Obama Speaks on Libya, but Path From Here Is Unclear

In his address to the nation Monday night, President Barack Obama intended to explain why the U.S. got involved in a military operation in Libya.What the president can't really do—because nobody can—is predict exactly where that military operation will lead. It's a strange undertaking to begin with, a "humanitarian" exercise to protect Libyan civilians from their own leader, a man the U.S. calls upon to leave, but whose departure isn't the stated goal of the military intervention.

That leaves four broad scenarios that could unfold from here, two of them relatively happy ones for the U.S., two of them quite troublesome. The two positive scenarios:

• The Libyan army turns or collapses, and the rebels prevail. This would be the neatest and easiest resolution. The military operation by the U.S. and its allies has saved Libya's rebels from annihilation at their last stronghold, the eastern city of Benghazi. Now they've begun to inch back, regaining territory from Libyan troops pulling back in the face of Western air attacks.

So now, perhaps, some leaders of the Libyan military will conclude that they no longer hold a winning hand, and are destined to go down in the long run with Col. Muammar Gadhafi, a leader considered unstable even by many of his own people. The Western military operation is, in some ways, an open invitation for Libyan army units to turn on Col. Gadhafi and join the rebels, as, indeed, some have. 

The problem with this theory is that the Libyan army isn't a very conventional organization, with its most elite forces under the command of one of Col. Gadhafi's sons, who may or may not have been killed in recent days in an attack that may have come from the Western forces, or from a Libyan pilot who crashed his own plane into a command compound. An army's mutiny or meltdown is hard to predict.

• An accumulation of outside pressures forces Col. Gadhafi to leave. This is the scenario U.S. officials embrace openly. The military campaign has stopped the Libyan leader's effort to crush his opponents, this theory holds, buying time for economic sanctions, an arms embargo and complete international isolation to convince him he needs to negotiate a departure.

"Gadhafi has lost legitimacy," national security adviser Tom Donilon said last week. "Gadhafi is isolated here, thoroughly. He will have continuing pressures on him moving forward."

The promising precedent here is that fear and isolation succeeded once before in compelling Col. Gadhafi to change course, when he chose to give up his weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. On the other hand, the problem is that Col. Gadhafi and his sons, who share power with him, have behaved in recent weeks as if they believe that, unlike Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, they must either prevail in the current confrontation or perish at the hands of their foes.

Now, the two more troubling scenarios:

• Libya effectively separates into two, setting up a stalemate. In some ways, the military intervention by the U.S. and its allies already has established a divided Libya, with rebels reasserting control in a large swath of the east and Col. Gadhafi in the west. Libya could descend into either a hot civil war or into its own internal cold war.

If that situation emerges, the U.S., as well as its Western and Arab allies, will face a set of vexing questions. Do they make a long-term, open-ended and expensive commitment to continue protecting Benghazi and other rebellious areas from attack by Libyan army units? Are they willing to feed and sustain Libyans holed up in those areas through such a prolonged stalemate? Or do they try to turn the tide by arming and perhaps training rebel forces, a move that would go beyond the current United Nations-sanctioned mission of merely protecting civilians?

• Col. Gadhafi and his sons simply wait out the West, then destroy their opponents when the world loses interest. It's worth noting that Iraq's Saddam Hussein survived for a decade under a similar U.N.-sanctioned no-fly zone. He simply found other ways to keep his internal foes at bay, and the world shouldered the expense of feeding them.

Col. Gadhafi is 68 years old, has ruled for almost 42 years and has outlasted seven American presidents. When he took power, Barack Obama was in third grade. For much of his tenure, he has endured as a kind of international pariah.

His greatest asset may not be his army, or even his oil, but the fact that he's an oddball who knows how to sit tight.

Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com

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Posted in: LIBYA