Sorry to be coming to this late -- life moves so fast sometimes.
One thing that has struck is how often the setting up of a Libyan no fly zone is compared in one way or another to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Perhaps the most prominent is Juan Cole's oft-cited post from Tuesday: http://www.juancole.com/2011/03/top-ten-ways-that-libya-2011-is-not-iraq-2003.html
But these two cases seem to me to have nothing in common. Indeed that seems the inadvertent thrust of Juan's post: that they have nothing common.
But FWIW there seems an obvious parallel case that has a lot in common, namely the original setting up of an Iraqi no fly zone in April 1991 to protect the Kurds from the counterattack by Saddam Hussein.
In both cases, there was an uprising against a ruler who was perceived to be ready to topple over. In both cases, the counterattack from the regime was savage. In both cases, the US, France and the UK at first didn't want to intervene but were essentially embarrassed into it as not intervening made them look steadily worse and worse. In both cases, France took the lead (Bernard Kouchner -- remember him?), then the UK, with the US bringing up the rear. And in both cases, the initial aims were very limited. In fact they were much more limited in the case of the Kurds in 1991. There, the rhetoric was phrased in terms of refugees, not revolutionaries, and the goal was pure and simply to stop the regime from slaughtering them using airpower. In both cases, the UN Security Council passed a resolution approving it with Russia and China abstaining.
The result? The no-fly zone was never removed. It remained in place indefinitely and steadily intensified until more bombs were dropping during it than during the Gulf War. The country was de facto partitioned from that point forward, a partition that even survived a three year civil war between Kurdish factions. So long as there was no regime change, the zone couldn't be lifted. And yet the zone couldn't produce regime change. The result was a growing tension with no route to satisfactory resolution leading to a Western obsession to punishing the country -- eventually meaning mostly the population within it.
I'm not saying the same will happen here. But if you want a parallel, that seems clearly to be the one to look to. And I think it throws into serious doubt the idea that this is a no risk proposition.
IIUC the supporters of intervention, Juan Cole among them, the hope seems to be that in this case, a no-fly zone will be sufficient support to allow a largely "people power" revolution to quickly overthrow the regime. This overthrow seems to be imagined as not entirely without arms, but not quite a revolutionary war either -- something somehow on the same spectrum of what happened in Egypt and Tunisia but a bit more intense. The feeling seems to be that this is possible because of the previous examples of Tunisia and Egypt and the widespread resonance of the Arab Spring; because the Libyan regime has an extremely shallow social base of social; and ultimately because Libya is still in large part a small collection of large tribes which could change sides en masse in moments and command the loyalty of the group. So three of four flips and the whole country's against him.
Certainly this sort of victory wasn't a hope in Iraq 1991 when the zone was set up. (Although there was a similar vague hope and fervid conviction that nothing short of the crazy ruler leaving would do.)
And certainly it would be lovely if it happened here -- if a relatively wee bit of aid was enough to allow an originally peaceful revolution to continue its march to victory that would have come to a bloody end otherwise.
But I think we have to admit that if it happens here, it will be the first time ever in history that it does. And perhaps the original no fly zone experience suggests what we can expect if it doesn't.
Michael