Hemming and Hawing on Libya

Wow, I'm having a tough time with the Libya attack.  I read about how great it is that we're going in like we are.  Then I read about how disastrously this is all going to end.  It seems increasingly like we've got a choice between bad and worse.

First of all, not that this is a surprise, but President Obama is acting unconstitutionally by launching military action without a congressional vote.  Of course presidents do this all the time now, and there's no reason to believe a liberal president will be any different from a conservative one in holding on to increases in his power established by his predecessors.  Of course congress is free to take up the issue and either declare war, support the action, or even withdraw funding.  They won't do any of those things, of course, ceding this ground to this president.  Can't see how this will change.

But that aside, is it the right policy?  I think it's clear that we've forestalled the massacre of hundreds or thousands of protesters along with lots of innocent bystanders.  That's certainly a good thing. 

But Qadafi doesn't appear to be going anywhere.  The rebels are completely disorganized, fractured, leaderless, and untrained.  If this is a civil war, I don't see how the rebels win unless the army defects, and there's no sign of that happening.  Qadafi is willing to do what some other leaders in the Arab Spring were not- get really brutal.  So that's why I used the word "forestalled" in the paragraph above- I don't think we've secured the populace from a massacre that's still in their future.  How do we do that?  I don't see any way other than conquest.  And when western countries conquer Muslim ones, the inevitable result is that they hate us eventually.  It's a quagmire we're not going to get out of.

Now I thought at the time that Clinton's failure to intervene in Rwanda in the 1990s was a terrible abdication of basic human values.  But in that case we wouldn't have had to worry about the reaction of the whole Arab world.  They don't want our troops around. 
So here I am.  The No-Fly Zone in and of itself is OK, but soon we're going to have two choices:

1. Escalate our involvement and eventually occupy a 3rd Muslim country
2. Leave the country after inadequately downgrading Qadafi's forces, and then watch him brutally retake the country

It's no good.  We have to disengage.  It's going to be horrible, and many will accuse the US of failing to do enough to promote Democracy.  The problem is that the alternative is even worse.  I'll take #2.

I really hope I'm wrong about this one.