BRUSSELS — As the United States and its major allies were gearing up for a no-fly zone over Libya, a senior U.S. general was asked over a private dinner whether the strained American military was up for another Middle East conflict. We could easily impose a no-fly zone, he replied, according to one of his tablemates, but what would the objective be?
More than a month and hundreds of coalition airstrikes later, the answer has remained elusive, and the war goes on.
Follow how events are unfolding in Libya.
Under the terms of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, which on March 17 authorized Western air operations over Libya, NATO aircraft are bombing to protect civilian lives. But according to increasingly explicit statements from European leaders, they are also deployed to help an armed rebellion defend its positions and pressure Moammar Gaddafi and his sons to give up power in Tripoli.
The equivocation, according to observers inside and outside the alliance, has fostered frustration in European capitals at what seems increasingly to be a stalemated ground war along the sandy expanses of Libya’s Mediterranean shore. Moreover, it has strained the cohesion of NATO’s 28 member countries, some of which insist on sticking strictly to the civilian protection mission while others say the only way to protect Libya’s population is to get rid of Gaddafi.
President Obama’s reluctance to stay fully involved has been perceived by some European officials as a fraying of NATO’s solidarity principle. In a joint declaration last week, Obama joined French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron in declaring that Gaddafi must go, a gesture toward their expansive war goals. But, Europeans complained, he remained unwilling to fully commit U.S. resources to help make that happen.
Perhaps the most debilitating development since March 31, when the United States transferred command of the Libyan operation to NATO, has been the absence of U.S. military leadership. This has left the Naples-based multinational NATO command for Operation Unified Protection without a naturally dominant voice.
The frustration has been particularly visible in France and Britain, the two countries whose leaders pushed hardest for Western intervention and who have been at the forefront in seeking a victory for the rebels. By their yardstick — helping rebel forces topple Gaddafi — the bombing campaign has fallen short.
“According to the logic of what they say, it can’t be over until Gaddafi is out of there,” said Robert Danin, a Middle East specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. He noted that “questions, contradictions and ambiguities” have plagued the operation from its outset.
Gaddafi has survived five weeks of punishing airstrikes, and his military has not yet betrayed him, as officials in Paris and London were hoping. In a notable display of candor, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe suggested this week that alliance leaders — including his boss, Sarkozy — may have underestimated Gaddafi’s staying power in deciding to go to war.
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