NATO widened its campaign to weaken Moammar Gadhafi's regime with airstrikes on desert command centers and sea patrols to intercept ships, the military alliance said Saturday, amid signs of growing public anger over fuel shortages in government-held territory.
This is good. The rebels aren't going to march in and defeat the loyalists--and neither is NATO--so defeating the loyalists requires their military assets to crack and either desert or defect. Having to face too many angry civilians could be one way to crack their morale. Repeated air attacks might also do it.
But NATO is in a race against time because pressure to halt the war short of Khaddafi's ouster are also apparent:
At the same time, however, NATO has come under increasing criticism that it is overstepping the U.N. Security Council's mandate, which provides for the protection of civilians but not for wider attacks. The Pan African Parliament, the legislative body of the African Union, plans an emergency session next week to discuss what it calls NATO's "military aggression."
This is one more part of the pressure to save Khaddafi, which includes divisions within NATO over goals, the UN Secretary General's push for a ceasefire, Russian and Chinese opposition to regime change, the cost to Europeans of waging a war that has not concluded quickly as expected, other opposition to the war (Brazil and Venezuela to name a couple South American notables). Add in that the Arab world is probably one big collateral damage incident from demanding an end to the war and I still don't know who will break first.
