The Hill News

Senatre Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) said Sunday that a proposed no-fly zone over Libya doesn't "step over the line" into military intervention.

But Kerry cautioned that the U.S. should "prepare a no-fly zone in conjunction with our allies, not implement it."

"Certainly first hope would be if it were called on to be done only in the context of international agreement and sanctions," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"But right now they don't want that. And I think that's good," Kerry said. "The last thing we want to think about is any kind of military intervention. And I don't consider the fly zone stepping over that line."

Kerry said that there were options beyond Defense Secretary Robert Gates' assertion that implementing a no-fly zone would mean bombing Libya's air defenses first.

"One could crater the airports and the runways and leave them incapable of using them for a period of time," he said.

The chairman also stressed that the situation wouldn't turn into another Iraq or Bosnia.

"We're not talking about, you know, this gargantuan kind of force that we face," Kerry said. "But more importantly I would only consider its implementation if Gadhafi himself were using it as a means of terror, as a means of massacring large numbers of civilians. And I think it is only then that the global community would begin to say, uh oh, we've got to do something, now is the time you have to do it."

Kerry said that United Nations or NATO approval should be necessary.

He also lauded the White House's handling of the crisis.

"I think the administration has done a terrific job of, number one, the president's statement could not have been more clear," Kerry said. "The president has said Gadhafi has to go. That's an important message to everybody in Libya and around Libya."

He also lauded the "major humanitarian lift" in the region and the freezing of Gadhafi family assets.

Kerry said, though, that military aid would be "trickier."

"I assume that a lot of weapons are going to find their way there from one means or another over the course of the next weeks," he said.