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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.
Being opposed to the war is not treason. Treason would be something like assisting Iran. It's conceivably possible that a congressman might do this, but it probably looks more like Bob Menendez-type behavior than a political stunt.
As far as democrats' political behavior, this is pretty normal for late-stage republics. Iran can't really hurt us that much; obviously attacking them was dumb, but we're kind of committed now. The real question is 'is the local allies part of the plan going to work'. I don't have the highest hopes, but Iran is kind of falling apart right now.
I feel like my point was missed by the majority of posters (which could easily be my fault).
The problem is not opposing the war, it's serving as opposition to the war effort, which some people are clearly doing.
You have a difference between not wanting to spend American lives in Vietnam and giving aid to the VC, or even just hoping that the VC win.
I mean I get the argument on pragmatic grounds, but in theory the political process (i.e. the democratic part of government) is specifically entrusted with deciding who to go to war against and how. So on that level it's nonsensical to say opposing (non-democratic!) decisions about going to war isn't or shouldn't be allowed.
In other words, there's an okay argument you can make that it would be nice if people supported the war effort even if they oppose the war, but upgrading that to people ought to support the war effort even if they oppose the war is an argument that's at least out of sync with the Constitution and our history. Morally sure, you can still say that, everyone can have their opinion.
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Haven't all American wars had significant numbers serving as opposition to the war efforts? Even WWII? And riots in New York city against conscription during the Civil War? Is there something different with what's going on now that I'm not seeing?
Yeah, the near-unanimity. Or apparent near-unanimity, anyway. Everywhere I look the story is that the US cannot win this war, in fact is losing as we speak, and has hit nothing but civilian infrastructure, schools, and world heritage sites. That Iran's launch capability cannot be stopped, that their nuclear materials are being recovered as we speak, and that the US can do nothing about their nuclear program. That Iran can keep the Strait of Hormuz closed indefinitely and there's nothing the US can do about it, that the IRGC will remain in control and remain defiant, and that the question is not whether the Iranian regime can survive this war but whether the American one can.
Or maybe it's just CNN, X, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Reuters, AP, and The Wall Street Journal.
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An American joining a chant of "Death to America" probably isn't treason (but if the American knew the chant was organized by the hostile state, I could see it), but it's pretty bad nevertheless. This is getting pretty close to the line, assuming any of those people are actually American citizens. "Solidarity with Iran" is pretty bad in terms of "adhering to their enemies".
(Why can I find no mention of this in US media... including Fox? Maybe nobody at any of those agencies speaks Farsi)
It's probably not mentioned because at least going by the one picture, this is like 30 people. Size of protests matter. You can pretty easily get 30 people to show up at a protest over a pretty stupid issue, especially in NYC
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That is protected 1st amendment speech. And who actually cares what those privileged mamma's boys say? Blow them off, tell them to their face's they're assholes, or punch them in the nose and take the consequences. But spoiled brats acting out suggests not at all that the FBI and Justice Department need to be involved because Western Civilization is about to collapse.
A DIA analysts secretly passing intel reports to Iran or their proxies would be treason. This isn't just not in that neighborhood, it's not even in the same zip code.
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