WASHINGTON

The Iraq war hawks urging intervention in Libya are confident that there’s no way Libya could ever be another Iraq.

Of course, they never thought Iraq would be Iraq, either.

All President Obama needs to do, Paul Wolfowitz asserts, is man up, arm the Libyan rebels, support setting up a no-fly zone and wait for instant democracy.

It’s a cakewalk.

Didn’t we arm the rebels in Afghanistan in the ’80s? And didn’t many become Taliban and end up turning our own weapons on us? And didn’t one mujahadeen from Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, go on to lead Al Qaeda?

So that worked out well.

Even now, with our deficit and military groaning from two wars in Muslim countries, interventionists on the left and the right insist it’s our duty to join the battle in a third Muslim country.

“It is both morally right and in America’s strategic interest to enable the Libyans to fight for themselves,” Wolfowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

You would think that a major architect of the disastrous wars and interminable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq would have the good manners to shut up and take up horticulture. But the neo-con naif has no shame.

After all, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets last month, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”

Gates boldly batted back the Cakewalk Brigade — which includes John McCain, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry — bluntly telling Congress last week: “Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that’s the way it starts.”

Wolfowitz, Rummy’s No. 2 in W.’s War Department, pushed to divert attention from Afghanistan and move on to Iraq; he pressed the canards that Saddam and Osama were linked and that we were in danger from Saddam’s phantom W.M.D.s; he promised that the Iraq invasion would end quickly and gleefully; he slapped back Gen. Eric Shinseki when he said securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops; and he claimed that rebuilding Iraq would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues.

How wrong, deceptive and deadly can you be and still get to lecture President Obama on his moral obligations?

Wolfowitz was driven to invade Iraq and proselytize for the Libyan rebels partly because of his guilt over how the Bush I administration coldly deserted the Shiites and Kurds who were urged to rise up against Saddam at the end of the 1991 gulf war. Saddam sent out helicopters to slaughter thousands. (A NATO no-fly zone did not stop that.)

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is also monstrous, slaughtering civilians and hiring mercenaries to kill rebels.

It’s hard to know how to proceed, but in his rush, Wolfowitz never even seems to have a good understanding of the tribal thickets he wants America to wade into. In Foreign Affairs, Frederic Wehrey notes that “for four decades Libya has been largely terra incognita ... ‘like throwing darts at balloons in a dark room,’ as one senior Western diplomat put it to me.”

Leslie Gelb warns in The Daily Beast that no doubt some rebels are noble fighters, but some “could turn out to be thugs, thieves, and would-be new dictators. Surely, some will be Islamic extremists. One or more might turn into another Col. Qaddafi after gaining power. Indeed, when the good colonel led the Libyan coup in 1969, many right-thinking Westerners thought him to be a modernizing democrat.”

Reformed interventionist David Rieff, who wrote the book “At the Point of a Gun,” which criticizes “the messianic dream of remaking the world in either the image of American democracy or of the legal utopias of international human rights law,” told me that after Iraq: “America doesn’t have the credibility to make war in the Arab world. Our touch in this is actually counterproductive.”

He continued: “Qaddafi is a terrible man, but I don’t think it’s the business of the United States to overthrow him. Those who want America to support democratic movements and insurrections by force if necessary wherever there’s a chance of them succeeding are committing the United States to endless wars of altruism. And that’s folly.”

He quotes John Quincy Adams about America: “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy ... she is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

AJDABIYA, Libya — Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi cranked up military and psychological pressure on the rebels on Monday, offering amnesty to those who surrendered their weapons but bombing a strategic linchpin in the east and invading a rebel-held town in the west.

Government warplanes launched fresh strikes against this anxious town on the doorstep of the opposition capital, Benghazi, and almost abreast of a highway crucial to recapturing the eastern border and encircling the rebels with heavy armor and artillery.

Residents of Zuwarah, an isolated city near the Tunisian border in the west, told Reuters that the pro-Qaddafi forces that surrounded them three days before had taken control. “Zuwarah is in their hands now,” said one resident, Tarek Abdallah. “They control it and there is no sign of the rebels. They are now in the center — the army and the tanks.”

