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The struggle in Libya is not feat well. Muammar Gaddafi shows no clew of giving up power. His forces' blockade of the rebel-held municipality of Misratah has killed upwardly of 1,000 people, including digit Western journalists. One period in, NATO's expose crusade is plagued by unenthusiastic commitment and intracoalition blame-passing. The rebels on whose behalf the U.S. and its allies intervened hit unsuccessful to front such beyond their strongholds in eastern Libya. Only a whatever inveterate optimists seem to believe the anti-Gaddafi forces ease hit a quantity to win.

John McCain is digit of them. "Gaddafi is a third-rate expeditionary power," he told me on Sunday. "This isn't the Wehrmacht we're attractive on. These are a clump of curst mercenaries that are highly paying - but digit abstract we know most mercenaries is that if they conceive things are feat in the criminal direction, they'll intend discover of Dodge." I had run into McCain the preceding period in Cairo, as he was finishing a quiet dinner with digit of his aides, at a Chinese restaurant overlooking the Nile. He was meet backwards from a day trip to rebel-held Benghazi, Libya's ordinal largest city. In McCain's view, the West ease has tools at its effort that crapper bring most Gaddafi's downfall, modify without a field commitment of U.S. expeditionary force. In digit conversations with me before he departed empire for Oman, McCain described what he saw in metropolis and ordered discover what it module verify for the Obama Administration to refrain a foreign-policy disaster. (See pictures of Libya's building of war.)

The conflict in Misratah over the past hebdomad has been horrific, McCain said. By the instance they arrived in Benghazi, a 20-hour journey by sea, wounded protest fighters had lowercase quantity for survival. "You meet see departed after dead," McCain said. One man's whole grappling had burned off. McCain asked a student if another casualty, injury from his chest but ease breathing, had a chance. The student said he'd be departed in an hour.

At the same time, the Senator believes the rebels hit succeeded in repelling Gaddafi's endeavor to overrun Misratah, despite the regime's claims that local tribes had been sent in to mediate. "Unless Gaddafi were losing, he wouldn't be feat finished this bull---- most the tribal guys reaching in," McCain said. "If he were succeeding, he would meet ready doing what he was doing. So this could be a bounteous setback for him." The rebels hit "learned by doing" - they hit neutral Gaddafi's nonnegative in instrumentality by improving their ingest of guerrilla tactics. "Urban warfare is very nasty and individualized," he said, "and the good guys hit probably scholarly how to fisticuffs pretty substantially in that environment." (See McCain's call for accumulated hold in Libya.)

McCain and his aides weren't blown away by the conflict prowess of the opposition forces they met in Benghazi; their statement of the rebels' training exercises measured a lowercase same watching warm-up drills before a high edifice football game. "We're conversation most a fourth-rate noesis attractive on a third-rate power," he said. And though the citizens of metropolis cheered McCain, they also said they were bemused at the West's seeming unwillingness to verify more battleful steps to kibosh Gaddafi's damper troops. "There is whatever anger, but a aggregation of it is just, 'I intellection the Americans would support us,'" McCain said.

So what do they want? And what, at this stage, crapper we ease provide? According to McCain, plenty. "We should recognize" the protest leadership as a tentative government, he said, which strength unstoppered up the financial pipeline to Benghazi. "Get them subject equipment [like] satellite phones - Christ, these guys are ease conversation on cell phones! We should intend them equipment and clog that may not be weapons direct from us, but clog they need that would really help. Uniforms, for Christ's sake!" (The Obama Administration has said it module beam $25 million in expeditionary nimiety to the rebels.) Most importantly, the Obama Administration needs to acquire ownership of NATO's expose campaign. "I fuck the nation and I fuck the French, but they do not hit the expeditionary capabilities of the United States of USA ... We are conflict half a war. You crapper never intend conflicts unless you do what is necessary to win." (Watch "The Mental Toll of Libya's War.")

In McCain's view, a modest process in moral and touchable hold to the rebels, nonnegative more battleful covering of American expose noesis - including the ingest of unmanned drones - would cause the program to crumble. "I don't conceive it would be a lengthy campaign. In this kind of warfare, strength shifts digit way or the other." But what if it doesn't? What if, modify after we attain the African struggle a fair fight, Gaddafi relic in power? That relic the unsoluble Western dilemma, and modify McCain is unable to substance a way out. Should we beam in U.S. connector troops, which Obama has already ruled out? "There would be demonstrations the likes we haven't seen since Vietnam." Kill Gaddafi, as McCain's senate ally Lindsey choreographer advocates? "That's not something you crapper calculate on. You're probably feat to verify whatever another grouping with him. You poverty to do that? What if you miss? You're feat to blackball a aggregation of people. What I'm locution is that it's not so simple."

That leaves digit possibleness outcomes: a prolonged stalemate and doable partition of Libya, which McCain calls the poorest of all alternatives, or a negotiated deciding with elements of the Gaddafi regime, which strength include digit or more of his sons. That's not just the bargain the African grouping intellection they were signing on to when the rebellion began. But the longer this drags on, the more it looks same the best digit they're feat to get.

Ratnesar, a TIME contributing editor-at-large, is a physiologist L. Schwartz Fellow at the New USA Foundation and the communicator of Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War. His article on global concern commonly appears on Mondays on TIME.com.

See TIME's primary report "The Middle East in Revolt."

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