Invade Libya. You know Sarkozy is talking about it with his advisors right now. Someone is calling Angela Merkel's assistant to check what she thinks. The State Department has been sounded out, they have first dibs on invading Muslim nations after all.
The initial reports are that Europe is not excluding the possibility of undertaking an humanitarian intervention:
NATO Secretary General, Rasmussen, states there are no plans to intervene, but with every denial comes its antithesis, and the French defense minister, Alain Juppe, has suggested taking action, in the form of sanctions, to prevent further humanitarian violations.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/02/libya-protests-5.html
Yet there is a cardinal rule in politics: when your opponent is self-destructing, get out of the way.
What better way to save Khadaffi than to turn him into a defender of national security. Right now his opponents are citizens of his own country and the military is wavering in their resolve to shoot. This has obviously been the key to the entire democratic movement in the Middle East: armies who do not wish to massacre the people.
Given the prospect of French, British or German ( I doubt it) troops in Libya, the situation would change dramatically. The Libyan army and air force would snap to attention and obey the commands of the supreme leader to defend the nation against colonialist aggressors using this moment of domestic turmoil to invade.
The best policy is to let the democratic revolution unfold without reviving French or even Turkish fantasies of Mediterranean hegemony. So long as Khadaffi is in power it would be madness to present him with a rallying cry for the nation. Right now he is blaming the uprising on Al-Kaeda and Nescafe spiked with Ecstasy. Better to leave him to his mad delusions than to give him a ideological lifeline.
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