Throughout my naval career, whenever chaos reigned, no one seemed to know what to do, or too many cooks were spoiling the broth, the same cry was heard: "Someone needs to take charge!" In Libya, all three conditions would seem to apply, with no evidence of any strategy in play beyond that of suck it and see.
As successive crises threaten massacre and mayhem, Nato, the designated enforcer of UN Security Council Resolution 1973, looks like lastminute.com, with its provision of bargain-basement, "just in time" military intervention. We are, to paraphrase Tacitus, creating a stalemate and calling it peace.
