No Fly Zone

Washington (CNN) -- The story of the Libyan intervention may pain some of the most ardent believers in the proposition that it is America's role to take the lead, all of the time, everywhere.

But when the French and the British began the first sorties into Libyan airspace, it made an awful lot of sense: It's their neighborhood after all. And when the Arab League decided to support some kind of allied intervention, it seemed a powerful consensus was developing.

Then came the United Nations resolution, and the deal was sealed. Some complained that President Barack Obama had dithered and that it was too late for an effective no-fly zone. Others applauded his insistence on not going it alone. Put me in that camp: Without a strategic reason for unilateral U.S. military action, this is clearly a humanitarian effort. And a worldwide one.

So if the president has done the right thing, why does it feel as if something is wrong?

It's hard to pinpoint exactly, but there's an amorphous and unsettling nature to this action. On the one hand, there is one coalition goal that has been explicitly stated and affirmed: This is an effort to keep Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi from murdering his own people. Yet there's another goal here -- an implicit one -- that suddenly no one can explain in any great detail: Gadhafi has to go.

It's something the president himself said two weeks ago. And on Monday, he labored to separate his own words (as in, the end of the Gadhafi regime is "U.S. policy") from the wording of the U.N. resolution (the humanitarian protection of the Libyan people).

In other words: We know the ouster of Gadhafi is part of the preferred endgame. But we can't make it part of the official coalition plan because regime change is nowhere in it.