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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.
When the metric keeps changing it's a very useless term to use. Just a few months ago it was mainstream Republican view that interventionism and fucking with the middle east was a waste of time even at best and potentially dangerous. We spent the whole last year justifying the admin's dwindling support of Ukraine as a "pivot to Asia" and now we're back in the middle east again for ?????? They won't even give a cohesive explanation, the reasons keep shifting around at their whim (likely because if you give an actual goal, then you actually have to achieve it instead of just claiming victory whenever you feel like it). Even before the election the conservative argument was that Harris would be the one shooting missiles into Iran and potentially putting soldiers on the ground, the this you account on Twitter has documented a few of them.
It's absolutely insane that some people are trying to argue having actual principles and beliefs instead of being hypocrite liars who turn on a dime because Israel and Trump under them told them to is treasonous behavior. If anyone is a traitor, it's the people who lie to the American public (with the aid of foreign spy agencies mind you) and get elected on false promises. That's not loyalty to Americans, that's treating us citizen goyims as cattle and sheep who you think are too stupid to recognize it and won't notice. Well too bad, this war is really unpopular and there hasn't been a "rally around the flag" effect. Turns out the American people aren't brainless and don't just become your fans over a war you started because Israel told you to.
Edit: Also quite interesting this happens just a few days before they had to release the part of the Epstein files where we find out the guards were talking about a coverup of Epstein's death, saying he was killed, and also mysteriously depositing tons of money in cash over a period of a few months right around that time. What a strange coincidence that Israel and the US would want a headline consuming war started right at this exact time.
I agree with a lot of your concerns, but a clear case for Iran now can be made as part of a pivot to Asia. That basically gives US full control over the global oil market. It would just be Russia outside of the American block. US would have a credible card of cutting Chinese oil supplies 80% during a Taiwan War.
"simply blockage the Malacca strait" needs to stop. I honestly might make a copy pasta for this.
Here's a lazy version:
it is likely, but not guaranteed, that the USA could station enough forces to maintain a blockade , but we'll assume it does for the rest of this analysis
blockades are effective, but not a kill switch. Germany got blockaded quite hard in both world wars. It definitely contributed to its downfall. That downfall still took many years and massive amounts of boots on the ground effort and death.
China shares a massive land border with a massive oil producer who hates the USA, Russia. They don't have enough pipelines, and it's actually odd that China is slow rolling the power of Siberia 2, but they could speed it up if they wanted.
a clear part of belt and road was to start hedging against a Malacca blockade (and to soak up absurd domestic construction capacity), it's not going great , but they're thinking about it
speaking of thinking about it, China is a world leader in solar and EVs , you ever wonder why they're going balls deep into tech that reduces oil dependency??? They can run their warships and planes for years on domestic production, storage, and Russian imports.
China is calorie self sufficient. They import a ton of food, but they could live off their own rice if they had to. They also share a giant land border with a country that grows a ton of food and hates America (it's Russia again!).
the Chinese people can soak a lot of pain. They won't like having no gas and eating rice, but their grandparents remember way worse.
if you think China has an energy/calorie import problem, you should look at Taiwan and Japan. Both of them need to import WAY WAY more of their energy/calories as a % of demand. Japan could get away with only offloading with Pacific ports, although that would suck. Taiwan just immediately starves to death and collapses. There are no (0) ports that Taiwan can use that can't be missile/mine spammed from the Chinese mainland.
on another note, a ridiculous amount of global trade goes through Malacca. The USA will deeply upset the rest of the world by doing this. You can say "yes but fuck the rest of the world, we have super carriers" which is true. But when you're in a peer fight against a peer who's got home field advantage, you are not helping yourself by doing this.
I'm so fucking sick of "erm, we'll simply blockade the straits of Malacca and they'll fold, gg" when the entire population of Taiwan will have starved 5 times over before China even starts going "damn are we sure we want to spend the fuel on this sortie right now?"
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The US already had those cards given its ability to sanction or blockade pretty much any oil exporter at will and/or blockade China. The only reason that Chinese purchases dominated Venezuelan and Iranian exports in the first place is that they were pretty much the only ones who would buy from them thanks to US sanctions, and as much as the sanction discount was easy money for the Chinese it isn't that important. China also buys lots of oil (much more than from Iran and Venezuela combined) from Saudi Arabia and the GCC countries, along with Iraq. Are we going to sanction all of them as well?
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