As the Libya conflict appears to settle into a potentially protracted stalemate, the memory of President Obama’s demand that Muammar Qaddafi step down from power ”“ essentially a call for regime change ”“ is feeding a debate over what the president will or should do now to influence the outcome.

A growing number of policymakers and regional experts are concluding that a drawn-out war in the midst of a turbulent Middle East would be the worst of all possibilities. And as they do, doubts are mounting over the Obama administration’s decision to take ”“ or at least try to take ”“ a back-seat role among international powers involved in Libya.

Even as Libya’s rebels retreat from gains made last week and Colonel Qaddafi shows no signs of budging from his Tripoli stronghold, a debate builds over what the US should do. One side says Obama is in tune with a majority of Americans who may support the idea of humanitarian intervention, yet who are leery of any deeper involvement of the US in Libya.

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Counterterrorism operations in Yemen have ground to a halt, allowing Al Qaeda’s deadliest branch outside of Pakistan to operate more freely inside the country and to increase plotting for possible attacks against Europe and the United States, American diplomats, intelligence analysts and counterterrorism officials say.

In the political tumult surrounding Yemen’s embattled president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, many Yemeni troops have abandoned their posts or have been summoned to the capital, Sana, to help support the tottering government, the officials said. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group’s affiliate, has stepped in to fill this power vacuum, and Yemeni security forces have come under increased attacks in recent weeks.

A small but steadily growing stream of Qaeda fighters and lower-level commanders from other parts of the world, including Pakistan, are making their way to Yemen to join the fight there, although American intelligence officials are divided on whether the political crisis in Yemen is drawing more insurgents than would be traveling there under normal conditions.

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U.S. officials are becoming increasingly resigned to the possibility of a protracted stalemate in Libya, with rebels retaining control of the eastern half of the divided country but lacking the muscle to drive Moammar Gaddafi from power.

Such a deadlock ”” perhaps backed by a formal cease-fire agreement ”” could help ensure the safety of Libyan civilians caught in the crossfire between the warring sides. But it could also dramatically expand the financial and military commitments by the United States and allied countries that have intervened in the six-week-old conflict, according to U.S. officials familiar with planning for the Libyan operation.

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There is an old saying in the Middle East that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. That thought came to my mind as I listened to President Obama trying to explain the intervention of America and its allies in Libya ”” and I don’t say that as criticism. I say it with empathy. This is really hard stuff, and it’s just the beginning.

When an entire region that has been living outside the biggest global trends of free politics and free markets for half a century suddenly, from the bottom up, decides to join history ”” and each one of these states has a different ethnic, tribal, sectarian and political orientation and a loose coalition of Western and Arab states with mixed motives trying to figure out how to help them ”” well, folks, you’re going to end up with some very strange-looking policy animals. And Libya is just the first of many hard choices we’re going to face in the “new” Middle East.

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President Obama tried Monday night to clarify America’s goals — and methods — in Libya. Unfortunately, though, just as the international coalition’s air strikes have so far left dictator Moammar Gadhafi in power, the president’s speech to the nation from Fort McNair in Washington left some troubling questions unanswered.

The president seemed to declare victory of a sort while hailing NATO’s looming Wednesday takeover of coalition command. And for the present, Col. Gadhafi has been beaten back by the coalition. But U.S. air power remains the coalition’s most potent weapon. How much of our air arsenal will remain at the coalition’s disposal? For how long?

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Britain and the United States are prepared to consider a swift exit of Colonel Gaddafi into exile, it emerged tonight.

Coalition nations gather in London tomorrow to plot a future for Libya without him. The official position of Britain and the US is for the dictator to stand trial at the International Criminal Court, but both are ready to accept that a deal under which he leaves the country quickly may be in Libya’s best interests.

Such a move has some European support, including from Italy, and could be facilitated by the African Union.

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Historically, the east of Libya centred on Benghazi is quite distinct from the rest of the country and has suffered disproportionately under Col Gaddafi. It is not impossible that the country will be effectively divided while a civil war ensues. We have no mandate from the UN to intervene on the ground to help the anti-Gaddafi forces take Tripoli. We could, of course, arm them, which would allow them to defend the territory gained but we are then drifting further away from humanitarian intervention and closer to direct military involvement. More importantly, it might make it more difficult in future to secure Security Council backing for future humanitarian interventions.

From a parochial British point of view, we will want to gauge whether removing Col Gaddafi, as opposed to stopping his attacks on his own people, matters sufficiently to us as to be prepared to see our soldiers actively engaged on the ground. In reaching a decision are we motivated by a desire to protect our own security and energy supplies or are we inspired by the obvious wish of significant elements of the Libyan people to be free of the Gaddafi incubus? Almost certainly the latter.

