The widespread jubilation at the death of Osama bin Laden should not be allowed to disguise the fact that he was an American creation, and that this pattern of first support and then overthrow is a common feature of western foreign policy.

In March 1958 Washington, seeing the drift of events in Cuba, imposed an arms blockade on its former puppet Batista, which aided the popular revolution. The US then deemed it necessary to launch repeated assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. There is uncertainty about whether Muammar Gaddafi attended Sandhurst, but he was certainly given military training in Britain prior to the coup he staged in 1969. Now it is judged necessary to remove him. The US brought Ngo Dinh Diem to power in Vietnam and then the CIA arranged his assassination in 1963. General Manuel Noriega, the creator of what has been called a "narco-kleptocracy", was on the CIA payroll under the first George Bush for more than a decade until it was deemed necessary to overthrow him in 1989 with the US invasion of Panama, in which thousands of civilians were killed. Saddam Hussein, working for the US throughout the 1960s, gave names to CIA-orchestrated death squads targeting members of the Iraqi Communist party and other groups in Iraq. The US aided his rise to power and supported him with intelligence, weapons and active belligerency throughout the Iran-Iraq war. Eventually it was judged necessary to remove him in 2003.

Now we see the same pattern beginning to unfold yet again. Western support for the Libyan insurgents – over the last few days dubbed by the western media the "rebel government" – takes no account of al-Qaida activists in the rebellion, as revealed by WikiLeaks and other sources, or of the involvement of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which has sent hundreds of jihadists to Afghanistan. When "our" side in the Libyan civil war eventually prevails, if only after the death of Gaddafi and tribal chaos, will the west again wonder exactly what creature it has generated?

Geoff Simons

Author of Libya: the Struggle for Survival

• Osama bin Laden's escape to Pakistan in 2001 is one of the main causes of the present Afghanistan war. His death offers a chance for a quick closure of that war. Why continue fighting until 2015, with the unacceptable cost of thousands of lives and billions of pounds and dollars, when the best result that can be hoped for is stalemate?

This event has given Obama a limited window of opportunity to gain maximum advantage from this victory. What is required is an international conference similar to the one that resulted in the Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian conflict. If Hillary Clinton is to retain a place in history, she must fill the void left by the death of Richard Holbrooke, and force the interested parties to a conference with the objective of ending the war.

If he acts quickly, Obama can not only earn his Nobel peace prize by ending the war, but in doing so help secure a second term in office. He cannot afford to dither.

George D Lewis

Brackley, Northamptonshire

• President Obama declaims that "justice has been done" with the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US special forces in Pakistan. No, not really; vengeance has been meted out rather than justice delivered.

Western democracies have moral legitimacy by adherence to a number of principles, not least the rule of law, due process and respect for the sovereignty of other states. There is little moral distinction to be drawn between the murders inflicted by terrorists in pursuit of their political aims and extraterritorial, extrajudicial killings undertaken by government agencies. Pakistani public sentiment is already seething over the US contemptuously treating it as if it were part of the American wild west. While few here will shed tears for Bin Laden, choppering in an unauthorised posse into Pakistan on a mission to get Bin Laden dead or alive may just tip Pakistan over the edge. If it does, Bin Laden will have the last laugh.

Andy Smith

Kingston upon Thames, Surrey

• David Cameron says the killing of Osama bin Laden is a "great success". I disagree. To execute Osama bin Laden, rather than capture and prosecute him, is surely a war crime and wrong. The same is true in respect of the attempted assassination of Gaddafi, which resulted in the death of his grandchildren and son.

Tom MacKinnon

London

• Jackie Ashley (Comment, 2 May) and Benjamin Barber (Comment, 2 May) acknowledge the injustice of targeting Gaddafi and family as violating UN resolution 1973. It is a crime because he is no more in "command and control" than the Queen as colonel in chief. He officially retired in 2007, as Moussa Koussa told us in March. Nato command should be taken to The Hague for war crimes.

Dr James B Thring

Founder, Ministry of Peace and Legal Action Against War

• Tariq Ali is anything but consistent (Who will reshape the Arab world: its people or the US?, 30 April). On the one hand he declares, "It is too soon to predict the final outcome, except to say it is not over yet" and on the other he dismisses the Libyan uprising with "whatever the final outcome, the Libyan people have lost". It is a combination of ignorance and arrogance that has afflicted the "left" ever since the revolution in Tunisia that leads Mr Ali to think that the Libyans, who have experienced colonial rule and imperialist exploitation first-hand, are unaware of the machinations of the US, the UK and France. The Arab people need no lectures. They will take their own unique path to social and political change which need not follow the models of the past.

Fawzi Ibrahim

London