B.O.Obama urged oil firms to halt work in Libya.
The United States faced calls to impose sanctions but also to take direct action such as bombing Libyan airfields and imposing no-fly zones -- military steps that most analysts consider unlikely. Some critics questioned Obama's silence on the violence in which hundreds of Libyans have died.
U.S. officials called for an end to the violence but seemed to rule out any unilateral action, stressing the United States was working with other countries on a way forward.
Senator
John I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry
... the Senate's current
foreign policy expert, filling the empty wingtips of Joe Biden...
, the influential chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the White House to consider reimposing tough sanctions on Libya.
"World leaders must together put Colonel Qadaffy on notice that his cowardly actions will have consequences," Kerry said.
The White House said it was studying Kerry's proposal to reimpose sanctions that were lifted by the Bush administration but, for now, was focused on ending the bloodshed, which sent U.S. oil prices to near 2-1/2-year highs.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Kerry's Republican counterpart in the House of Representatives, said the United States and others "should impose economic sanctions, including freezing assets of the regime and imposing a ban on travel."
Obama did not mention Libya when he spoke about small business at a university in Ohio -- in contrast to his German counterpart Angela Merkel, who said she would back sanctions if Qadaffy did not halt the violence.
Obama's administration has been struggling to keep up with the wave of popular uprisings unfolding across the Middle East and North Africa. Each country has presented its own challenges for Washington, which has seen its decades-old Middle East policy upended in a matter of weeks.
Obama spoke out about violence against protesters in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain but some analysts saw his silence on Libya as a deliberate tactic.
"Getting into a spitting match with Qadaffy would not be such a smart idea," said Daniel Serwer of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. "This guy obviously enjoys the attention so ignoring him may have some virtue."
LIMITED OPTIONS
U.S. options to influence events in Libya are limited, unlike in Egypt and Bahrain where Washington was able to bring pressure to bear as a long-time ally and benefactor. U.S. foreign aid to Libya was less than $1 million in 2010.
Military action does not appear to be on the table, although the United States has not shied from the use of force against Qadaffy in the past. It bombed Tripoli and Libya's second city, Benghazi, in 1986 in retaliation for an attack on a West Berlin disco used by U.S. military personnel.
"There is absolutely no talk of military intervention," said Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institution in Washington. "We don't know the opposition and it is not clear that they would be on our side.