Nassim Nicholas Taleb är en av de mest inflytelserika filosoferna i nutid. I sin senaste bok, Skin in the Game (Random House 2018), skriver han om Libyen efter Antaeus :
”…Libya, the putative land of Antaeus, now has slave markets, as a result of a failed attempt at what is called ’regime change’ in order to ’remove a dictator’. Yes, in 2017, improvised slave markets in parking lots, where captured sub-Saharan Africans are sold to the highest bidders.
A collection of people classified as interventionistas (to name names of people operating at the time of writing: Bill Kristol, Thomas Friedman , and others) who promoted the Iraq invasion of 2003, as well as the removal of the Libyan leader in 2011, are advocating the imposition of additional such regime change on another batch of countries, which includes Syria, because it has a ‘dictator.’
These interventionistas and their friends in the U.S. State Department helped create, train, and support Islamist rebels, then ‘moderates’, but who eventually evolved to become part of al-Qada, the same, very same al-Qaeda that blew up the New York City towers during the events of September 11, 2001. They mysteriously failed to remember that al-Qaeda itself was composed of ‘moderate rebels’ created (or reared) by the U.S. to help fighting Soviet Russia because, as we will see, these educated people´s reasoning doesn´t entail such recursions.
So we tried that thing called regime change in Iraq, and failed miserably. We tried that again in Libya, and there are now active slave markets in the place. But we satisfied the objective of ‘removing a dictator.’ By the exact same reasoning, a doctor would inject a patient with ‘moderate cancer’ cells to improve his cholesterol numbers, and proudly claim victory after the patient is dead, particularly if the postmortem shows remarkable cholesterol readings. But we know that doctors don´t inflict fatal ‘cures’ upon patients, or don´t do it in such a crude way, and there is a clear reason for that. Doctors usually have some modicum of skin in the game, a vague understanding of complex systems, and more than a couple of millennia of incremental ethics determining their conduct. “