Helena Cobban is one of the best informed commentators on the Middle East.

It is extremely unclear what the political outcome inside Libya of the tripartite (western) assault against the country will be. It is unclear, too, what political outcome the leaders of the three countries are aiming at in Libya.

In my experience, all wars are anti-humane and anti-humanitarian. But according to "Just War" theory, Clausewitz, Gen. Sherman, and other definers of the western pro-war canon, wars can only ever be justified if they are fought to bring about political outcomes that are clearly defined, compellingly desirable, and highly probable. If you can't even define the desired political endgame, then launching a war is ipso facto immoral. Launching a war just to "prove some kind of a point" is doubly immoral.

The only things that are clear as of today are that the politics not just of terminating this war but also of fighting it are extremely muddled; that this degree of muddle can be expected to grow; and-- given the passions that the war has already ignited-- that the escalation of violence that it represented will be very hard indeed to tame, de-escalate, and finally bring under control.(...)

(...)Before the tripartite assault, Turkish PM Rejep Tayyip Erdogan was working hard to try to mediate a political resolution to the contest between Qadhdhafi and the rebels-- one that would have involved Qadhdhafi stepping aside and a peaceful resolution of all outstanding differences.

The news out of the ongoing NATO summit in Brussels is all over the place. (Reuters 1, Reuters 2, Reuters 3.) Bottom line: No-one in NATO seems really able to figure out what it is they want to achieve or who it is they want to achieve it.

Oh boy, it looks as if the world is in for a nasty, ill-planned, very damaging, and quite possibly long-drawn-out war in Libya.

How come no-one told Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and their bellophilic friends from Washington's large aviaries of liberal hawks that this is, indeed, the nature of war? I guess the U.S. military-- and SecDef Gates-- had tried to.

But launching this war was not, in the end, a decision that was taken by Clinton, Powers, or Rice. It was taken by Barrack Obama. Shame on him.