Any viable alternatives for Libya?

A Libyan rebel fighter runs up a burning stairwell during an

effort to dislodge some ensconced government loyalist troops

who were firing on them from an upstairs room during

house-to-house fighting on Tripoli Street in downtown Misrata.

April 20, 2011. Chris Hondros/Getty Images.

The same day he took this photo, Chris Hondros died

during the fighting in Misrata.

The Libyan War has been an interesting international affair to follow, to say the least. There were so many different layers that combined at once. There was the so-called "Arab Spring," the military intervention, a dictator who had completely lost all sense or reality and sanity, the possible massacre of citizens, the a popular rebellion where citizens built their weapons out of whatever they could find, the lack of clear American leadership, the lack of overwhelming European military strength, and finally a rebel's victory that didn't end in house-to-house fighting in Tripoli. I look forward to reading future books using this war as a case study. Every side will have something to say. Every side in international relations will pick and choose which facts they will research in order to justify their political slants and predispositions, from the realists to the neo-liberals to the neo-marxists.

As the NATO-led military intervention started to bomb the Libyan military in order to stop a most-likely bloody attack on Benghazi, I read my former St Andrews professors decry any form of military intervention. Oddly, they mocked the United States for losing a fighter jet and mourned the death of Libyan soldiers who had driven tanks, even though these professors had said nothing beforehand about the Libyan citizens Qaddafi's military had killed. It seemed as though everyone in the Peace Studies community disapproved of NATO for its 'neo-colonial' actions, even though the Arab League had asked for the intervention. There was a black-and-white notion that dropping bombs on tanks moving towards Benghazi was the same as dropping bombs onto civilians. If the Arab League and NATO had followed the Peace Studies' advice, thousands upon thousands of Libyan citizens would have died. For me, these criticisms reminded me of everything I disliked most about Peace Studies.

What would the Peace Studies scholars have us do? Were there any viable alternatives for Libya when Qaddafi's tanks were on the outskirts of Benghazi? Most certainly, it would have been nice if before the war even began, perhaps several years ago, there had been an ongoing peace process that would have created a government that listened to the people. But once the bullets started killing civilians, it was too late for that type of slow, difficult peace process and nation building. Foreign governments needed to make decisions within hours that would have consequences immediately, even if that decision was to do nothing. I wholeheartedly reject the idea that peace workshops where each side sat together in a room and discussed their demands, hatreds, fears, and hopes for the future would have had any benefit when Qaddafi was fueling his jets and tanks for another offensive. If anything, these types of peace process workshops would have been a stall tactic for one side or the other as they prepared for another offensive. I am unconvinced that any peace workshop can have any significant impact on a society as long as a shooting war exists. Even Peace Studies' greatest achievement through workshops, a partial contribution to the Oslo Peace Accords, was ultimately a failure. I'll admit that stopping a war isn't enough to ensure a just peace, but stopping the shooting is a little bit more than just important.

Yes, I had multiple problems with the Libyan intervention. As a realist, I do not like the notion of using military action for humanitarian missions when there is no strategic objective. The United States was already in two wars with our personnel and resources spread across the globe, and I was concerned about a possible 'mission creep' that would suck our blood and treasure into another country's civil war. I was happy to see the British and French take the largest brunt of the air campaign, even if the United States provided a large number of cruise missiles in the beginning phase of the war. The war was in Europe's strategic interest, and France should have been afraid of a lingering civil war in the southern Mediterranean. At first I was concerned that once military action started that NATO wouldn't have made decisive moves the end the war quickly. I believe that a limited war will likely lead to more deaths and misery than a swift and decisive war. In particular, I was worried that the rebels wouldn't have proper arms, training, and guidance in order to overrun Qaddafi's military. Thankfully, the French gave the rebels fresh arms. Also, there were reports that Special Op personnel with British accents were training and leading the rebels. Most importantly, Tripoli fell swiftly without a bitter last stand. Overall, the military intervention went as well as it could have gone, considering that war is an inherently messy affair. Now the bigger problem will be building a government to replace Qaddafi. Now would be a good time to have peace workshops so that the local community can have more ownership in their government and society. It's up to the Libyans to build their own country and take responsibility for its success or failure.

World War Z: if you should read this book, you probably already have

If anyone claims to like the zombie genre of films or books, then he or she has already read World War Z by Max Brooks. I intended to read the book the summer I spent in St Andrews because some friends and I were going to film a faux-documentary about a post-apocalypse zombie outbreak with our friends acting as survivors. In order to do 'research' for this documentary, I was going to read this book. As it turned out, schoolwork got in the way so that we all forgot about it. Instead of reading The Economist or some detailed political science book before going to bed, I began reading World War Z because it has been on my bookshelf for too long.

The book's narrator has worked with the United Nations after a global zombie outbreak. Originally, his job was to write a report detailing the events of the outbreak for austerity, but the UN didn't want emotional stories detailing the horrors individuals endured. They just wanted raw, detached numbers about the collapse of civilization. The narrator believed that he had to gather the interviews he had collected over the years and write an 'oral history' that showed the human experience during the outbreak. Ergo, this book is a series of interviews going from the doctor who first discovered the outbreak in China, to a soldier who fought in Yonkers, NY in order to stop the outbreak from spreading out of the city, to a girl whose American family fled to Canada but became stuck there without enough food. The book as a whole is an interesting take on what society could do in order to survive a zombie outbreak and what difficulties civilization would have in order to survive. For instance, former movie makers created inspirational propaganda films about heroes surviving under a zombie siege and finally defeating the zombies so that others wouldn't lose hope.

