Death to mYseLF?

Scrolling through social media lately has been a little mind-blowing.

A large swath of Americans seem to have completely lost their confidence in their own nation. I’m seeing posts openly rooting for the Iranian military—what’s left of it—against the United States.

People celebrating Iranian strikes on U.S. sites.

People cheering retaliation.

The usual anti-American leadership commentary.

Criticism of leadership is normal. It’s healthy even.

But this is something else.

Some people seem to genuinely want the country that has been screaming “Death to America” for fifty years to succeed militarily against Americans.
As a former soldier, that’s hard to wrap my head around.

But honestly, you don’t even need to have served to find it bizarre. You want a regime that openly calls for the destruction of your country to win?

You want them to land successful strikes?

That means you’re cheering for Americans to die.

The justification people are using right now is the reported strike on a girls’ school in Iran. If the United States did hit that school, it’s a tragedy. Full stop. Civilians dying—especially kids—is horrific and it deserves a real investigation and real accountability.
But right now even that situation is still being sorted out.

I’m not even 100% convinced it was us yet, and even if it was, there’s a massive difference between a tragic mistake and intentional targeting. War is chaotic. Intelligence is imperfect. Bad things happen even when the intent is legitimate.

Some people online don’t even wait for facts anymore. They want to believe America did it and that it was intentional.

There’s almost this strange hunger to prove that we’re the bad guys.
And it goes beyond random posts.
You even hear it from people with huge platforms. Tucker Carlson recently said that total surrender means foreign troops get to assault your wives and daughters.

Really?

Is that what happened in Japan in 1945?

America doesn’t have a history of doing that. Not in modern warfare. Yes, tragedies and atrocities happened in places like Vietnam, but those were rogue soldiers committing crimes—not standard operating procedure.
There’s a difference between acknowledging dark moments in history and pretending they define everything.

Criticism of American policy is fair. I’ve got plenty of my own.

The messaging from the Trump administration on this situation hasn’t been especially clear. And if we’re being honest about history, the United States does not exactly have a glowing record when it comes to regime-change wars. Iraq and Afghanistan alone should make anyone cautious about jumping headfirst into another open-ended conflict.

But that doesn’t mean every military action automatically becomes another Iraq.

If this operation ends up turning into a long occupation and nation-building project, Americans should absolutely push back against it.

If it ends up more like Panama—or like the recent Venezuela strike—quick, controlled, precise, and over with quickly, that’s a completely different conversation.

Those are not the same thing.
But the online conversation has skipped that nuance entirely.
Instead we get a strange kind of inverted nationalism where some Americans seem desperate to prove the United States is always the villain in every situation. Every accusation becomes fact immediately. Every enemy becomes sympathetic as long as they oppose America.

That’s not analysis.

That’s ideology.

And here’s the uncomfortable reality for the Americans cheering Iran on:
The Iranian government hated you before you tweeted in its defense.

They hate you now.

And unless the regime fundamentally changes, they’ll continue to hate you regardless of how loudly you denounce your own country.

In the eyes of the Iranian regime we are not divided into critics and supporters, Democrats and Republicans, soldiers and civilians.
We’re all just Americans.
And to them, that means we’re all infidels.

None of this means the United States is perfect. No nation is. Our military has made mistakes before and it will again.

But there is a massive difference between demanding accountability from your country and rooting for its enemies to succeed militarily against it.

One is patriotism.

The other is something else entirely.

Mic G