Rabbi's a moron.
Poppy should never have had that war. He failed to clearly state to Saddam what our response would be to his invading Kuwait. Saddam had a valid complaint because the Kuwatiees (-: were stealing his oil. But Poppy saw himself as the WWII generation with outlawed war to gain territorial concessions and made war only legal for either self-defense or to stop genocide. After the fall of the Soviets, Poppy was determined to make the law stick. He did, claimed victory and came home .... leaving a cancer in Iraq. But it was neither an illegal war or a war based on lies.
W's motives were many and who really knows. The neocons view the US military as a valid tool to secure strategic resources. Reagan never agreed to that. He was the one who formulated the necessity to show a vital strategic interest AND a threat to the US that could not be defused with diplomacy. Iraq never posed a threat to the US. And W lied. But was he a neocon himself, or was he drug addled fool who was taken in by Cheney and the Israel firsters? Or was he Oedipially drawn to go "deeper" than Poppy?
Obama's sin in being a first term senator who was raised at the feet of elitist utopians. And he's a egotist who sees himself as uniquely poised to see the crimes of colonialism. Saddam, Kaddafi and Assad the Younger are/were all despots who didn't care about their populations. From a humanitarian sense they are worse than Castro, who despite viewing individual rights as a threat to the state, actually did give Cuba universal literacy and healthcare. Of course he was a communist in "our" hemisphere, and that is intolerable ... unless he promised to stop being a communist and just be a dictator. But, Obama was never able to articulate that sometimes we cannot persuade dictators to permit more freedom over the short term, and even in the case of Mao .... unless he attacks our vital interests, we have to play the long game of human history and the gradual march of freedom. That was really the lesson of Reagan's for policy.