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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3201 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 16, 2023

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So, why does the Western multi-national coalition want al-Assad dead or dethroned? Since the WMD narrative fell apart for Iraq and I believe the chemical attack narrative was a false flag by rebels, there has to be something more. But I never see these rationalist or rat-adjacent spaces talking about it.

It’s accepted truthiness among the alt-right and conspiracy spaces that Gaddafi was killed for trying to make a pan-African state backed by a gold Dinar. Is it something like that?

I thought I sent this response yesterday, but…

Why do you think the chemical attacks were a false flag? I would expect that to be less likely than the regime, which is known to target civilians, known to have the relevant weapons, and known to control the most likely launch sites.

Anyway, if you’re going to oversimplify geopolitics, might as well go all the way: Assad is on the naughty list. The most important predictor for Western attitudes towards a given dictator is whether he looks amenable to negotiation. Assad got a reputation for not playing ball.

I could get into the “he said” / “they said” of it all, but for me the bottom line was the timing. Trump was planning on pulling out. That’s exactly the wrong time to do a chemical attack..

The response to the Douma event was American cruise missiles hitting an airbase after clear warnings to evacuate. To his credit, Trump walked the fine line between retaliation and no response, and the feeling among his fans on The_Donald was that he knew it was not Assad but had to do something after having mocked Obama’s “red line” backdown.

  • Syria is a Russian & Iranian ally.
  • They've been refusing a Saudi oil pipeline to Europe for a long time.
  • The governing tribe is made up of Alawite Muslims. There's a longstanding conflict between the Alawites and the Sunnis. The Saudis feel that the Alawites are heretics unjustly ruling over their Sunni brothers.

So really it's an assortment of reasons, but the US & allies wanted al-Assad gone and Sunni leaders brought in.

I’m not sure that getting rid of Assad is a major goal of western Middle East policy right now- no doubt the state department would be happy if he would be replaced with an Al-Sisi, but it doesn’t seem to be a focus and they’ve more or less made their peace with him being there to stay.

It’s accepted truthiness among the alt-right and conspiracy spaces that Gaddafi was killed for trying to make a pan-African state backed by a gold Dinar.

This is probably not true, if for no reason other than that the USA was definitely not in the lead on taking him out- he was batshit crazy and France and Italy took him down to gain control of his oilfields.

Syria is a Russian ally, an Iranian ally, has a rivalry with Israel (from when they took the Golan Heights off Syria, Israel bombing their nuclear reactor). Syria's been a thorn in the US's side for some time, they let some jihadists out of prison and sent them into Iraq to cause problems for the US occupation back in the day. Plus the Assad family has been pretty bloody in the past and present - see Hama in the 1980s. Plus giving up on offing Assad would be embarrassing, an admission of defeat. As we see from Afghanistan, the Western multinational coalition often has a decade-long lag time before giving up on a lost war, so we can expect a US presence in Syria for years to come.

So it’s more about geopolitical grudges than something al-Assad is currently doing?

A mix of both, I don't know exact motivations.

I believe the chemical attack narrative was a false flag by rebels

Or it wasn't. Middle-Eastern dictators - and, to be honest, also European dictators - have absolutely no problem using any weapons, including chemical weapons, when they see fit. Chemical weapons is a weapon of terror, best used agains weakly organized and poorly equipped, but numerous opponent - exactly the scenario a dictator beset by rebels faces. Whether or not it was used in a particular case, it's hard to know, and to be honest, not very important - a massive bombing with regular high explosives will kill everybody as well - actually, probably better, and cheaper - than chemical weapons. The question of chemical weapons use is used as a sign that a particular dictator is out of control (and also is a useful meme to deploy in the press to gather support) but substantially killing 10 thousands people using gas or killing 10 thousands people using bullets and explosives makes no difference.

I believe the reason why West wants Assad out is because they feel a) he is out of control, as to maintaining the agreement "you don't murder too many of your own people and we turn a blind eye on all your lesser atrocities" and b) there are forces that could replace him, so removing him would not cause utter chaos.

Gaddafi was killed for trying to make a pan-African state backed by a gold Dinar

Likely no. Conspiracy spaces are woefully ignorant about how the modern economics works in general and what would concern whoever rules it, even provided - which is a very unproven hypothesis - that these people are capable to produce coordinated action like starting a whole new war, as opposed to passively reacting to events around them.

Even if [KGQ]h?add?h?af?fi wanted to do something like that - and which dictator doesn't want to be King of Kings? - there's no reason for other countries to submit to him, and he owns, as far as I know, no special resource to make it happen. Even if it somehow happened - adopting the gold standard requires an economic approach very different from what is being used by every modern economy, and would require an economic discipline and tenacity which just does no exist anywhere, let alone in commonly grotesquely corrupt and mismanaged African states. Even if somehow that happened, nobody in their sane minds - at least not anybody who really matters - would rush to abandon economic ties with the US economic juggernaut in exchange for going all in for an upstart project run by a Lybian dictator. In other words, this theory lacks all the components of the classic triad - motive, means and opportunity.

My head canon is that Gaddafi regex is out there running in production somewhere.

There are usually better culture-aware name canonicalizers running inside AML software, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of them did have a regex inside.

Yinon plan never existed, but it is working as intended.

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