Historian Victor Davis Hanson nails it in this paragraph:

“I cannot think of a prior war in which all the following were true at the same time: We claimed a humanitarian mission on behalf of rebels about whom we knew nothing; started bombing without congressional approval and without majority support of the American people; sought sanction from the U.N. and the Arab League, only to go way beyond their resolutions by seeking Qaddafi’s ouster; nevertheless denied that regime change was our mission, insisting that we were only establishing a no fly zone that, on each day, we went well beyond by attacking ground targets and inserting operatives on the ground – all against a monster that as late as last year we were proclaiming a rehabilitated partner in the war against terror, as our senators courted him at home and he sent his westernized progeny abroad to buy friends and influence.
“This strange so-so war has a bit of Mogadishu, a bit of Beirut 1983, some Iraq and Afghanistan, a lot of the Milosevic bombing and the no fly zone over Iraq, and is reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s fondness for now and then lobbing missiles into Afghanistan, East Africa and Iraq – not to mention Reagan’s bombing of Tripoli in 1986. It is all and nothing of all that – and by this Wednesday few will quite know what we are doing in Libya. Fewer, I’m afraid, will care.”