But after the bitter experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, public opinion will want to know what the exit strategy is. If we are prepared to intervene on the ground to save Benghazi from being overrun by Col Gaddafi, how long would we be prepared to remain?

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Libya is not Iraq. The West has learned through bitter experience to avoid the grievous mistakes it made from the outset of that venture. For one thing, the current mission is indisputably legal. For another, it has, at least for now, the backing of Libya’s own people and””even allowing for some wobbles from Turkey and the Arab League””of most Arab and Muslim countries. Libya’s population is a quarter the size of Iraq’s, and the country should be easier to control: almost all its people, a more homogeneous lot albeit with sharp tribal loyalties, live along the Mediterranean coastal strip. If Colonel Qaddafi’s state crumbles, the West should not seek to disband his army or the upper echelons of his administration, as it foolishly did in Iraq. The opposition’s interim national council contains secular liberals, Islamists, Muslim Brothers, tribal figures and recent defectors from the camp of Colonel Qaddafi. The West should recognise the council as a transitional government, provided that it promises to hold multiparty elections. Above all, there must be no military occupation by outsiders. It is tempting to put time-limits on such a venture, but that would be futile.

Success in Libya is not guaranteed””how could it be? It is a violent country that may well succumb to more violence, and will not become a democracy any time soon. But its people deserve to be spared the dictator’s gun and be given a chance of a better future.

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Democracy is part of America’s very identity, and thus we benefit in a world of more democracies. But this is no reason to delude ourselves about grand historical schemes or to forget our wider interests. Precisely because so much of the Middle East is in upheaval, we must avoid entanglements and stay out of the domestic affairs of the region. We must keep our powder dry for crises ahead that might matter much more than those of today.

Our most important national-security resource is the time that our top policy makers can devote to a problem, so it is crucial to avoid distractions. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fragility of Pakistan, Iran’s rush to nuclear power, a possible Israeli military response””these are all major challenges that have not gone away. This is to say nothing of rising Chinese naval power and Beijing’s ongoing attempt to Finlandize much of East Asia.

We should not kid ourselves. In foreign policy, all moral questions are really questions of power. We intervened twice in the Balkans in the 1990s only because Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic had no nuclear weapons and could not retaliate against us, unlike the Russians, whose destruction of Chechnya prompted no thought of intervention on our part (nor did ethnic cleansing elsewhere in the Caucasus, because it was in Russia’s sphere of influence). At present, helping the embattled Libyan rebels does not affect our interests, so we stand up for human rights there. But helping Bahrain’s embattled Shia, or Yemen’s antiregime protesters, would undermine key allies, so we do nothing as demonstrators are killed in the streets.

Of course, just because we can’t help everywhere does not mean we can’t help somewhere.

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The American strategy for handing over security responsibilities to the Afghan government rests on a similar strategy: putting local militias on the government payroll. Such “recruits” are supposed to be vetted. But in the months it will take to complete that process, American commanders are counting on ragtag militias like Rozeboi’s to fight the Taliban.

Many of the militias are controlled by strongmen who traffic in drugs and weapons and pay their soldiers by taxing the locals, as the Taliban do. Indeed, several militias in Kunduz fought alongside the Taliban before switching to the government’s side.

Can the Karzai government provide the food, clothing and salaries needed to keep those militias friendly? “If they do not have income, they will return to their old bosses,” the mayor of Imam Sahib, Sufi Manaan, warned American officers in February. He should know. Some American commanders believe that he has links to a militia that fought against their soldiers last fall.

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David Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief for The Times, wrote an article from Libya on Monday that posed the key question, not only about Libya but about all the new revolutions brewing in the Arab world: “The question has hovered over the Libyan uprising from the moment the first tank commander defected to join his cousins protesting in the streets of Benghazi: Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it fundamentally a tribal civil war?”

This is the question because there are two kinds of states in the Middle East: “real countries” with long histories in their territory and strong national identities (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran); and those that might be called “tribes with flags,” or more artificial states with boundaries drawn in sharp straight lines by pens of colonial powers that have trapped inside their borders myriad tribes and sects who not only never volunteered to live together but have never fully melded into a unified family of citizens. They are Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The tribes and sects that make up these more artificial states have long been held together by the iron fist of colonial powers, kings or military dictators. They have no real “citizens” in the modern sense. Democratic rotations in power are impossible because each tribe lives by the motto “rule or die” ”” either my tribe or sect is in power or we’re dead.

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…amid the turmoil of 2011, and this weekend’s military intervention in Libya, we need clarity about our guiding principles. Yes, the situation in the Middle East is highly complex. That complexity makes moral vision all the more necessary. The list of our non-negotiable values is not long, but they include the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of speech and of the press, and religious liberty for all faiths. Our commitment to these freedoms historically derived from the confidence, as Jefferson wrote, that those “liberties are of the gift of God.”

