The outside powers are reluctant to impose a no-fly zone. As appealing as it initially sounds, an aircap would likely entail several days of suppressing Libyan air defense systems, destroying scores of fighters and helicopters, and cratering a dozen or more military runways. The unappealing potential of incrementally increasing the use of force is foreboding as is the potential for an open-ended commitment as in the Balkans and Afghanistan.
Foreign assistance could take the relatively unobvious form of using electronic surveillance to find Kadafi and his command system and surreptitiously relay the information to rebel leaders. Further, outside help will weaken the prestige that rebel leaders, political and military, will need to build a new political system once the colonel is gone.
More obvious outside intervention could play into the colonel's hands, if only weakly and temporarily. Kadafi could use his continued control of national television to depict the rebels as in league with nefarious foreigners to humiliate the nation, seize its oil and gas resources, and perhaps even to recolonize it.
Such claims would have found an eager audience several decades ago at the outset of the colonel's Green Revolution, but today they ring hollow, especially for the young urban dwellers who compose the bulk of the popular movement. To them, such claims are trite cries from a distant past that echo insignificantly across an empty expanse. Nonetheless, any vacillation caused by such rhetoric, however small, will needlessly protract the ordeal of ousting Kadafi and delay the hopeful beginning of new day for Libya.
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