Call me a pedant, but ISTR Op El Dorado Canyon was actually a retaliation for the Libyan bombing of a Berlin disco (preceded by much c0cking about in the Gulf of Sirte and Chad) and had the effect of significantly reducing the practical (if not verbal) level of support for the 80s brand of Arabic terrorist.
I may be wrong, but one of the less-trumpeted (by some) consequences of Op Telic/OIF was that a certain N African dictator, having realised that people were getting serious about WMD proliferation, suddenly coughed to maintaining both production and storage facilities for some rather unpleasant nasties and offered to destroy them under supervision (with an aid package, natch).
Now IMPO Barry O'Bama is a bit of an @rse, but he has undisputedly suggested to Europe that it's about time it stood on its own two feet and looked after interests on its own doorstep, rather than expecting Uncle Sam to pop up and do the necessary instead. And about time too.
Much like Iraq, people are way too quick to get a dose of rose-tinted hindsight when sh1t happens and immediately activate the "blame whichever western government suits your political position" switch, rather than point out that this is in fact an African / Arabian governance issue, exacerbated by an ongoing Sunni/Shia proxy war. It's got very little to do with the West, other than the fact that our media luvvies expect the West to somehow sort it out, because "something must be done!"
Don't forget that a major contributory factor in all this was the media-led "Arab Spring", where a bunch of half-witted (if we're being charitable) journos tried to portray things as an outbreak of happiness where the masses would magically discover pluralist democracy, all enabled by the enlightened support of the religion of peace. Which was a stretch of the actualite to put it mildly.
The actual trigger for the Op Ellamy was the threatened extermination of the rebels and civpop of Benghazi. Whether it was a good idea to extend that operation into provision of an air capability for the rebels is a different question. However - the vision of what happens when you don't intervene is also available in technicolour in Syria and it's not like that's going well for the civpop either.
Short version - the cause of all this is not "the West". It's not the Red Sea Pedestrians either. It's actually a vicious sectarian war being played out between Sunni and Shia, with lashings of poverty thrown in as well. To fix it would require intervention on the ground at a scale that we have tested to destruction whether the public will support - and the answer is, they won't.
Unpleasant as it is, we have to learn to live with it and prevent it spreading to Europe, proper.
Last edited by Not_a_boffin; 23rd Apr 2015 at 10:51.