By 'our,' I am speaking as an American. 'Our' might also mean westerner or merely non-Libyan.

So, is our military action awkward, clumsy, 'clunky'?

It seems that way to me. Instead of doing something small early in the game, we are doing something big and dramatic late in the game. And there's inordinate energy spent on 'proving' our case and 'proving' that Kadafi is a bad guy and thus our actions are moral (and that connection doesn't always follow).

And then, an air war is largely clean from our perspective but it can play poorly since we are not also at the same risk. But I am not in the military, so I don't feel I can really advocate that other people place themselves at risk. And people sign up for the U.S. military to defend their country, so asking them to defend our values is a little bit of a stretch. But our military doesn't really work by asking for volunteers for a large-scale intervention. So, I'm not sure there are easy answers, and I certainly am not the one to provide them. As a citizen, perhaps I can my part by doing my best to ask questions.

During our intervening in Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, we bombed such things as electrical generating plants and a chemical plant on the Danube River. As if we were trying to coerce an irrational leader (Milosevic) into doing the right thing, not a very high percentage move. I do ask, if we had put the word out, informally and/or formally, that Serbian military units that attack civilians will be at risk of being bombed within the next 12 to 24 hours. That might undercut the support the dictator has from 'his' military, and you might find specific military units refusing orders and asking questions.

(I posted a response earlier but I think I close the window before it loaded--if it appears twice, that is why)

I think the delay is because there wouldn't have been public support for sending the military to Libya before the recent events. I see the recent events as "plausible deniability" to deny that the real reason is largely influenced by the effects on oil production in Libya and surrounding countries.

As for volunteering in the military, soldiers can submit a list of preferred assignments when their current assignment is near completion, but the military does not start a military action based exclusively on volunteers because that is not how the laws work. When the President says to attack a country, the military sends troops there whether they like it or not. In some cases I know that troops are put on airplanes and not told where they are going until they are in the air.

During the Persian Gulf War, the feeling on the part of a fair number of my fellow citizens was that oil was what got our attention, but once we focused on the area and the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, we went ahead and did the right thing. Maybe, perhaps, but I think that's a stretch and being overly optimistic. For example, we didn't really restore human rights in Kuwait. We put the Emir back in power, and it was a long way from a democractic society (hopefully better now, I do tend to be on the optimistic side, just I like to think not overly so. And people can be pretty amazing at times. For example, look at Egypt.)

And throughout the cold war, we supported a number of dictatorships, basically just if they were successful at playing the label game, if they were successful at labeling themselves "ally" and any rebel army or dissident political group as "Marxist," "communist," "socialist," whatever. It was not very sophisticated, almost like high school. And not very beneficial even for our own interests in the long run.

All that on the table. People don't want passivity. They don't want the argument, 'Well, we made such a mess of things in the past, we ought just not do anything now.' In a human rights situation, a dictatorship situation, people want a positive active thing they can do.