Being engaged with a messy and chaotic situation means messy and chaotic outcomes occasionally happen.
So I agree that the UK's response to the situation in the Middle East has been chaotic, inconsistent and sometimes plain wrong.
But so has the response from every other country - look at the insanity that happened in Egypt from the US at the start of the troubles there, they had to basically disown their own special envoy as soon as he opened his mouth. Similarly, France is having a serious set of scandals because half the government seems to be in bed with the middle eastern dictators currently under pressure.
And the UK did manage to retrieve its citizens without any of them falling hostage (a real danger), yes there were a couple of days' delay, but all of them got out. Yes, this MI6 thing was weird, but if you decide to be engaged in that sort of chaotic situation, mistakes will happen.
The US has not made any major policy blunders on Libya, but that's because the US has not engaged with the Libyan situation. You could argue that the UK should similarly not be engaged - I might even agree with that. But being engaged will involve mess.
And I certainly don't believe Labour would magically have done any better under Gordon Brown, and I reckon they'd have done far worse under Tony "intervene" Blair.
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