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With Libya providing huge percentages of the oil and gas imported by powerful European countries – especially Italy – and with the UK working hard the last several years to burnish Libya’s image so that British Petroleum could claim a privileged stake in the Libyan oil industry and General Dynamics UK could sign lucrative weapons contracts, western countries came late and soft to criticize Qaddafy’s violent assault.

The Production Sharing Agreement – the PSA – is an unknown entity in the UK and arguably all over the world, but a household terms and a red hot potato in Iraq. The neutral and fluffy sounding contract that private oil companies crave to secure decades of control over public resources became emblazoned across banners and placards all over the country, in large part due to awareness raising by the IFOU, with the help of social justice and environmental campaigners from the global North, like Platform in London. Who would have thought that this secretive, codified, technocratic ‘thing’ that is the PSA was become a shouted-out, negated, we-know-your-game public enemy?

On the plus side, Egypt not only has the largest population in the Middle East, but is one of the Arab world's most diversified economies with oil and natural gas reserves, world-class tourist attractions and a strategic trading location between Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which explains why no major investors have left Egypt since Mubarak’s ouster. The new administration could improve Egypt's economic prospects should it prove to be less corrupt than Mubarak’s.

ENI, which has been operating in Egypt since 1954 through its subsidiary International Egyptian Oil Company (IEOC), owns a 56 per cent working interest in the Meleiha Concession, with Russia's Lukoil holding a 24 percent stake and Japan's Mitsui owning 20 percent. In Egypt's Western Desert ENI already produces about 36,000 bpd in five different development licenses.And, unlike Egypt’s eastern neighbour Saudi Arabia, which has been nervous about the implications of the Egyptian revolution, Qatar, which was always more enthusiastic about Egypt's political changes, is focusing more on private-sector investment there, most notably when earlier his month, Qatar Petroleum engaged in “serious” talks about investing in an Egyptian oil-refinery project.

President Obama continues to rely on the authorization to give his drone-killing programme a veneer of legality. This is the old colonial formula of liberal values at home sustained by a hidden illiberalism in the periphery – where routine extra-judicial killing is normalised.

colonial history teaches us that violence always ‘comes home’ in some form: whether as refugees seeking sanctuary, whether as the re-importing of authoritarian practices first practised in colonial settings, or indeed as terrorism.

What results is a mutual reinforcing of the militarized identity narrative on both sides: the jihadists point to numerous speeches by western leaders to support their claim of a war on Islam; and western leaders legitimise war with talk of a ‘generational struggle’ between western values and Islamic extremism. What is striking today is the tired rhetoric of military aggression – Hollande’s “pitiless war” – once again recycled, despite the obvious failures of the past 14 years.