We've Made a Massacre in Libya More Likely

Predictably, though, mission creep is what's occurring inLibya. Each halting step the United States and its NATO allies take deeper into a morass none of them really understands makes it more likely that this ill-considered intervention will end in precisely the event it set out to prevent: Moammar Kadafi's massacre of his political opponents.

That's because even the most enthusiastic of the strongman's foreign antagonists, France, is unwilling to commit troops to dislodge him from power. Without foreign troops it seems less and less likely that an untrained, sketchily equipped, ill-organized and divided insurgency will overthrow Kadafi, who has all the resolve of a man with nowhere else to go and the support of his tribal allies and the considerable number of Libyans who somehow have benefited from his misrule.