Belief in God-given liberty is still the most compelling reason to defend freedom around the world. We should marshal all our influence and means of diplomatic pressure, speaking with one voice, to promote liberty in the new Middle East. The region’s protesters continue to call for relief from decades of oppression. Our politicians will typically react to these pleas in one of two ways: The pragmatist will hedge and stutter, while the moral leader will cast a vision for what a good and just future might hold.

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SHAUN CASEY (Wesley Theological Seminary): Whether you act or whether you don’t act, the stakes are really quite high, and that’s what makes it so daunting from a moral perspective: trying to find the right way to know when to intervene and when not to because the consequences, the body counts are quite high.

LAWTON: In the wake of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the United Nations hammered out a set of principles known as the “Responsibility to Protect.” The principles say that nations must protect their population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. And if a state doesn’t live up to that responsibility, the international community has a responsibility to step in. The United States has endorsed those principles.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (from Nobel acceptance speech, December 209): I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in the other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.

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Allied warplanes are stopping Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s forces attacking the rebel-held city of Benghazi, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Saturday.

Gaddafi’s troops on Saturday morning pushed into the outskirts of Benghazi, the second city of some 670,000 people, in an apparent attempt to pre-empt Western air strikes that came after a meeting of Western and Arab leaders in Paris.

But as the meeting ended, Sarkozy announced that allied air forces had already gone into action.

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The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet….

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Egypt’s military has begun shipping arms over the border to Libyan rebels with Washington’s knowledge, U.S. and Libyan rebel officials said.

The shipments””mostly small arms such as assault rifles and ammunition””appear to be the first confirmed case of an outside government arming the rebel fighters. Those fighters have been losing ground for days in the face of a steady westward advance by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The Egyptian shipments are the strongest indication to date that some Arab countries are heeding Western calls to take a lead in efforts to intervene on behalf of pro-democracy rebels in their fight against Mr. Gadhafi in Libya. Washington and other Western countries have long voiced frustration with Arab states’ unwillingness to help resolve crises in their own region, even as they criticized Western powers for attempting to do so.

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The United Nations authorised military action to curb Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Thursday, hours after he threatened to storm the rebel bastion of Benghazi overnight, showing “no mercy, no pity.”

“We will come, zenga, zenga. House by house, room by room,” he said in a radio address to the eastern city.

Al Jazeera television showed thousands of Benghazi residents in a central square celebrating the U.N. vote, waving anti-Gaddafi tricolour flags and chanting defiance of the man who has ruled for four decades. Fireworks burst over the city.

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Suheil Dawani, the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem, has gone to court to seek a renewal of the Israeli residency permit that allows him to live and work in the ancient city. The Israeli government recently declined to renew the permit and ordered Dawani and his family to leave the country.

Dawani was elected head of the Episcopal diocese in 2007. He was able to renew his visa in 2008 and 2009. But he was informed in writing last August by the Israeli Ministry of the Interior that it declined to renew the permit.

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The tiny Island of Bahrain could become a battleground for regional influence between two historical rivals””with Saudi Arabia backing Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy, and Iran supporting the Shiite opposition.

A coalition of about 2,000 soldiers deployed by Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states, part of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, rolled into Bahrain’s capital Monday to help restore order and save a government challenged by an opposition seeking an end to the monarchy. It was the first time Gulf countries deployed troops to an Arab nation to settle an internal dispute.

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The Obama administration may not care to admit it, but it did make a decision, and one of benefit to Gaddafi. Why? One factor was surely Obama’s preference for a less activist foreign policy in general.

But there were special considerations in Libya, and they were clearly stated in a piece by General Wesley Clark for the Washington Post last Friday. The former US commander in Kosovo and a 2004 Democratic presidential candidate wrote: “We don’t have a clearly stated objective, legal authority, committed international support or adequate on-the-scene military capabilities, and Libya’s politics hardly foreshadow a clear outcome.”

The key phrase here is “Libya’s politics”. For the past few days, Washington policy circles have been worrying over a piece of research circulated last week: “On a per capita basis ”¦ twice as many foreign fighters came to Iraq from Libya ”“ and specifically eastern Libya ”“ than from any other country in the Arabic-speaking world. Libyans were apparently more fired up to travel to Iraq to kill Americans than anyone else in the Middle East. And 84.1 per cent [74] of the 88 Libyan fighters ”¦ who listed their hometowns came from either Benghazi or Darnah in Libya’s east.”

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Increasing alarm has been expressed in the US about the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.

Greg Jaczko, chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), said attempts to cool reactors with sea water and prevent them from melting down appeared to be failing.

Emergency workers in the vicinity could be exposed to “potentially lethal” radiation doses, he said.

