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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31541 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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It's still possible that Assad can pull off a rabbit from the hat and save his skin, but I just have to say that this whole process makes the whole "Lion of Damascus / Can't Mossad the Assad / Curse of Assad" memery seem, after the fact, rather cringe and, dare I say, Reddit (sure, a lot of it was jokes, but a lot of it wasn't). The great opthalmologist of Syria was, after all, just a paper tiger with little evident support beyond the minority demographics, if that, and a modest amount of pressure from a faction led by a guy who (unconvincigly) refers to Acemoglu on media makes the whole apparatus collapse like a house of cards.

Doesn't really look very good for the general pro-Russian camp that a major ally/prop of Russia would go out ingnomiously like this - kind of like Yanokovych, in the ends, forgotten by everyone basically the moment he left Ukraine, without support even among the antimaidan militants that Strelkov would later use as tinder for his Greater-Russia project.

Doesn't really look very good for the general pro-Russian camp that a major ally/prop of Russia would go out ingnomiously like this -

The same happens to America's puppets like South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. If they aren't themselves chased out, the moment they turn their backs it all collapses like a house of cards.

South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan

One of these things is not like the others.

Did anyone other than Erdoğan (and Netanyahu) politically survive Assad from his original set of enemies though?

The guy who was VP of the United States when the Syrian civil war started is still (just) alive and still (technically) in high political office.

Perhaps the unexpected Zerg rush of HTS was all Biden’s doing to beat the curse

The dictator and the guy who's been in and out of power since the nineties. Obama wasn't removed politically; he was term limited out and if he had been able to run in 2016 he would have stood a very good chance of winning.

Pretty big achievement for any leader to survive politically for 13 years, no?

Good point, although that memery has outlived its usefulness/relevance for years at this point, as Kamala lost the election, Biden is a lame duck and Trump isn't an interventonist. If the regime does indeed fall in the near future, it'll happen with negligible input from the US or Israel or the UK.

Hey hey, Yanukovych got a last gasp of almost-relevance when he was staged to swoop into Kyiv in the initial Russian invasion as a new government.

Assad is considerably less likely to be relevant like that, though. His minority power base is even smaller, and he doesn't have the narrative impetus of reversing an American effort.

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