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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.
That would be a very good reason not to start wars that lack democratic approval.
The purpose of requiring a congressional declaration of war is to make sure that you avoid this problem by having democratic backing for your war effort.
What stands out to me is that virtually no one seems willing to defend the war on the merits. Even the people who support it focus on how the IRI is bad or how we need to trust the president or how - per OP - not supporting the war is disloyal.
The merits seem to change on a daily basis, and have not been explained publicly in any way. I watched Hegseth's interview on 60 minutes last night, his explanation of the demand for "unconditional surrender" was vague to the point of incoherence. He smirked and played coy about whether there were troops on the ground ("well I sure wouldn't tell you that would I?" "we're not ruling anything out"), until the interviewer pointed out that he had said there were no troops on the ground earlier in the week at which point he claimed that was accurate.
As Daryl Cooper pointed out during the Gaza war, when Unconditional Surrender Grant or Eisenhower or Mcarthur demanded Unconditional Surrender from their foes, there was a basic understanding that once the foe surrendered, the conqueror would take on the government of the surrendered territory. We do not seem to intend to do that.
"Unconditional surrender" means exactly that; you surrender, and what the enemy does to you is up to them. If you've been watching Trump at all, you know that a demand for "unconditional surrender" by him just means "make me an offer".
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