Wrathmonk,
Or you could just view this forum as a virtual crew room. In all the crewrooms I've ever been in the conversation covered a fairly broad spectrum of topics, and certainly not limited to flying or aircraft to the exclusion of all else. That would make for a pretty dull crew room if you couldn't talk about world affairs, how Bloggs got blown out by the pretty young SAC in the pub the night before and Smith's new penis extension of a sports car. You know, general chat about the world and the daily ebb and flow of life that characterizes adult and not so adult conversation. That's how I prefer to view this forum.
But if you insist on making the linkage between this thread and mil avn: we're currently flying ops against ISIL in Iraq and Syria. We've already been to Libya once before and now there are reports in the press that the gunman might have been trained in Libya. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination that might suggest that as the SoS is already trying to make the case for increasing air ops in Syria, that in time, we might well find ourselves back in North Africa conducting counter ISIL ops in our own backyard and in theory this could be the start of that chain of events.