How to get out of Libya?

It was just 100 years ago that Italy decided to join the exclusive club of American and European colonial powers by attacking Libya. Indeed, the first bomb ever dropped in anger was tossed over the side of an Italian airplane onto Libyan tribesmen in an attempt to break their will in 1911.
Today, Italy is just part of an uneasy coalition trying once again, if not to conquer Libya, at least to bend the country's government to its will. Beyond that there doesn't seem to be much agreement on just what the coalition's war aims are. Some say it is supposed to be simply a no-flight zone, strictly for humanitarian purposes. Others say it is to break Muammar el-Gaddafi's war machine so that he cannot attack the rebels attacking him. Yet others say the true war aim is regime change. And no one seems to know when or how the conflict will end.
War from the air has evolved considerably since it was first introduced over Libya. The French developed a "Type Colonial" aircraft, which was designed to kill North Africans by a traversing machine gun in the rear. Later, German, American, British and Italian airplanes battled over the skies of Libya in World War II, but that was a fight between the Allies and the Axis powers, not a war against Libyans.
Today we are back to a form of fighting in which airplanes, as in colonial days, are unopposed by any serious threat in the air, but can deliver a thousand-fold more damage than in 1911.
President Obama has now entered his own war of choice. Having inherited two wars in Muslim countries, he has now involved America in a third conflict in a Muslim land, the consequences of which no one can foresee. Dress it up as you like in humanitarian robes, the attack on Libya, as Defence Secretary Robert Gates famously told Congress, is an act of war.
When Britain was the premier military power there was considerable vacillation between what came to be called a "forward policy," i.e. an aggressive desire to extend British control over the world's surface, against a less aggressive imperial stance. In the 19th century, the forward policy would advance whenever Benjamin Disraeli was prime minister, and recede when William Gladstone was back in power.
Obama would like to play Gladstone to George W. Bush's Disraeli, but, like Gladstone, he can be talked into military adventures that he probably would have liked to avoid. Obama hopes to soften the edges of intervention by saying the US will not be in charge, but that is not likely to be persuasive.
All the coalition powers hope this will be a very short, surgical operation that will be over very soon so that democracy will flourish and all foreign forces can go home. However, since there is no real agreement on how this will end, or what the mission is, or what will happen if Gaddafi doesn't fold, there can be no clear exit strategy. Nor do we know that the Libyan rebels would install a true, functioning democracy. As the terrorism expert Jessica Stern has written, most countries overthrowing autocrats end up in a kind of halfway place somewhere between democracy and autocracy.
In reality, there really are very few exit strategies that have actually gone as planned. I am sure Bush's defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, never thought the attack on Iraq that he helped organize would see American troops still on the ground there eight years later. Nor did he perceive that his lightning, and successful, attack on Afghanistan would end 10 years later in the very "quagmire" that he so mocked when it was predicted. These conflicts are easier to get into than get out of.
It is hard to imagine that those who are attacking Libya now won't feel the pressure to just put a few boots on the ground if it looks like Gaddafi is going to hang on for the long run, or if Libya looks in danger of becoming a failed state like Somalia, another former Italian colony in which the United States became involved for humanitarian reasons.
And what if we do tip the balance of power in Libya and the rebels begin massacring Gaddafi's supporters?
Gaddafi, who portrayed himself as a bulwark against Al Qaeda, is now using the language of Osama bin Laden by calling his attackers "crusaders."
Until now the Al Qaeda narrative has been absent from the Arab Spring, as the West has had nothing to do with the uprisings against autocracy. That may change now that Obama and the West have chosen a military option.