In 2011 I traveled by bus from Cairo northward to the Mediterranean coast and across the land border from Egypt into Libya. Sometime later, I flew the cross-country distance from Benghazi into Tripoli. A few weeks after that, my cousins drove me west through the Ras Jdir border crossing into Tunisia, from Ben Guerdane all the way up into the capital city. These circumstances were extraordinary, in a period of revolution, and to deal with the burdens of long-distance land travel struck me as unsurprising. I was unaware at the time that the impossibility of air travel during this period echoed the early and mid-1990s, when international flights could not land in Libya. I could not have known that, as the result of the ongoing war, this year would preview the decade to come.
If Angelenos are famous for having animated arguments over the best combination of freeway routes a...