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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.
I think taking the country and the troops hostage to your insane decisions is spiritually treasonous, if not treason by the letter of the law. Even if we grant (which I do not) that we really are irrevocably committed, the first thing to do would be to remove Trump and his cabinet and replace them with less corrupt, inept, and irresponsible leadership.
See, I think what is going to happen is that we're going to bomb them for a while more, kill a bunch of people, and then proclaim victory and go home having accomplished very little. Sure, we'll have blown up some Iranian military hardware, destroyed a bunch of civilian infrastructure, killed some replaceable autocrats, and killed a lot of civilians. After which the IRI will rebuild and redouble its quest for a nuclear weapon. Trump does not believe in the Pottery Barn principle and he has a notoriously short attention span. Hegseth has openly stated that we're not in it for regime change and thinks war crimes are badass. So from where I stand, the options are 1) stop the war now and stop killing people, despite the job being 'unfinished' 2) keep the war going, killing a lot more people, and still leave the job unfinished. Either way, at the end of this we're going to be back to negotiating with IRI leadership.
Really, Trump II has really cemented my opinion that we need to gut the executive. The ability of the presidency to embroil the US in a major conflict unilaterally is untenable, and the notional justification for this broad authority doesn't seem to have much real-world basis.
I have a news for you - there isn't any. It's neocons all the way down. At least Trump with adventures - he keeps like Clinton only in the air and with low US body count.
The Congress has spent the better part of a century removing power from itself and piling it onto the executive. Why do you think that it will be easily reversed when the Dems are hungry to do the imperial presidency too.
There are no people left in the congress willing to defend the commons.
Skibboleth did not actually say that he thought gutting the executive would be easy, or that it is on the Dems' agenda. He said that it needs to be done. It may very well be that no one will do the necessary thing, but it's still necessary.
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