Obama, with his administration in crisis over a staggering economy and mounting U.S. debt as he winds down two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has maintained that the U.S. was not at war in Libya because the American role was confined to a defensive posture of "suppressing" enemy air defenses, to intelligence-gathering, and to surveillance and reconnaissance capability (along with air-to-air refueling for NATO strike forces).

In fact, however, in recent weeks U.S. involvement has verged over into clearly offensive attacks using armed Predator drones on selected targets, especially as a desperate Qaddafi sought to quietly shift his troops to civilian hideouts in the final stages, according to NATO. "Yeah, [the Predator] had that added ability. It can take action on its own and did in a number of cases," NATO spokesman Tony White told National Journal on Monday. "I heard the NATO commander [Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard of the Canadian Air Force] say that the addition of the Predators was a huge boost to his capability."

The downside of such a low-profile, stealthy U.S. role--which an anonymous U.S official described to the New Yorker magazine as "leading from behind"--is that it becomes that much harder to win kudos for leadership, a critical issue for Obama as he heads into the 2012 election year with his approval ratings at worrisome levels. "This wasn't the best way to get credit, but it was a pretty good way of getting results," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch, a sometime administration adviser and former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration. "It was smart in the sense that it generated a lot more action from the Europeans than would otherwise have happened. They really got the Europeans to share the burden in a way that the United States has never managed before. It minimized the administration's exposure to criticism at home in a time of austerity."

Obama's approach also appears to have sown discord in Republican ranks. Leading GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney has criticized Obama for being "weak" and "following the French into Libya," as well as relying too much on international organizations. On Monday, the rigorously anti-Obama editorial page of The Wall Street Journal joined Romney, arguing that Qaddafi might have been toppled faster and fewer people would have been killed "if America had led more forcefully from the beginning."

But at an earlier point, Romney worried about U.S. "mission creep" and questioned the rhetoric against Qaddafi personally, asking who was "going to take his place." Meanwhile, other GOP candidates, such as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), embraced a new isolationist strain emanating from the tea party movement and criticized the Libya intervention altogether, saying that events in that country didn't threaten U.S. interests.