"What's an acceptable number of civilian deaths? I don't know. Choose your figure," Henderson said. "At the very least, instead of having a casualty list certainly in the hundreds, possibly in the thousands, we don't want a casualty list numbering in the tens of thousands, or 100,000 or so."  After 10 days of protest, Gadhafi has lost control of the eastern portion of a country he has ruled for 42 years, and analysts portrayed him as a dictator desperately clinging to power. Members of his government have defected, and in a sign of growing international pressure, Switzerland ordered Thursday that Gadhafi's assets be frozen.  "You've got to assume the worst about Moammar Gadhafi," Nicholas Burns, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former under secretary of state between 2005 and 2008, told CNN. "With his back to the wall, he's going to go out in a blaze of vicious attacks."  North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense chiefs ought to be holding discussions about "not taking action but preparation" for the Libyan crisis, said Robert Kagan, a Mideast expert who worked in the State Department under President Ronald Reagan.  "I don't think anyone is talking about immediate military actions now," Kagan told CNN, especially as 167 U.S. citizens are waiting on a ferry to leave Libya.  U.S. officials have said all options were under consideration, including sanctions and enforcement of a no-fly zone, to try to keep the Libyan government from attacking protesters.  Ibrahim Sharqieh, deputy director of Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, interpreted that statement as indicating that military force remains a possibility.  "In my opinion, it's still premature to talk about U.S. military intervention in Libya at this point, but we should not eliminate it completely," Sharqieh said.
If the U.S. military were to intervene in an increasingly chaotic Libya, it would most likely be part of a NATO action in which Libyan bloodshed has reached a humanitarian crisis, analysts said