Post War (Great War) Managed Decline
Sunfish,
You demonstrate a not-uncommon and erroneous Antipodean view of a Britain that doesn't exist anymore.
Britain (a country that adopted me, I love and have devoted my working life to) has suffered from a crisis in confidence since the end of World War I. It has been characterised by the managed decline of greatness. Arguably it has never recovered from the grevious human and financial losses of the Great War which shook its self image (and acutalite) of invincibility. One just needs to visit any Public School or Oxbridge College and see the In Memoriam boards and weep at the lost of talent and youth (no escaping the fact that these schools and colleges did produce Britain's leaders). At my son's school they lost a hunderd 'old' boys on the first day of the Somme. The youngest had just turned 18; almost all of them Temporary (very temporary) officers. My own College produced Sigfiried Sassoon and three VC winners, amongst many others - all 'bright young things' whose lives were forever changed. Who can blame them that they didn't want Britain to fight more wars and saw the realities of Empire. Just read Orwell's 'Burmese Days' to get a sense of what Empire was all about.
I was reading to my daughter an old Ladybird book on the Kings and Queens of England, and we got to our current Regent. The book used the telling phrase 'By the early 1950s, England (sic) was proud to be poor. It had defeated three tyrants in wartime, made of its old Empire self governing and created a welfare state where there would be no more poverty.' That's quite an achievement.
Britian is well and truely Post Imperial, but commands a huge sector of the global market in language, culture, tourism and finance. Militarily we still carry a punch (what other country - apart from the US - can continuously field 10,000 high quality, well-equipped troops with all the CS and CSS they need?) and in spite of EU cynicism, the UK is well regarded in Brussels. Set all this against the privaledged upbringing (not his fault, btw) of David Cameron and you can see the dichotomy he faces. 20 years ago there would be absolutely no thought of interfering with the 'internal' affairs of Libya, or any other country for that matter. The dirty, internecine Balkans wars changed that. Western democracies simply could not ignore the 'CNN Factor' and Libya, inter alia, is no exception. Perhaps David Cameron's well-meant proposals (amongst a range of other options) was a genuine 'we've got to do something!'
A NFZ seems a good idea until the tactical weeds of disabling the IADS are considered (mind - that doesn't always mean resorting to kinetic means...) ; moreover NFZ over BiH and Kosovo didn't stop the troops on the ground do some truely awful stuff. It did, however, stop Saddam Hussein's ambitions to rebuild his defences. Certainly, news reports indicate that the Libyan people (sic) don't want direct foreign intervention but the problem in Libya is that there is no organised opposition; the opposition has been viral and hitherto leaderless. In this leadership vacuum, Qadaffi might well prevail, although his FJ crews need to improve their bombing accuracy, it seems.