I started a modern AU Old Guard fic in Feb 2021 in which, a few chapters in, Nicky starts learning Arabic on Duolingo.

'You know what,' I thought, naively, 'I'll just do the first few lessons myself so I can use some of the sillier sentences from it in the fic.'

Just under 3 years later, I have just completed all levels of Duolingo Arabic on Legendary. The fic, while nudging at 100k words, is still not finished. I believe there is one brief reference to Duolingo in it.

It's a bloody hard won reference though.

Since you're the only anti-Assad guy I seem to be following, what exactly is the case for removing him? I've looked at the issue multiple times and I can't seem to find any sort of benefit to removing Assad that would outweigh the significant cost of doing so, with the added downside that it only shores up more power for Saudi Arabia. I really don't see what we stand to gain.

Well, lemme spell it out: Assad is playing for the other team - to wit, Iran has troops in the country backing up Assad right now, and we all know about Russia’s direct support and troops in-country, as well. This whole Qatar conflict? Kicked off days after Trump told the Saudis to stop fucking about and start self-policing. The Qataris are tight with the Iranians who are tight with the Russians. See how this works? Syria has simply become the latest battleground in a very long, very old proxy war between the United States and Russia for global influence. 

Now whether or not you believe the claims of the Russians that they’re just “defending themselves” and that tiny Baltic states would be existential threats to a nation with ten times their population, land mass and budget if they join NATO is up to you, but I think we can both agree that Putin has decisively committed Russia to a new conflict with the West. We are in a new Cold War as we speak, and as a new generation is learning, the Cold War was anything but - it was simply fought by proxy. 

Egypt is a good example, here. Mubarak was a bastard, and the military junta he represented are still oppressive bastards, who’ve successfully stifled any hope of free democracy in Egypt from the Arab Spring. But they’re our oppressive bastards. And that’s pretty much as good as you can hope for in the Middle East... that is, unless you’re willing to commit your nation to a very expensive, bloody ten year war to invade one of those states and shield and nurture a nascent democratic government against a decade of upheaval, war, and attempts to kill it until it can stand on its own. *Cough cough.* And that’s the price you have to pay. That is, by Donald Rumsfeld’s own admission, why Bush Sr. didn’t remove Saddam - it would’ve created a power vacuum which would’ve been filled by a new SOB. It’s the clearest example of “the devil you know versus the devil you don’t” you could ask for. And that’s from the guy who’d preside over the invasion of Iraq under Bush Jr! 

If it wasn’t for ISIS and the Russians/Iranians, we’d be doing right now what we’ve done for decades - not give a shit about Syria. ISIS is the real problem. I’ve heard some people opining that ISIS would never have been a problem if not for “our meddling.” Those people are fucking retarded. The Arab Spring, in case they missed it, was (and is) a big fucking thing - decades upon decades of oppression, suffering and rage finally boiled over, and it hit the Middle East like a goddamn brick. If you really think that half-assed “bombing campaign” of Obama’s and Hillary’s was the deciding factor in Gaddafi finally leaving Libya by riding a bullet to hell, you’re delusional. Fuck, even Saddam was almost ousted by the Kurds after the Gulf War - a short bombing campaign could’ve taken out Saddam and replaced him with allies of ours (allies during the Gulf War,) and saved us all the later bloodshed, but apparently Bush Sr. didn’t want to take that big roll of the dice. Hindsight, 20/20, etc. But don’t think that they only managed it because we’d trashed their military: the Kurds have been rebelling since the 30s, and they’ve taken their chances at other times Iraq was vulnerable, like during the Iran-Iraq war. Note that the Iraqi regime was desperate enough against this uprising to employ chemical weapons against what was nominally their own people. And remember that we’re not the only ones that “meddle” in other nations - the Turks, who fucking hate the Kurds, were balls-deep in that shit as well to restrain and hamper Kurdish efforts to form an independent state. 

Long story short, there’s no guarantee that ISIS wouldn’t have toppled many if not most of these states all on their own, aided by the internal fragility of many of these regimes and the many other groups seeking to topple them - including all the moderate, anti-Islamist rebels. Yes, they exist. The only people who deny it are the fucking Russians who’re making a point of bombing them. The best proof of this is Syria itself - a nation with one of the largest and best-equipped armies in the Middle East (short of Egypt) has been fighting a civil war for five years and is still struggling - and to be blunt, if the Russians and Iranians hadn’t came to their aid in 2015, Assad would be swinging from a rope right now. And even with their support - well, just look at the fucking livemap. They’ve got American-backed Kurds kicking the shit out of ISIS in most of the important areas to the north, ISIS has lost almost all of its major support bases in Iraq, like Mosul, and they still are struggling to make headway. (The US is now actively backing the moderate rebels, true, but considering that ISIS was always more competent and dangerous than most of the moderates, the fact that the moderates are fighting ISIS too, and that the most potent local anti-ISIS forces, the US-baked YPG Kurds, didn’t get involved in force until recently, with American backing, I’d say that’s a wash at best.) You can scroll back through the months (and years) on that map - do so, and note how much the colors on the map change, and for whom. Northern Homs is a pocket of resistance that seemingly refuses to die, and those major urban areas in the North are decisively stubborn - the government managed to take Aleppo (with intensive Russian airstrike support) but it cost them dearly and they’re still struggling to expand those gains. And apparently, the Russians are maintaining order in Aleppo with their own military police, so the Syrian government can spare forces for offensives. 

