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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3201 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 16, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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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?

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.

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