White House officials said President Obama had been briefed on the more energetic bombing campaign, which included a strike early on Monday on Colonel Qaddafi’s residential compound in the heart of Tripoli, the capital.
United States officials said the effort was not intended to kill the Libyan leader, but to take the war to his doorstep, raising the price of his efforts to continue to hold on to power. “We want to make sure he knows there is a war going on, and it’s not just in Misurata,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity in discussing military planning.
The NATO campaign, some officials said, arose in part from an analysis of Colonel Qaddafi’s reaction to the bombing of Tripoli that was ordered by President Ronald Reagan a quarter-century ago. Alliance officials concluded that the best hope of dislodging the Libyan leader and forcing him to flee was to cut off his ability to command his most loyal troops.
“We don’t want to kill him or make a martyr out of him in the Arab world,” said a senior NATO diplomat familiar with the evolving strategy. “But if he sees the bombing happening all around him, we think it could change his calculus.”
American warplanes were not involved in the most recent strike on the Qaddafi residential complex, which also includes administrative offices and a military communications center, or in a separate raid on Monday that temporarily knocked Libyan state television off the air. The decision to let warplanes from other nations carry out the bulk of the attacks is in keeping with the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw to what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has called “a support role” in the Libya air campaign.
But the attacks depend on intelligence reports and other military support from the United States, NATO officials said.
NATO officials acknowledged that the alliance’s intelligence was based on intercepted cellphone calls and radio dispatches that might indicate which barracks, buildings or compounds were serving as the government’s hidden command posts.
“If you know your main headquarters is going to be hit, you get out and set up an alternative in some nondescript barracks,” one NATO official said. Attacks on those hidden military posts are wholly legitimate, officials said — but there is always a chance that Colonel Qaddafi might be inside one of them.
Officials in Europe and Washington said the strikes were meant to reduce the Libyan government’s ability to harm civilians by eliminating, link by link, the command-and-communications and supply chains that are required for military operations.
But the attacks also reflect a broadening of alliance targets at a time when the rebels and the government have been consolidating their positions along more static front lines, raising concerns of a prolonged stalemate. Although it is too soon to see results from the recent shift, a NATO official said Tuesday that the alliance was closely watching early signs, like the recent reports of desertions from the Libyan Army.
NATO planes pounded targets east of the port city of Misurata on Tuesday, lifting mushroom-shaped clouds of dust hundreds of feet into the air. On the ground, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces fired missiles and mortars in heavy, though intermittent, barrages on the rebels defending the port area, news agencies reported. Explosions echoed for miles across the water, and rescue ships bound for the port and its stranded migrant workers found themselves without a safe window to dock amid attacks by Colonel Qaddafi’s troops.
By sunset, a NATO warship could be seen patrolling the waters several miles off the coast. A Human Rights Watch representative with contacts in Misurata said one migrant worker was killed and 11 others wounded in shelling by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces.
The strike on Colonel Qaddafi’s palace and command center was denounced by Libyan officials as an assassination attempt, but alliance officers rejected that suggestion. Pentagon officials said the mission was against a legitimate military target and noted that it was carried out by F-16s from Norway.
But the view from the Kremlin was skeptical. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday delivered his most passionate critique of the Western intervention in Libya, underlining a rare open disagreement with his protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev.
At a news conference in Copenhagen, Mr. Putin was asked to elaborate on his comment that the United Nations resolution allowing airstrikes resembled “a medieval call for a crusade.” He responded by launching into an extended caustic attack on the NATO campaign, saying it violated the principle of sovereignty and the wishes of the Libyan people.
Military officials privately acknowledge that removing Colonel Qaddafi from power is the desired secondary effect of striking at state television and other symbols of his authoritarian rule. “His people may see the futility of continued resistance,” one Pentagon official said.
Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, the NATO mission’s operational commander, told reporters on Tuesday at his headquarters in Italy that alliance intelligence officers were picking up reports of Libyan government soldiers who had abandoned their positions. “We are well aware of troops not reporting for duty,” he said.
Senior officers who served in NATO’s previous air war, fought in 1999 to protect the population of Kosovo from Serbian forces, said the campaign over Libya drew on lessons learned then.
Gen. John P. Jumper, who commanded United States Air Force units in Europe during the Kosovo campaign, recalled that allied “air power was getting its paper graded on the number of tanks killed” — even though taking out armored vehicles one by one was never going to halt “ethnic cleansing.”
So NATO began to hit high-profile institutional targets in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, instead of forces in the field. Although they were legitimate military targets, General Jumper said, destroying them also had the effect of undermining popular support for the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic.
“It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in Belgrade, and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade, that Milosevic’s own people began to turn on him,” General Jumper said.
C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from the Mediterranean Sea.
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