First you have to be careful, remember the massacres and mass graves in Romania, many which turned out not to be true. While it’s nearly a cert that such has happened in Libya, remember it is happening elsewhere right now. Just don’t believe all you hear.
The real question is why Libya?
Right now Bahrain and Yeman have done as such, will we see No-Fly zone over there as well? What about Burma and the Ivory Coast and North Korea?
Of course the pat answer is, if you see six fires burning and only have enough water to put one out, you don’t let them all burn, you put the one you can, out.
The side effect is more nations are going to want nukes? Do you really think anyone would risk a no-fly zone over a nuclear armed Libya
In the end it amounts to the West doesn’t like Gaddafi and Libya is close enough to actually do this and finally they have oil.
As for interfering in a country, that’s how the world works. It was the French who through out Bokassa in the Central African Empire (now Republic), it was the Cubans who proped up Angola and Ethiopia. It was the US who split apart Columbia to build the Panama Canal.
To be fair to the UN, what’s wrong with lots of talking?
After all, we have some 200 sovereign nations in the world. They’ve got to engage in diplomacy, and so you might as well invest diplomatic legitimacy in some sort of central body. If you abolished the UN because it talks too much, by the following Monday the world’s nation-states would be wondering where they could set up a new one.
Sometimes, however, one must take action. Preferably you take the UN route not to please the UN itself - the UN has no legal or sovereign authority - but simply because it quashes a lot of argument and objections out of the gate and gives the action some degree of legitimacy, however tenuous.
What is tenuous about it? When the UN gives us a decision we like, we act on it like it was holy writ. Saddam was defying the UN mandates. It gave a thin veneer of morality to the Bush invasions. He used it for Regime Change, which is what he wanted anyway.
This UN vote, with Arab League backing ,is even better.