Sorry Keith, I did post the wrong one, or at least not the one I thought I'd posted, though reading it will have done you no harm.

Some contributor to an online debate included at that link goes some way to answering 999's question to me:

If I were a betting man, I'd wager this entire 'crisis' would disappear if the US and the other nations of the world demanded that Israel match Iran signature-for-signature on every nuclear control protocol and every inspection regime. Why hasn't this been done already? Why hasn't the issue of Israel's undeclared nuclear weapons been brought up each and every day in the UN and other international forums?

But my short answer to 999 is that I would have stayed out of Libya and Iraq and I would leave Syria for Putin to deal with, or not, as he thinks appropriate. I had no problem with Gadaffi, didn't like Saddam's indulgence of his mentally unhinged son Uday and don't care for what I've seen of the younger Assad. None of which gives me any entitlement to interfere, any more than I would advocate interfering with the obscene regime of (say) Lukashenko in Belarus.

We live in an unhappy world and have no magic wand to make it better.