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Notes -
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?
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.
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.
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