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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.
So the line of argument is this:
Saddam Hussein launched a full ground invasion of Iran. He gassed Iranian civilians as part of a terror bombing campaign (with the support of much of the international community, including the US). The war lasted 8 years. The Iranians did not later acquire nukes and did not nuke Baghdad, they did not even gas the Iraqis back. Iraq was not even a nuclear power so there were no especially strong reasons not to nuke Iraq.
Why would Iran nuke Israel now when it didn't nuke Iraq? Israel has hundreds of nukes and would doubtless fire back.
And what is the proposed plan to finish the job? Destabilize the region more by bombing Iran harder, having Iran bomb the Gulf harder? Bombing alone has proven ineffective at achieving regime change. A ground invasion of an extremely mountainous country of 90 million? The US military would be fighting alone and would almost certainly get bogged down as China floods Iran with arms and aid. Meanwhile Iran would've suffered enormous casualties and be, if anything, more inclined to pursue nuclear weapons. Clearly their conventional forces are not sufficient to deter foreign attack! An enormous, bloody, ruinously expensive, strategically disastrous clusterfuck.
What the US really needs is smart leaders who appreciate what can and cannot be done with military power, who can judge the risks and benefits clearly, who have the wisdom to ignore the latest dossier of Israeli 'intelligence' about WMDs.
Leaving the job 'half done' is the best case scenario here. The US is not militarily or politically strong enough to launch a successful ground invasion. Nothing short of a ground invasion is going to achieve the kind of regime America is looking for. Probably not even that. You can't bomb people into becoming pro-Israeli.
It is not treasonous for Americans to pursue American interests by enforcing constitutional constraints on waging war. I am not American for what its worth.
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