Rebel fighters deface a portrait of Muammar Gaddafi in his Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli, Libya, August 24, 2011.
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Fox's statement seemed to contradict a NATO's military spokesman for the Libyan operation, Roland Lavoie, who told reporters in Naples on Tuesday that "Gaddafi is not a target," and that the organization would "just be happy" if its jets spotted Gaddafi trying to flee, and would not intervene to stop him.
Although British, French and other Western countries have flown about 2,000 sorties over Libya since March, Western officials have been painstaking in casting the rebel campaign as a Libyan-led effort, not only by downplaying the Western military role, but playing up the involvement of some Gulf countries.
Fox said that if ground forces were needed to stabilize Libya, it would have to be approved by the U.N. — far different, say, from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. "We have always said we would prefer that being a force drawn from the Arab countries," Fox said. "It is very important that this is about the Libyan people determining its own future and that it is not seen as Western interference."
The sense that the Libyan conflict is not a Western operation is key to Arab support for NATO's campaign, Shadi Hamid, director of research for the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, told TIME on Thursday. Among Arab countries, he says, "There was widespread support for Western intervention initially because it was limited. But once you start talking about an actual presence on the ground, and special forces, that is going to sour public opinion in the Arab world."
For Western countries, that is a delicate dance, since an Arab-led military force could be far less effective than Western intervention, Hamid says. "The more you lean on the side of Arab ownership the less capable the Special Forces are going to be," maintains Hamid. "They are simply not up to the standard of the French or the British or the American special forces."
The British Foreign Secretary William Hague told reporters in London on Thursday that the fighting was far from over, and would likely continue for as long as Gaddafi's hard-line holdouts remain on the run. "As long as that remains the case and they remain a threat to the civilian population, then the NATO operations will continue," he said. Among the dangers is that the rebels' foes might have stockpiles of weapons from the regime's huge arsenal. "There are a huge number of weapons out there," Hague said. "This is the country with one of the most weapons per capita in the world."