Why bombing Libya is a gross mistake

Once upon a time there has been a people wandering around the desert in the Middle East. They were in ecological equilibrium with their environment. Whenever life got worse, they moved to another place. They would be welcomed or unwelcomed by the locals, waging fights of low attrition to thrive and survive in that poor land. They created big cities wherever they could, and that tribal mode of being never ceased to exist. They expanded that civilization for many centuries, up until 732, when Charles Martell put a brake on it in the battle of Poitiers, France. On the 1st of January 1492 (what an eventful year!), the caliph of Granada was expelled from the Alhambra palace by the Catholic Kings. That act ensued a long retreat. In 1800 Napoleon invaded Egypt, and from that time on the retreat became a rout.

After WWI, the Ottoman Empire, caretaker of that land, crumbled and the victors of the time, the British Empire and France, created new countries according to the provincial division of the Ottomans. Whenever they thought the country was too small to become viable, they jammed a couple of those provinces together. Iraq is the most egregious example. With that political arrangement they put a king in charge and created their economic institutions mirroring the West, thinking that was the "civilized" way through which those countries should build their future.

One day they became producers of the most important commodity for the whole world, crude oil. The "synthetic" monarchies were mostly replaced by dictators, who ruled the place under the pressure and scrutiny of the great powers, up until the day there was only one left. That last superpower was the United States, and from that time on the choice they had was to be either in favor or against it.

As time went by, the US managed to keep the situation under control, and their population grew beyond sustainability. With 20% of the water resources of a country of poor hydro situation, they now depend on desalination plants and aquifers to subsist. They became net exporters of whatever they could produce, and net importers of food, whose main hidden value is its water content. By and large the main reason for water consumption by mankind is irrigated agriculture.

With the inflationary policy implemented by the Federal Reserve to bail-out Wall Street, the prices of food and energy sky-rocketed. This triggered social unrest in the area, which is predominantly devastatingly poor, thus dependent on government aid or intervention for everything.

That's why the unrest started in countries whose hydrocarbons production was relatively unimportant. They had a huge surge in the food prices, without having the benefit of the concomitant surge in oil revenue.

In Libya what is going on is a fight between the tribes in control and the tribes under control. The first group is known, the second is not. The only sure thing we know from them is that they provided most of the suicide bombers that killed themselves to inflict damage to the American troops in Iraq.

Moreover, no sovereign nation has ever given legitimate power for the UN to choose winners and losers anywhere in the world. If humanitarian reasons really mattered to the UN, EU and US administrations, they just lost a HUGE opportunity to assert that during the crisis in Darfour. They chose not to act. Has it all been motivated by oil?

Cheers