WASHINGTON -- While it's clearly reluctant to become militarily involved in Libya's burgeoning civil war, the Obama administration is coming under pressure to do just that.
World oil prices are soaring, posing a threat to the U.S. economic recovery, and food and medicine shortages are looming in rebellious cities cordoned off by Moammar Gadhafi's forces. Top U.S. lawmakers, meanwhile, are calling for the imposition of a no-fly zone and even sending arms to the Libyan dictator's ragtag foes.
"We have joined with allies in making clear that Colonel Gadhafi must go. He has lost all legitimacy. We cannot be halfway about that goal," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass, said Wednesday, urging the administration to be ready to enforce a no-fly zone over the North African nation "as necessary."
The turmoil in Libya poses a growing dilemma for President Obama as he grapples with the most serious foreign crisis to erupt on his watch. He finds himself caught between a desire to avoid U.S. meddling in what have been indigenous Arab uprisings over poverty, joblessness and the denial of basic rights and sitting by as Gadhafi looses fresh onslaughts against population centers lost to the rebels.
"I think the United States has a unique problem in the world. It can't do too little, but it can't do too much," said Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, one of a number of outside experts who's been consulted by the White House on the uprisings.
The administration is deeply concerned that the longer the upheaval persists, the greater the danger that al-Qaida or other extremists could find a new safe haven in Libya from which to plot attacks on U.S. and allied targets.
"One of our biggest concerns is Libya descending into chaos and becoming a giant Somalia," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before Kerry's panel. "It's right now not something that we see in the offing, but many of the al-Qaida activists in Afghanistan and later in Iraq came from Libya."
The pressure on Obama to intervene is coming at home and abroad.
Noting that Libyan rebel leaders aren't asking for foreign troops, Kerry warned that the international community "cannot sit on the sidelines while (Gadhafi's) airplanes are allowed to bomb and strafe."
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who caucuses with majority Senate Democrats, also have endorsed a no-fly zone and called for arming the rebels who control Libya's eastern wing and several western cities.
