no idea what Trump thinks is magically going to happen.

The risk to us seems to be primarily from the economic effects of shutting down shipping lanes, which I think is most likely worth the cost.

How can you say that when you don't know what the cost is yet? Should Americans pay $7/gallon for gas for a year for this? Will Iranian insurgent groups periodically drone oil tankers in the Gulf for the foreseeable future? How long will it take global shipping to recover? How much money are you personally willing to lose because of this war?

So far we've seen no attempt at any action against the regime. I think the IRGC has successfully neutered all the opposition; there's no armed rival to take control. And the hard-line regime may be deep enough that you simply can't kill enough of them to find anyone willing to make a deal; if you keep killing you may just reduce the nation to ungoverned chaos.

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