Personally, I'm a little over the zombie genre for now, at least for books. I might enjoy a good zombie movie, though. After getting about 100 pages into this book I was ready for it to be over, but I persevered and finished it. I'm glad I read it so that I know what my friends are talking about when they mention it.

Rooster with my Coffee

The rooster that was determined to get inside the coffee shop.

Early one morning I went to a coffeehouse in Ocean Springs, Mississippi to meet an old friend I hadn't seen in about 8 or 9 years. While I was waiting for her to drive up, I noticed a rooster walking around the edge of the building. I looked around to see if there was some kind of farm or chicken coop nearby, but I was in downtown Ocean Springs surrounded by several restaurants and small, trendy shops. Granted, Ocean Springs is not a metropolis, and I'm sure there are people who raise their own animals in their back yards, though I'm not sure why anyone would want disgusting animals living in their back yards when they could just simply buy food at the grocery store. I walked inside the coffeehouse and sat down beside a window and waited for my friend. Then I saw the rooster again circling the building as if it wanted to get inside and couldn't find a way. Finally, the rooster got onto the front porch and then jumped into the window on the front door. It flapped it's wings furiously against the window to see if that would help it get inside. The animal was stunned and began to circle the coffeehouse again. I almost felt like I was in El Salvador or some other poorly developed country. But I was in Mississippi instead.

The Petrol Paradox

Marshall Ramsey. The Clarion Ledger.

When I read news articles about the economy and think about my current unemployment, I try to think of where future growth might come from. Even if I did get a job tomorrow, there would still be millions of other people who want a job. If there is supposed to be a sustained recovery within the next year or so, which sectors of the economy will grow? Housing and construction don't seem very likely. Housing prices are still around a third lower than they were before the Great Recession started, and there is still a glut of office space so that building more would be foolish. The United States could export more manufactured goods or services, but to where? The euro zone faces great uncertainty with its currency, and emerging markets like China are difficult to enter without the Chinese government meddling and preventing competition with their favored companies. Maybe American businesses could expand to Brazil and India, but how many jobs would that create in the US? However, even if certain sectors of the economy gained traction and began to expand and hire new workers, the price of gasoline could put the brakes on any growth.

An article in The Atlantic explained that the economic recovery earlier this year sputtered because high oil prices caused consumers to reduce their spending on other goods. Some politicians and economists blamed the higher oil price on the Arab Spring and the Libyan revolution, but that is only a small part of the bigger picture. Yes, because the world is consuming as much gas as it can produce, even a small drop of oil supply will increase prices dramatically. However, high demand from India and China are the main reasons why oil prices have remained high. When the economy began to recover, more people had more money so that they went to more places. They bought more products, which needed to be delivered, which required gas for the trucks. But once people had to spend more money filling their gas tanks, they didn't have enough money to then buy the products that caused the expensive gas. The economy sputtered and flirted with a double-dip recession. If the economy recovers again, we'll have the same problem unless the recovery is robust enough to handle gas prices higher than $4 per gallon.

This paradox makes me wonder how much more the world economy can grow with the current amount of natural resources that we produce. Can we really produce more oil or other types of energy in order to support emerging economies? There's natural gas, but it's not like we're putting it into our cars. Perhaps we should, but it'd be slow and expensive to convert our cars and transportation systems. In the meantime, the lack of cheap and efficient energy will hamper growth. If wealthy nations found ways to pay for the more expensive energy, the poorer nations would lose out because they wouldn't have enough money or resources to buy energy and other necessary products, such as food. There could be more revolutions, like the Arab Spring, or famines. Or there could just be quiet misery. Therefore, I suspect that the next couple decades will be more tumultuous and dangerous than the past decade.

Great-Grandmother Duff Scones

Ingredients:

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

2 tbs Crisco

1 cup buttermilk (probably use only 1/2 to 3/4 cup)

Cut in flour, Crisco, salt, baking soda, and baking powder together until well blended ('cut in' means to distribute solid fat throughout the dry ingredients using a pastry blender, fork, or 2 knives in a scissors motion). Add buttermilk slowly. Once balled up, knead dough about 10 times. Roll and smooth into large, round pancake. Flatten to about 1/2 inch thick. Cut into 8 pie wedges. Heat griddle to 400º F. Brown wedges on all sides and edges.

Notes:

These are poor Scottish scones my great-grandmother and her family cooked on a pan because they didn't have a proper kitchen with an oven. When she emigrated to the United States in 1911, she brought the recipe with her and taught it to my grandmother and then my mother.

I've written about my Great-Grandmother Sarah Duff in other blog posts because my family has stayed in close contact with our Scottish family because she stayed in close contact with her family in Ayrshire.

My family pronounces them "sc-ahns."

Ingredients.

Cutting in the dry ingredients.

The kneading hook on the blender.

The ball of dough after kneading.

At this point my uncle will put the dough

into a bowl and place the bowl into warm

water so that the ingredients will activate.

He said my great-grandmother taught him that.

Spreading flour on the roller.

Cutting the flattened dough into wedges.

Flour sprinkled onto the griddle.

Scones on the grill before browning.

Scones lightly browned.

Browning scones on all sides.