[Ennahar] Western forces pounded Libya's air defences and patrolled its skies on Sunday, but their day-old intervention hit a serious diplomatic setback as the vaporous Arab League chief condemned the "bombardment of civilians."Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffy
... a proud Arab institution for 42 years ...
vowed to defeat the Western powers' "terrorism" and sent his troops and tanks into the rebel-held coastal city of Misrata, residents said.
European and U.S. forces unleashed warplanes and cruise missiles against Qadaffy on Saturday in a United Nations, aka the Oyster Bay Chowder and Marching Society-backed intervention to prevent the veteran leader from killing civilians as he fights an uprising against his 41-year rule.
But Arab League chief
Jerry Lewis doppelgänger Amr Moussa... who has been head of the Arab League since about the time Jerry and Dean split up ...
said what was happening was not what Arabs had envisaged when they called for the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya.
"What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians," he said.
In comments carried by Egypt's official state news agency, Moussa also said he was calling for an emergency Arab League meeting.
Arab backing for a no-fly zone provided crucial underpinning for the passage of the U.N. Security Council resolution last week that paved the way for the Western intervention, the biggest against an Arab country since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Withdrawal of that support would make it much harder to pursue what some defense analysts say could in any case be a difficult, open-ended campaign with an uncertain outcome.
The U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said the no-fly zone was effectively in place. But he told CBS the endgame of military action was "very uncertain" and acknowledged it could end in a stalemate with Qadaffy.
Mullen said he had seen no reports of civilian casualties from the Western strikes. But Russia said there had been such casualties and called on Britain, La Belle France and the United States to halt the "non-selective use of force."
The aerial assault stopped in its tracks the advance by Qadaffy's troops into the eastern city of Benghazi, and left the burned and shattered remains of his tanks and troop carriers littering the main road outside the rebel stronghold.
The charred bodies of at least 14 government soldiers lay scattered in the desert.
"Qadaffy is like a chicken and the coalition is plucking his feathers so he can't fly. The revolutionaries will slit his neck," said Fathi Bin Saud, a 52-year-old rebel carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, surveying the wreckage.
Qadaffy said the raids amounted to terrorism and vowed to fight to the death. "We will not leave our land and we will liberate it," he said on state television. "We will remain alive and you will all die."
A Libyan government health official said the corpse count from the Western air strikes had risen to 64 on Sunday after some of the maimed died. But it was impossible to independently verify the reports as government minders refused to take Western news hounds in the capital Tripoli to the site of the bombings.