LONDON-World powers meet on Tuesday to try to lay the groundwork for a Libya without Muammar Gaddafi after President Barack Obama said U.S. forces would not get bogged down trying to topple the Libyan leader.- British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who led the drive for a muscular intervention in the conflict, called on Monday for Gaddafi to go and for his followers to abandon him before it was "too late". "We call on all Libyans who believe that Gaddafi is leading Libya into a disaster to take the initiative now to organize a transition process," they said in a statement. Emboldened by Western-led air strikes against Gaddafi's troops, rebels took the town of Nawfaliyah and pushed west toward Sirte, Gaddafi's home town and an important military base, in the sixth week of an uprising against his 41-year rule. Rebels fired mortars and heavy machineguns in sporadic clashes with loyalist forces in the oil-producing state. Further west, rebels and forces loyal to Gaddafi both claimed control over parts of Misrata and fighting appeared to persist in the fiercely contested third largest city. Arab and Libyan media said late on Monday that coalition forces had bombed west and south of the capital Tripoli. Libyan state television said a leather factory was struck when "colonial and crusader aggressors" bombed Surman, some 70 km (45 miles) west of Tripoli. The London meeting is expected to set up a high-level steering group, including Arab states, to provide political guidance for the international response to the crisis and coordinate long-term support to Libyans. Britain has invited Mahmoud Jebril, a member of the rebel Libyan National Council, to London although he is not formally invited to the conference, a diplomatic source said. Some 40 governments and international organizations will discuss stepping up humanitarian aid, and call for a political process to enable Libyans to choose their own future. In a nationally televised speech, Obama said NATO would take over full command of military operations from the United States on Wednesday. Obama vowed to work with allies to hasten Gaddafi's exit from power but said he would not use force to topple him -- as his predecessor President George W. Bush did in ousting Saddam Hussein in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. "To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq," Obama told an audience of military officers in Washington. "But regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya."