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Possible interventions include not only a no-fly zone but also providing weapons to the rebels, offering inducements to Gaddafi loyalists to defect, jamming Libyan military radio transmissions or bombing Mr. Gaddafi’s tanks and artillery when they move east. Each option carries risks for the United States, and Mr. Obama’s caution is understandable.

On the other hand, Mr. Gaddafi’s military is weak, and many Libyans clearly are desperate for change. And a Gaddafi victory also carries risks for U.S. interests, as Mr. Obama himself has said. A sacking of Benghazi will be accompanied and followed by a horrific bloodbath. A revitalized dictator is likely to be distinctly unfriendly to Western interests. And other despots will conclude that Mr. Gaddafi’s brand of merciless revenge brings better results than the Tunisian and Egyptian models of accommodating people’s yearning for freedom ”” and that American threats to the contrary can be discounted.

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World leaders on Tuesday refused all forms of military intervention in Libya, abandoning Col Muammar Gaddafi’s fleeing opposition to its fate.

France and Britain failed to persuade other world powers meeting in Paris to impose a no-fly zone over the country, where pro-Gaddafi forces claimed to have taken the last major town before the rebel capital, Benghazi.

The no-fly proposal was absent from the G8 foreign ministers’ closing statement in Paris, following resistance from Russia, Germany and the US. China, a United Nations security council veto-holder, is also opposed.

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Last June, writer and political scientist Peter Beinart launched a broadside at the American Jewish community, accusing it of forsaking its own liberal democratic values in blind support of Israel’s rightward lurch, and in the process creating a generation of young Jews who feel no attachment to the Jewish state.

“The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” published in the New York Review of Books, made a lot of waves and fueled a wider argument about when, and whether, American Jews should speak out against Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The discussion will continue 7 p.m. Thursday [in the Pittsburgh area]…His topic: “Is the love affair over? Young American Jews and Israel.”

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The nuclear power industry had been experiencing something of a rebirth in the United States, following decades of doubt. That’s been put at risk by the crisis unfolding at a nuclear power plant in Japan in the wake of a devastating quake and tsunami there.

With that situation still in flux, attention should remain focused on dealing with the immediate safety issues in Japan, says Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, an association of electric utility companies.

“There will be plenty of time later on for a, hopefully, thoughtful dialogue,” Owen says.

But officials in Owen’s industry recognize that problems in Japan are bound to have repercussions when it comes to nuclear policy in the U.S.

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A strategic town is lost in the east with another expected to follow soon. In the west, a symbolic centre of resistance is about to suffer an onslaught that it is unlikely to survive. With no international action to stop Muammar Gaddafi’s fierce offensive, the survival of Libya’s revolution hangs in a precarious balance.

Just four days ago the picture was very different: the rebel fighters were seemingly on a march to the capital, Tripoli, and the enemy was in disarray and retreat. But a series of misjudgements, and chronic lack of planning and organisation, have resulted in a dramatic reversal. The regime’s troops are poised to strike at Benghazi, the capital of “Free Libya”.

By yesterday afternoon, the opposition had abandoned Ras Lanuf, an oil port on the key coastal route. They withdrew to Aghala, outside Brega, another petrochemical complex. Control of the two locations would provide the regime with the reserves of fuel needed for the tanks and armoured cars arriving in increasing numbers on the frontline. It would also put Tripoli in a position to shut down power supplies to Benghazi.

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The Arab League has backed the idea of a no-fly zone over Libya, as rebels continue to be pushed back by Colonel Gaddafi’s forces.

A special meeting in Cairo voted to ask the UN Security Council to impose the policy until the current crisis ended.

The UK and France have pushed for the idea, but have failed so far to win firm backing from the EU or Nato.

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France and Britain on Thursday agreed that Libya strongman Moamer Kadhafi “must go” and called on the EU to consider the country’s rebel national council a valid political interlocutor, Sarkozy’s office said.

“To stop further suffering of the Libyan people, Muammar Gaddafi and his clique should leave,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron said in a joint letter to European Union president Herman Von Rompuy.

France earlier recognised the rebels as the country’s rightful representatives.

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As the Obama administration wrestles over what to do about Libya, the voices on Capitol Hill offer no consensus on military action.

Influential senators John McCain, a Republican, and John Kerry, a Democrat, have kept up a drumbeat for U.S. military action such as a “no-fly” zone to aid the rebels fighting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

But other senior lawmakers, like Republicans Senator Richard Lugar and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, are warning against getting the United States into a Libyan war.

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If the American-led fight against the Taliban was once a contest for influence in well-known and conventionally defined areas ”” the capital and large cities, main roads, the border with Pakistan, and a handful of prominent valleys and towns ”” today it has become something else.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the United States military has settled into a campaign for scattered villages and bits of terrain that few people beyond their immediate environs have heard of.

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