Good Bad Guys

Long War: America and Britain were gung-ho to throw a No-Fly Zone over Gaddafi until Obama had a heart-to-heart with the Pentagon. They told him if ordered to create a NFZ, the Navy would immediately attack Gaddafi's air assets on the ground. Let's put it another way, the Pentagon is either going to wipe Gaddafi off the map or be genuinely neutral, no in between. Obama's instincts are to do something symbolic to Gaddafi, a ploy to pump approval ratings, not a military strategy. The NFZ is probably off the table.
It is less clear now which side America is backing although there is an obvious lean toward the Libyan Rage Rebels. Both sides say they hate Al-Qaeda. Just as in the Cold War, America has to pick a horse in this particular race and then make sure its horse wins.
As far as the facts on the ground: Gaddafi's forces have made a few probes, captured one Rebel-held town and tested the defenses of its main target, a coastal town with a key port and energy infrastructure. He is preparing a big counter-offensive and there is no point in predicting right now if it will succeed or not. There are reports that Gaddafi's fighter-bombers have attacked some Rebel energy assets. We will know if this is true tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the PKK, the main Kurdish terror group, has denounced its ceasefire with Turkey and says its ready to go to war again. This is a side-effect of the Rage Rebellion. The PKK is old school Marxist, so on paper isn't part of the Rage, but for all practical purposes we are seeing all insurgent groups gaining strength and radiating outward from the Mideast and North Africa.

Let us consider what the average intellectual might say about the Rage: "Evil war criminal type dictators in the region should not receive US support and probably should be harmed in some way, like trade sanctions or worse, maybe NFZ." Okay, Yemen and North Sudan are both run by dictators with a pedigree similar to Gaddafi's. Should America go to war against these two countries? Both are essentially Al-Qaeda central and both dictators have old jihadist links. Current US policy already has Saleh, the dictator of Yemen, openly declaring that he is an enemy of the US. Saleh might be renewing his old ties to Al-Qaeda at this very moment.