Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Face the Nation this morning that the United States must have a clear mission in Libya. “We had better get this straight from the beginning or there is going to be a situation in which war lingers on in country after country, situation after situation, all of them on a humane basis, saving people,” he said.

Lugar worries that President Obama has not fully explained how the situation will unfold. “We really have not discovered who it is in Libya that we are trying to support,” he said. “Obviously, the people that are against Qaddafi, but who? In eastern Libya, for example, a huge number of people went off to help the Iraqis, against the United States, in a war that is still winding down.”

Lugar argued that Congress deserves an opportunity to consider military action before it moves forward. “We are not declaring war at this point,” he said. “If we are going to war with Libya, we ought to have a declaration of war by the Congress.”