If anyone tells you that the Syrians are on the “verge of winning,” they’re worse than stupid - they’re either a fucking Russian shill, or they’re a mistake of evolution. There was - and is - every reason to fear that Assad might eventually lose, Russian/Iranian support be damned. The Russians remember very, very well how thoroughly they were fucked in Afghanistan. I chatted with a Russian man who fought in Afghanistan one night (in a highsec corp I was awoxing at the time, incidentally,) and the stories he told were fucking hair-raising - about how when the AK-74s ran out, they issued AK-47s, and when those ran out, they issued SKSs and when those ran out they started handing out fucking Nagants. Trust me, the Russians have no fucking interest in a quagmire - they’re constantly watching their Return on Investment, and nothing beats an actual war for polishing up your personnel, practical experience and organizational structures, especially when you’re trying to recover from two decades of under-investment and decay. Just look at how fucking hard ISIS is still fighting, and how bloody the advances are even for the YPG backed by US/coalition airpower - with the Kurds, the Russians (nominally,) the Syrians, the moderates and the Americans all allied against them, and after most of their infrastructure has been blown, blasted or bayoneted out from under them. 

What am I getting at, here? Simple - America’s not the only one in the world that can effect a regime change. Sometimes you don’t get to choose whether or not to knock someone out of the game - because plenty of other forces are willing to do it for you. In that case your best bet is to hope to have enough influence to see that the next group in power is the least terrible one you can manage - because if you don’t, the Russians sure as fucking hell will. 

Of course, that’s all assuming that we want to remove Assad. Frankly, I believe the Trump administration - and the defense department - when they say they don’t want to remove Assad. I am anti-Assad, and so is Trump, and the Defense Department, and anyone else who doesn’t like mass-murdering cunts. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t serve our purposes better alive than dead, however, because it’s likely that Assad will end up permanently ruling a lot less of Syria than he used to. 

To wit, even after Iranian and Russian support flowed in to prop up the regime, Syria was - and still is, outside of US-backed offensives - a bloody stalemate. Gaining ground in one area meant losing it in another. For a long time now, neither “side” in this conflict (regime alliance versus everyone fucking else) have had the power to really overwhelm and defeat the other conclusively. The relatively static frontlines in many places really illustrate that. Many places that changed hands have done so multiple times and likely will again. Neither Russia nor Iran wish (or can afford) the resource investment to change that, and the Turks only care because REEE KURDS. There’s an excellent chance that Syria might end up as East Syria and West Syria, with the modern-day frontlines defining much of the eventual states they will become, much like North and South Korea.  (Which was another war were Russia and America were dicking with each other by proxy.) What do you think the Kurdish interest in taking ground in northern Syria is? Why do you think the Turks (who’ve been fighting Kurdish rebels in their own country for decades,) are screeching so hard about Kurds taking vast swathes of territory just south of their border? The Kurds finally have what they’ve always wanted, in Northern Iraq - an ethnic Kurdish state - but there’s Kurds in Syria, Turkey and even Iran. And for obvious reasons (say, many decades of murder, oppression, marginalization, having their people gassed, etc.,) they’re quite eager to take as much ground as they can to form a contiguous Kurdish state. 

So why the hell would we eliminate or depose Assad - and have to jump through the many, many hoops that follow as we try to influence, second-guess and react to whatever successor state we get out of the throw (because even loaded dice can come up snake eyes,) when we can neuter Assad, and leave him mostly powerless to fuck with us, or give the Russians more influence in the region? Someone fighting all-out just to hang on to half of what he used to have is someone too busy to fuck with you and yours much, you know? 

And we’re accomplishing this all for far less investment in troops, weapons, aircraft, etc. as we used in Iraq and Afghanistan when we were doing most or all the fighting with our own soldiers, too. We’re playing the same ROI game that Russia is, and we’re doing pretty well. 

So, yeah. The “case for removing Assad” is that he’s hostile to us, our allies, and our interests, he’s a tool and boon to our dedicated global rivals and enemies the Russians, he’s in bed with other problematic and constant threats like Iran, and last, but not least, he’s a mass-murdering cunt who’s on the ropes and is fighting for the existential survival of his state and himself, which is literally what WMD exists to guarantee. But like most hostile mass-murdering cunts who are hostile to us and are in bed with our enemies, that just means we should remove him IF, and ONLY IF, a good opportunity presents itself. Usually the math is against it - it’s been against taking out the Norks for five goddamn decades, and it took the Norks developing the bomb - and a delivery system for the bomb - and vast upheavals in the Cold War geopolitical order - to even begin to nudge that needle. And considering that we’ve got many better options to neutralize the threat Assad poses - and that they’re going well - its quite unlikely that we’re going to move against Assad himself. Why would we take the Syrian regime out of the fight when that’d just free up more ISIS fighters to inhibit our own forces and goals, which apparently include helping the YPG to grab vast swathes of territory? 

tl;dr That’s what ACTUAL realpolitik considerations look like. Half the fuckwits on /pol/ make vague noise about unpragmatic regime change before sucking Assad off like some kind of fucking hero. 

When someone’s sucking a dictator’s cock, be wary about how they characterize the position of their detractors.