Obama’s end game in Libya becoming clear

So many reports of the conflict in Libya focus on the untrained ragtag group of rebels’ inability to sustain advances and take advantage of the breathing room received from airstrikes.  All of these reports mentioned serious doubt about this conflict ending soon and has become even more increasingly talking about a stalemate between the rebels and the pro-Gadhafi fighters.  I believe that the answer and end game lies in the Associated Press’ Ryan Lucas and Maggie Michael article titled Airstrikes force Gadhafi retreat from key city.

The first thing that needs to be understood is how these airstrikes have saved so many lives as evidenced by those who live it every day and by this paragraph where a doctor was quoted.  “A doctor in Misrata said the tanks fled after the airstrikes began around midnight, giving a much-needed reprieve to the city, which is inaccessible to human rights monitors or journalists. He said the airstrikes struck the aviation academy and a vacant lot outside the central hospital, which was under maintenance.  "There were very loud explosions. It was hard to see the planes," the doctor said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals if Gadhafi's forces take the city. "Today, for the first time in a week, the bakeries opened their doors."  He said the situation was still dangerous, with pro-Gadhafi snipers shooting at people from rooftops.  "Some of the tanks were hit and others fled," he said. "We fear the tanks that fled will return if the airstrikes stop."  “The withdrawal of the tanks from Misrata was a rare success for the rebels.”  As the rebel holdings increase, there will be more defections even if those defections are more political than anything else.  Those political defections will also be those who will seek to move into power but will remember that they are not there by any other power than the power loaned to them by the Libyans people.

The second phase of this conflict is also coming online as evidenced by this one sentence in the above mentioned article.  “Western diplomats neared an agreement to let NATO assume responsibility for the no-fly zone and its warships began patrolling off Libya's Mediterranean coast.”  NATO moving in to be the responsible party controlling the no fly zone may also have one less problem to deal with and that is refugees.  Those seeking refuge should be allowed to migrate to those areas controlled by the rebels and still stay within their own country thanks in large part to the airstrikes.  Those who say that this president did not make clear what his plan was must have forgot to listen to him as he spoke and anyone who has ever been intimately involved in any military maneuver knows that sometimes things move much quicker than outside of the conflict zone.   So many Americans remember how quickly President Bush said that Iraq was going to be and see that we are still there.  If President Obama can accomplish the goals that he has set and get us to the back of the bus in days instead of weeks, the approval of his handling of this conflict will not only improve the poll numbers but will give the Arab League and other nations a template on how to better handle these types of situations in the future.

I am quite convinced that this will not end in a stalemate because of the other pressures being applied to Gadhafi that seems not to be getting any press coverage at all.  I say this because of the paragraph at the bottom of the above mentioned article which reports that “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told ABC News that people close to Gadhafi are making contacts abroad to explore options for the future, but she did not say that one of the options might be exile. She said they were asking, "What do we do? How do we get out of this? What happens next?"   This action alone is enough to make the point as it is the same exact action that Mubarak made in Egypt just before he left and disappeared.  It is imperative that on the date Gadhafi does leave that the US be in a supporting role and the final march is captured on film and orchestrated by the rebels alone.