I don't see how this is any sort of revelation. That line "The US takes no stance on these Arab affairs" is on wikipedia. I am not taking any stance, just pointing that out.

 

*I only watched up tell 1:50
I don't really see a "green light" in the line "The US takes no stance on these Arab affairs". Indifference at worst, but not a green light to begin ethnic cleansing on Kuwaitis.

 

I was a Desert Stormer. I remember those days like it was yesterday.

We certainly did send some unclear signals. And, Sunni Iraq had drained its coffers and blood fighting Iran on behalf of the Gulf Arabs. Add to that the advent of directional drilling (it's almost a certainty that the scumbag Gulf Arabs were drilling into Iraq). Honestly, the invasion of Kuwait was probably one of the more justified invasions in history. I wonder how different things would have been if we had been clear up front with Hussein.

One of the good things that came out of the late-80s conflicts (even though Desert Storm was in 1991, I consider it late-80s because we went in there with Ronald Reagan's armed forces) was the destruction of the Soviet Union. Those conflicts were a stark demonstration of the superiority of Western technology and weaponry:
1. Israeli F-15s vs. Syrian MIG's: 80:0 kill ratio.
2. Falkland's conflict with Harrier's and modern AIM-9s.
3. Desert Storm, where the world's second largest armed force fought against the third largest armed force using the the latest Soviet equipment, and just shellacked them on every front.

I still remember the debrief on Saratoga after that first night of DS. We were all in shock that we had only lost one. Our intel had prepared us to get bloody.

History is interesting . . . and often repeated.