Well, the UK will decide, through their elected representatives, what they want to do...and then will have to live with the results and consequences.
However, I am not sure that you can make that last statement.
Jihadists are such that that particular attack would have likely occurred in any case...and they would have killed those Brits or other westerners in any case too IMHO.
Well Jeff old buddy, I think we will have to disagree here.
While we are of one mind that extremists will seek to take innocent lives wherever and whenever they can to further their own twisted and perverse ideological and/or political goals, the key here is the "can" part.
Extremists, terrorists and jihadists thrive in chaos, lawlessness and strife, that is why they go out of their way to create all that.
As unappealing as the Gaddaffi and Assad regimes were and are, they did provide stability, ran functioning states, and generally kept things peaceful and orderly, such that the hardcore extremists were easier to identify, locate and arrest or eradicate, the wannabe terrorists had no training or network they could easily join and little to no useable weaponry and munitions to launch attacks with, and ordinary people had zero interest in their extreme ideologies.
The destruction of the Gaddaffi regime and the attempted dismantling of the Assad regime has created huge strife and chaos, effectively obliterating the national police and intelligence agencies in those countries that would normally have spend much of their time and resources hunting down and stopping hardcore terrorists.
At the same time, the fighting has allowed terrorists to obtain military training, funding, weapons and even combat experience, that drastically increased their lethality and capabilities to launch successful attacks.
Many of the insurgent and resistance cells are almost like networking events for would-be terrorists. Allowing them to make contacts and establish networks that would have either been impossible during peacetime, or set off masses or red flags for security agencies to investigate and follow up on.
The brutality of the terrorists in their attacks on regime forces and their treatment of prisoners would also have drastically hardened the views of ordinary soldiers, and there are the inevitable tit-for-tat revenge attacks, often against innocents. That helps to radicalise many ordinary people who would never have thought to get into terrorism, and creates a steady and vast stream of new recruits and applicants to the terrorists.
There are so many other pertinent factors I could write an entire thesis on the matter.
But even if you ignore all the reasoning and just look at the numbers, intensity and tactics of terrorist attacks in the years after 9/11 and after the collapse of the Gaddaffi regime and the destabilisation of Assad's, you can see a clear uptick in both the frequency and effectiveness of attacks in the years after Gaddaffi compared to those after 9/11.
There is also a clear shift in tactics from bombs to armed assault. Which in my view makes the attacks far harder to stop beforehand, and more reliably deadly in result.
This last part is undeniably a direct result of the wars in Libya and Syria as well as to a lesser extent Iraq and Afghanistan.
The most important lesson of the West's misadventures in Libya and Syria is that if you want regime change, you need to be prepared to get your hands dirty and pay the butcher's bill yourself.
Iraq and Afghanistan was markedly different from Libya and Syria because of the presence of western troops on the ground.
As loathed as I am to admit it, the war hawks had a certain point when they argued that fighting in Iraq an Afghanistan made the western home territories safer. Because the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan served as a magnet to jihadists and terrorists and their wannabies world wide, just as it did in Libya and Syria.
The crucial difference was that pre-pull out, the jihadists and terrorists ran face first into the teeth of most efficient military killing machine in the history and man in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the vast majority ended up being "liquidated" by the experience.
In Libya and Syria, the forces arrayed against them were to an entirely different league and calibre, so those conflicts ended up ultimately strengthening the extremists.
To sum up, war and strife breads extremists and swell their ranks. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US and coalition were able to kill them as fast as the war created new recruits, if not faster.
With the turnover rate of your average jihadist and the American strategy of preferring to target the middle management of insurgent cells served to significantly depleted the ranks of their most capable and dangerous operators, leaving a few big fish in hiding (many of whom were also rooted out and killed) and masses of raw recruits who were of minimal threat both in the host country and internationally.
Libya and Syria undid all the progress those long bloody years of fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The jihadists were presented on a silvered platter a safe haven free of American attacks and attention, and given training, arms, logistics and networking opportunities (most gallingly of all, from American allies or maybe even the CIA itself) to rebuild all that America spent so much time, money and blood destroying.
They then had the chance to bloody themselves against government forces they could defeat in open battle, gaining invaluable combat experience.
All of that has helped created ISIS and allowed those Jihadists to become far more powerful and deadly than even before 9/11.
Libya and Syria are strategic errors on a colossal scale, and it is getting worse by the day with the continued indecision and division of the world's top powers.
I truly hope it does not take another 9/11 scale attack to galvanise the world into doing what must now be done - a massive full spectrum military campaign to smash ISIS and peruse and root out and destroy as many of the splitters as could be found. Set up working and stable governments and security apparatus to deny them Libya and Syria as safe havens and training grounds forever.
But all that will only be a tunicate. The only real permanent solution to this threat is to have an open and honest discussion both internally and with moderate Muslims to identify and address the root causes of radicalisation of young Muslims.
Only by acknowledging that they have a real grievance and providing them with a real shot at achieving their goals (only the reasonable ones before anyone starts) peacefully could you turn people away from radicalisation and violence.
