I think you grossly oversimplify neocon thinking with your “Munich Syndrome”. It completely ignores the question of “why attack this dictator and not that one”.
I think that the neocons are grossly misguided in their view of the world and the need for the US to involve itself so deeply in so many places in the world, but I think their motives are much more complicated than your “Munic Syndrome”.
Nice try at a theory, but I don’t think it holds much water. Bush and Rumsfeld didn’t go into Iraq because they thought Saddam was on the march, Hitler-style. They went in because they thought they saw an opportunity to spread Western Democracy to a bunch of lunatic savages who were on the path to possessing nuclear weapons.
Again, I agree with you that their thinking was grossly misguided, but, again, I don’t think “Munich Syndrome” explains that thinking.
As for Obama, I would say “that’s a completely different kettle of fish” except for the fact that all the neocons are siding with him, which makes me think that whatever ideology the neocons ever had — whatever plan or worldview they ever had — is so flawed that it has devolved into agreement with one of the biggest blunderers in the history of human civilization.
F* Obama and F* the neocons who agree with his disastrous foreign policy.
I think that's fairly easy to figure out - it's a combination of strategic value (based on geography and natural resources) and the expectation of easy and cheap victory. Iraq was a target because they expected it to be a rerun of Grenada and Panama. Or the liberation of Kuwait and Iraqi Kurdistan.
They went in because they thought they saw an opportunity to spread Western Democracy to a bunch of lunatic savages who were on the path to possessing nuclear weapons.
They thought the only problem with Iraq was Saddam and his inner circle. Unfortunately, they were were wrong. The problem extended to tens of thousands of Iraqis (and hundreds of thousands who provided logistical support for them). We did not encounter that problem with either Japan or Germany because we killed millions of their troops and millions of their civilians. By war's end, we had killed everyone who wanted to fight and weren't afraid to get killed doing so. The effort came a cropper because instead of killing as many Iraqi troops as we could during the initial invasion, we let them surrender and come back as guerrilla leaders and trainers. Iraq is a tiny taste of what Japan and Germany would have been like if we had managed to compel a surrender and Allied occupation in the initial stages of WWII - all the fighting age alpha males were alive and spoiling for a fight. At the same time, we couldn't have slaughtered the Iraqi army en masse without getting lambasted by the press (in an echo of the Highway of Death). Besides, weren't we in Iraq as liberators?
Insoluble conundrums like this are why Iraq was a big mistake - we more or less had a blank check to pulverize Japan and Germany because of the tens of millions of civilians and soldiers their armies had slaughtered. What would have been our excuse for killing millions of Iraqis - the only way we could have attained the kind of submission obtained from Japan and Germany?