The developments came against a background of quickening diplomatic debate over possible outside help for the Libyan rebels, who have made increasingly anxious pleas for intervention that have, so far, produced none. TheUnited Nations Security Council took up the contentious question of a no-flight zone on Monday, but no decision was reached.

In recent days, the rebels have asserted that the retreat of their forces is a tactical choice rather than a desperate measure, and that they are reorganizing to inject more experienced fighters into the ranks. At the same time, their unrelenting calls for the no-flight zone — at news conferences, on banners and even in the face paint of protesters — have made clear that the rebel leadership holds out little hope of its ragtag army defeating the colonel’s loyalists on its own.

In a heartening sign for the rebels, however, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with unnamed opposition leaders in a Paris hotel room after a meeting of the foreign ministers of the countries in the Group of 8 — the first such high-level meeting.

In Benghazi, the vice chairman of the interim opposition ruling council, Abdul Hafidh Ghoga, said a rebel representative would use that meeting of the Group of 8 to demand quicker intervention. Inaction, Mr. Ghoga warned, “would have negative results on our future relations with the West.”

Apparently seeking to undermine the rebels’ determination to continue their fight, government authorities on Monday repeated an offer of amnesty for combatants who give up their weapons, Reuters said, quoting state television. The response was not immediately clear.

West of Tripoli, loyalists appeared to be tightening their siege of other rebel-held areas, following a brutal week of battle in which they recaptured — and nearly demolished — the strategically important town of Zawiyah. The legacy of that battle haunted the residents of Zuwarah, a Berber town of about 40,000 people.

“We know what happened in Zawiyah, and we think that the same thing is going to happen here soon,” one resident said, speaking anonymously to protect himself and his family from retribution.

“They say that if you take down the flag, we will let you live,” he added. “Maybe we will fight, but we will have a lot of casualties.”

On the eastern front, amid conflicting claims by the rebels and loyalist forces, the battle lines were hard to locate. The government said on state television that its troops controlled Brega, The Associated Press reported. At the same time, Mr. Ghoga said that rebel soldiers were still fighting in the city, particularly at night, and that on Sunday they had captured more than two dozen loyalist fighters there. But he did not provide any proof of that claim.

As the fighting nears Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, rebel leaders, reacting to criticism of their battlefield performance, have contended that they may still have a chance: Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, they contend, are overextending their lines as they push rebels back and might be running short of fuel. Mr. Ghoga said the rebels were not facing a similar fuel shortage.

And in an interview on Sunday evening, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, the country’s former interior minister and now the head of the rebel army, said the rebels still retained a sizable fighting force, though he said a no-flight zone was still a necessity. General Younes, the former commander of the special forces, said thousands of officers from that unit were now being recalled and mobilized. He said the rebels also had about 100 working tanks that had not yet been deployed. “The time will come,” he said.

There was an eerie calm in Ajdabiya, a strategic town about 100 miles south of Benghazi that has braced for an attack by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi. Some lines formed at bakeries, and a few cars were seen transporting residents out of the city.

Soviet-made warplanes struck a military barracks at the edge of Ajdabiya that has housed the rebels, who seem, at least anecdotally, to be making an effort to bring discipline to their unruly ranks. One blast struck a guard post at the barracks, spraying shards of green glass around the entrance. The other detonated just feet away from a pile of ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades, which did not go off.

Hospital officials said five people were wounded, one of them seriously.

At the entrance to Ajdabiya, marked by two metal arches, rebels have built dirt fortifications and filled hundreds of sandbags. Ammunition boxes scattered around a courtyard were moved inside or toward fighting near Brega. Rebel leaders repeatedly urged the civilians to leave the entrance, where reporters’ access was limited.

“If he takes Ajdabiya, he will win,” said Yunes Mohammed, an oil safety official milling about with a crowd at the town’s edge, where strong winds swept up sand.

“His people can go from here to Benghazi. But the people of Ajdabiya will fight because we know that if he takes the area, he will kill us all, and we know he has done this before.”