Obama doesn't want a reality-based foreign policy.
To understand how the U.S. can be led into a civil war with no relevance to its national security interests, it's useful to observe the reaction to recent testimony from the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
To recap: when asked about the status of fighting in Libya, Clapper said that a stalemate would eventually produce a victory for the Gaddafi regime.
This provoked a firestorm of criticism from lawmakers and pundits, angry that Clapper told them something they didn't want to hear. It even provoked push-back from the Obama administration's national security team, who were apparently unhappy with a "reality-based" assessment.
But, as Daniel Drezner observed, the job of an intelligence analyst isn't to cheer on one side in a conflict. It's to provide an assessment of the situation. And anyone reading the news in the past few days would surely see that Clapper was merely echoing the headlines pointing to a sharp deterioration in the rebels' position. A foreign intervention notwithstanding, the present trajectory appears to favor Gaddafi.
That this acknowledgment is verboten in Washington and, dispiritingly, inside the Obama administration is a pretty good indication that the U.S. is lurching toward another intervention in the Middle East.