After the near-unimaginable upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, I'd say that many of us in the West saw the rumblings in Libya as an exciting third installment of the “1848”-style chronicle sweeping the Arab world. But things in Libya seem to be headed towards an entrenched struggle rather than fortnight fiasco. Thanks to Qaddafi's refusal to face reality, this is a revolution whose second chapter is civil war.

The demented Colonel hasn’t hung onto power for four decades without developing some brutally effective survival skills. We've just seen him retake Ras Lanuf, dealing a major blow to the rebels; now he's marching eastward. It's not out of the question that he might climb back onto his battered throne. How exactly he could expect to govern with a shred of legitimacy after massacring the youth of his own nation is a question of psychology; how we in the West can prevent that massacre from dragging on in uglier ways is a question of foreign policy. Since America’s leverage over Libyan affairs is limited at best, Kaplan recently touched upon the few policies realistically available to Washington.

The no-fly zone seems to be an option shrinking day by day, and Kaplan notes that the UN Security Council was likely to (and in fact did) eschew plans for one due to the thorny questions such a policy entails. Kaplan posed one of them, asking, “would [US combat planes] bomb Libya's airfields?” On Wednesday, before the House Appropriations Committee, Defense Secretary Gates answered, “yes.”

“A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. “

Kaplan still entertains the option but calls introduction of any ground troops “a very bad idea,” most likely because of the possibility of a protracted struggle involving US forces. In Foreign Policy Robert Haddick has suggested the opposite, urging a “Jawbreaker” operation à la Afghanistan in 2001. While Kaplan affirms the zones imposed over Iraq in the 1990s to be largely successful, Haddick points out that they produced no material change on the ground and asserts that the same would be the case with a Libyan NFZ.

Then of course, there's this.

Me, I'm camping out with John Kerry and Eliot Spitzer on this issue, which gives one an idea of how serious the situation has become.

If you haven't yet taken a look at The Atlantic's gripping photos of the war, do so now.