Thanks to Wikicommons.

The UN sanctioned no fly zone has met little resistance from Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact mechanical failures have downed more US planes than Libyan loyalist forces.

However, that doesn’t mean our newest air war (and its Commander in Chief) isn’t under fire.

While the rebels in Libya may be celebrating, American reaction is much cooler with a majority not supporting involvement. Congress is also questioning whether whether President Obama could act without their official support.

Voicing this worry, Andrew Sullivan fears that involvement in Libya, like Iraq, is driven by a perfect storm of

the neocons who want to see the US military deployed across the globe in the defense of freedom and the liberal interventionists who believe that the US should intervene whenever atrocities are occurring. What these two groups have in common is an unrelenting focus on the reason for intervention along with indifference to the vast array of unintended consequences their moralism could lead us into.

It is this specter of Iraq and Afghanistan that is driving much of the opposition to Libya: America is already at war with two Middle Eastern nations do we think we’ll suddenly find success in a third?

Over at Democracy in America, M.S. thinks this won’t be like our other two desert escapades as

Things are different in Libya in great measure because Egypt, Tunisia and their Arab League fellows don’t want to see Muammar Qaddafi win; they’ve never much liked the guy, even before the revolt, and they don’t want to have an unstable, post-civil-war pariah state in North Africa.

…the fact that they’re spontaneously committing to the intervention, that the regional attitude is friendly towards a popular revolt to overthrow Mr Qaddafi and towards UN-approved intervention to protect that revolt, makes a huge difference.

Of course even if the climate is more favorable to positive results that doesn’t mean things will turn out the way we want them to. Using the US air war over Kosovo as an example Peter Beinart notes that by only having forces in the air we have little control on end results and

If we’re lucky, the Libyan rebels will soon be a much more powerful force, and if we’re really lucky, they’ll be a powerful force capable of unifying Libya behind a reasonably humane regime. But the latter will be mostly out of our hands.

So what is the take away? Libya could end up like Afghanistan, or it could not. The rebels could form a peaceful democracy, or they could not. President Obama could go down as humanitarian, or he could not. Thusly, in conclusion we’re as in the dark as you are.