Administration officials have been eager to show signs of progress in the Libyan bombing campaign, first led by the U.S. and now overseen by NATO. Obama met privately in the Oval Office on Friday with NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and the White House said the two agreed that the military action would go on until Gadhafi's assault on civilians stopped.
Military action may not be showing sufficient progress toward reaching the goal of driving Khaddafi from power, but it is well within NATO power to move the goal closer to what our military commitment is capable of doing.
This is what passes for progress, apparently.
UPDATE: Or, we could do a bit more of what hasn't work:
General David Richards, Britain's chief of defense staff, said the military campaign to date had been a "significant success" for NATO, but it needed to do more.
"If we do not up the ante now there is a risk that the conflict could result in Gaddafi clinging to power," he was quoted in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper as saying.
"At present, NATO is not attacking infrastructure targets in Libya. But if we want to increase the pressure on Gaddafi's regime then we need to give serious consideration to increasing the range of targets we can hit," he told the paper.
Yeah. That's the problem. Let's bomb "infrastructure targets" to put pressure on the regime even though the resulting collateral damage will splinter the coalition and lead to even more world pressure to halt the war if it looks like NATO is causing more civilian casualties than it is saving.
Can whatever "pressure" this aerial escalation causes speed collapse of the regime faster than it speeds collapse of the coalition and the UN-blessed war?
