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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 donated to Trump, I voted for him in the primary, and all three elections. From 2015 to 2025, my main complaint about Trump was that taco was happening too often.
I think attacking Iran was probably the worst strategic blunder in history. 20% of the world's crude oil flows through Hormuz. Worse 30% of the world's LNG and 30% of the world's nitrogen fertilizer. Thanks to a bunch of brilliant people we feed 8 billion people and counting thanks mostly to nitrogen fertilizer. It needs to be in place with planting which leaves a narrow window to get the supply that hasn't moved for almost a week moving. Finally a significant percentage of the world's sulfer also flows through there (it's a byproduct of refining crude). Sulfer is needed for copper refining so when that stockpile is used up so does semiconductor production (if LNG electricity in Taiwan doesn't stop it first). There are a massive web of gigantic world economic industries that all depend on inputs from inside the Persian Gulf.
Insurance is gone for a straight of Hormuz crossing. Every P&I Club pulled their policies effective Thursday. In a best case scenario and hostilities cease now, there's no guarantee it comes back because the risk of it happening again remains and is costly to calculate and they don't have enough capital to backstop the new business reality.
It takes time for governments to set up backstops and in that time we are very likely to miss important milestones like Taiwan runs out of natural gas or fertilizer never gets applied to spring 2026 planting.
Worse, there almost nothing that can be offered to Iran to get them to stop. if we try to make them stop. They have 90 million people in a mountain fortress full of missiles and drones and a week of bombing has only gotten potentially half the launchers. They make the drones that have completely stalemated Ukraine and Russia, so a ground invasion into endless drones is a slow costly bloody mess. Nukes don't solve this problem, and leave the US and Israel as pariah states or potentially kick off MAD.
There is nothing 90% of voters want or care about to be gained by hostilities and every other exit is massively costly. This was a giant, obvious trap (everything I mentioned above was or should have been well known to planners in advance of bombings) and Trump walked right into it thanks to at best flattery and at worst being a blackmailed child rapist.
We didn't even refill the SPR from the drawdowns, before attacking the nation that any idiot on the street would tell you they'd threaten Hormuz. Inexcusable blunder in my opinion.
Ok bad or not it's I doubt it's even in the top 1000 strategic blunders in history, however this ends it's unlikely to end with the entire population of the United States, or even a mere twentieth of its population, dead or destitute or enslaved or similar, and that is not true of a lot of strategic blunders.
We can rephrase "worst strategic blunder in history" with "worst American unforced error since cutting funding to mRNA vaccines"
I'm still so fucking mad about the mRNA vaccines
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06800-3
Sounds like we could use more data then, but oh wait...
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