Special report - The West's unwanted war in Libya

By Paul Taylor

PARIS (Reuters) - It is a war that Barack Obama didn't want, David Cameron didn't need, Angela Merkel couldn't cope with and Silvio Berlusconi dreaded.

Only Nicolas Sarkozy saw the popular revolt that began in Libya on February 15 as an opportunity for political and diplomatic redemption. Whether the French president's energetic leadership of an international coalition to protect the Libyan people from Muammar Gaddafi will be enough to revive his sagging domestic fortunes in next year's election is highly uncertain.

But by pushing for military strikes that he hopes might repair France's reputation in the Arab world, Sarkozy helped shape what type of war it would be. The road to Western military intervention was paved with mutual suspicion, fears of another quagmire in a Muslim country and doubts about the largely unknown ragtag Libyan opposition with which the West has thrown in its lot.

That will make it harder to hold together an uneasy coalition of Americans, Europeans and Arabs, the longer Gaddafi holds out. Almost two weeks into the air campaign, Western policymakers fret about the risk of a stray bomb hitting a hospital or an orphanage, or of the conflict sliding into a prolonged stalemate.

There is no doubt the outcome in Tripoli will have a bearing on the fate of the popular movement for change across the Arab world. But because this war was born in Paris it will also have consequences for Europe.

"It's high time that Europeans stopped exporting their own responsibilities to Washington," says Nick Witney, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. "If the West fails in Libya, it will be primarily a European failure."

A FRENCH FIASCO

When the first Arab pro-democracy uprisings shook the thrones of ageing autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt in January, France had got itself on the wrong side of history.