NATO holds its fire as Moammar Gadhafi's forces advance 100 miles into rebel territory. It then blasts a rebel tank, saying it didn't know the rebels had any — even though footage of rebels with tanks had been on YouTube for weeks.

NATO's leadership of the Libya campaign is coming under increasing criticism for mistakes and ineffectiveness. Nine difficult days of leading the air war have brought into sharp relief the confusion, ambiguity and constraints of the alliance's mission.

"This is something new. We haven't had a significant military operation in which the Americans have taken a back seat for quite some time," Malcolm Chalmers, a professor of defense at London's Kings College, said Friday. "It really is unclear whether the Europeans can rise to that challenge."

The NATO bombing of a rebel convoy on Thursday, in which five people died and at least one rebel tank was destroyed, appears to have crystalized the perception — to outsiders, at least — that the alliance is running a bumbling campaign.

Within a few days, the "Silmiya" (peaceful) popular uprising against the 42-year old rule of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya had turned into an "armed struggle" and in no time the U.S. administration was in full gear backing the Libyan armed violent revolt, which has turned into a full scale civil war, despite being the same world power who officially label the legitimate (according to the charter of the United Nations) armed defense of the Palestinian people against the 34- year old foreign military occupation of Israel as "terrorism."

Backing the armed struggle of the Libyan people came less than a month since President Barak Obama on February 11 hailed the Egyptians' "shouting 'Silmiya, Silmiya'" -- thus adding the Arabic word to the international language lexicon - because the "Egyptians have inspired us, and they've done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained by violence .. It was the moral force of nonviolence, .. that bent the arc of history toward justice," he said.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has appealed directly to President Barack Obama to halt what the Libyan leader called "an unjust war," and wished Obama good luck in his bid for re-election next year.

In a rambling, three-page letter to Obama obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, Gadhafi implored Obama to stop the NATO-led air campaign, which the Libyan called an "unjust war against a small people of a developing country."

"You are a man who has enough courage to annul a wrong and mistaken action," Gadhafi wrote in the letter that was sent to the State Department and forwarded immediately to the White House, according to a U.S. official who has seen the letter. "I am sure that you are able to shoulder the responsibility for that."

"To serving world peace ... Friendship between our peoples ... and for the sake of economic, and security cooperation against terror, you are in a position to keep Nato (NATO) off the Libyan affair for good," Gadhafi wrote.

White House press secretary Jay Carney confirmed that the White House received a letter from Gadhafi.

The truth begins to come out of Libya. While the armed forces of Colonel Al-Qathafi fight against the Islamist terrorists with links to Al-Qaeda, NATO is once again slaughtering civilians. Seven children were murdered by a heroic NATO pilot. Bullseye!

Bullseye, Mssrs. Cameron and Sarkozy! Seven children slaughtered by a NATO pilot. Four girls and three boys were blasted to pieces by a NATO bomb near Brega, according to a local doctor, who broke the news. Is this "protecting civilians" and policing a "no-fly zone"?

This, after a hospital and a civilian home were blitzed in Mizdah in western Libya. Several civilians, including an old lady and a baby, were massacred by NATO missiles. This, after 40 civilians were slaughtered in Tripoli, according to the Vatican. How Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron can sleep at night after this, defies logic, or else shows what callous, cold characters they must be.

Let the truth be known: CIA operatives, in collusion with a Prime Minister Cameron and President Sarkozy with flagging popularity ratings, eager to play the war card, started the trouble on the Libyan frontiers (why didn't the trouble start in the capital city, Tripoli?) having managed to sweep the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt swiftly aside.

In addition to the fraud that engulfed the foreign intervention in Libya, Brazil entered the fraud by failure "to oppose" the aggression led by the U.S.
"Gaddafi controls resources by Libyans in Libya and for Libyans. When he came to power, only ten per cent of the population could read and write. Today, it is about a 90 percent literacy rate. Women today have rights and can go to school and get a job. Quality of life is about 100 times better than existed under the rule of King Idris I ".
The first day alone, 110 Tomahawk missiles (which cost $1.5 million dollars each) were fired by American ships and submarines, killing 42 Libyan civilians.