Joel Rubin, deputy director and chief operating officer of the National Security Network:  

On Iraq and Bosnia: very different circumstances, clearly. Iraq came
after an armed conflict, after a war, and it was done to enforce
protection of civilians after that war-and to keep Saddam, frankly, in
a box. Bosnia was done to stop atrocities from occurring, and put
pressure ultimately on Milosevic and on others to decease and to get
out of power. So, very distinct. The one now scheduled for Libya is a
little bit closer to the Bosnian model than the Saddam model, but
certainly there's been a lot of analogies made about of what's
happening in eastern Libya as a potential bloodbath, akin to what
happened in southern Iraq, after the Gulf War, before there was a
no-fly zone. So humanitarian arguments have been: Put a no-fly zone in
to avoid that type of outcome. 
 

In my opinion, I think this is the right step in Libya, it's the
appropriate step, it's a prudent one, it's been done in the right way
through a multilateral framework, with support from the region, [which
is] crucial, and it is being done as the second request to Libya to
stop violence. The first request was ignored. So, now, the prospects
for it are unclear, obviously, but certainly it's going to make
Gaddafi's pilots think twice, it's going to put pressure on decision
makers and different actors within the Libyan leadership and regime
about what their options are. They won't quite know now, they can't
calculate in the same ways that they have been. So, it challenges the
balance of calculations, and that's essential.