"...Those who oppose the Western intervention remain a minority ..."

"... Muammar al-Qaddafi himself labels the intervention a "colonial crusader" war .. Yet there is little evidence that his message is resonating. Arab media and blogs, and wider public sentiment seen in the ongoing demonstrations remain decidedly against him. While we have not had scientific public opinion polls to capture feelings on the street, I have conducted preliminary research with my team using popular websites to try to offer some measure of the public reasoning on Libya. Not surprisingly, there has been ambivalence about intervention, as Arabs are caught between the sense that someone has to intervene to stop Qaddafi on the one hand and mistrust of Western powers on the other. Ideally, they would have loved to see the Libyan story evolve the way of Tunisia and Egypt, but they sense that was not to be. As a consequence, those who oppose the Western intervention remain a minority. (For a flavor of reader comments on two popular websites, Aljazeera.net and Alarabiya.net, please see the translation below [3] of 25 consecutive comments on each site. Overall only 28% of Al-Jazeera comments, and 36% of Alarabiya's opposed military intervention.)

Even more striking at a time when the public is trying to replace autocratic rulers is that both the public and governments have opposed Qaddafi; rarely does one find broad support of this sort on an issue as potentially divisive. There are a number of things that explain these attitudes.

First, timing. The fact that the Libyan uprising started immediately after the Tunisian and the Egyptian protests (which captured the imagination of Arabs everywhere) put the public decidedly on the side of the demonstrators in Libya...

Second, people see the revolutions as "Arab," not just national in nature. While early on, the discourse was about the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, by the time the uprisings emerged in Libya, talk was more about the Arab awakening ...

Third, Qaddafi's brutality... chilling were the explicit threats, first by Qaddafi's son, Saif Al-Islam, and later by Qaddafi, in which he called the demonstrators "rats" and threatened to purify Libya house to house, person by person.

Fourth, Qaddafi is the perfect prototype of the leader the Arab public wants to dethrone...

Fifth, governments have been sensitive to Arab public opinion from the outset. The unprecedented Arab League action of calling on the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over Libya was in part out of deference to pervasive Arab public opinion on this issue. No one wants to be on the public's bad side in times of revolution. This was particularly true of Syria, which was clearly ambivalent about Western intervention but didn't want to stick out like a sore thumb.

Sixth, score settling. Over the years, there has hardly been an Arab government that Qaddafi didn't manage to alienate, embarrass, or even threaten. And even for many who would normally be uncomfortable with the idea of foreign intervention against a sitting regime, Qaddafi was a greater evil.... Even the popular leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nassrallah, who had no kind words for the West or its intentions, reserved his strongest criticism for Qaddafi, with whom he had a long-standing feud over the disappearance of the Shiite Lebanese leader, Mousa Sadr, in Libya in 1978. Nassrallah also countered Qaddafi's preposterous proposition that the West was behind the Arab revolutions and defended them as indigenous and genuine.

Seventh, the position of opinion shapers. The most watched television stations in the Arab world, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyyah, both took on a supportive tone about the revolution in Libya and gave the country considerable attention. It quickly overtook the coverage of Egypt and Tunisia. Importantly, the Sunni cleric, Sheikh Yousef Qaradawi—who has a popular program, "Shariia and Life” on Al Jazeera, and who was the principal speaker in Tahrir Square on the day Egypt celebrated the revolution—not only attacked Qaddafi and called on the Libyans to get rid of him but also justified the international military intervention, even saying that under some specific circumstances collateral damage in such interventions can be justified.

Eighth, the seeming reluctance of the international community, especially the United States, to intervene, made it hard to argue that the West was itching to act...

Finally, the pervasive sense in the Arab world that Arab and Muslim countries are incapable of intervening effectively, especially in times of revolution. This is an argument that many have used (including Yousef Qaradawi) to justify inviting foreigners to intervene....They may have been happy to see Egypt carry out the mission, but everyone understood that Egypt's transition made this impossible.

All this gave the international intervention considerable space to succeed.... This of course does not translate into a sudden embrace of the United States and the West—or trust in their intentions...., attitudes remain ambivalent, based as they are on a long history and a complex set of issues that are likely to surface again sooner, rather than later (especially on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict). But the Arab revolutions have created some new prisms through which Arabs are looking at the world and at the United States specifically—and for now these are more positive for the United States than at any point in the recent past...."

(for the numbers & comments check here)