I suspect that we would have fewer waffling on the left if this scenario were to present itself. Naturally, most of us are antagonistic towards a Zionist state which commits daily outrages against the Palestinian people and Arab nation as a whole. Unfortunately this same criticism applies to the United States, a country whose soldiers pose alongside dead Afghans in photo-shoots, tortures its own citizens when they whistle-blow massacres in Iraq, and continue to use robotic aircraft to fire hellfire missiles into homes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
If this intervention were being conducted without the involvement of the U.S., if it were conducted as an EU mission say, I could almost understand some confusion on the matter, even though I would still wholeheartedly oppose the war. But to fall for the U.S. as savior of the Arab world in 2011?
This is like imagining the Germans to be the liberators of the Herero or the Turks the salvation of the Armenians a century ago. Something's gone wrong that a few weeks of civil war in Libya has already erased the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan.