I was pretty sure Rand Paul wasn't in my top 20 prez candidate possibilities, but this clinches it

On Meet the Press, he tells David Gregory he blames W for the current juncture at which Iraq finds itself.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line is more blunt than I'd be, but let's hear from him:

Rand Paul is a fool. Chaos exists in much of the Middle East and North Africa. Did the Iraq invasion cause the chaos in Libya? Did it cause the chaos in Syria?

Of course not. The chaos we see in these countries and elsewhere is the result of uprisings against dictatorial regimes following the Arab Spring. The uprisings would have occurred in or around 2011 regardless of whether the U.S. had invaded Iraq in 2003.

Indeed, it’s extremely unlikely that an Iraq still controlled in the spring of 2011 by Saddam Hussein would have been immune from such an uprising. Iraq, with its multiple sectarian fault lines, was as vulnerable as any nation in the region to the type of civil wars we’ve witnessed since that time. Why would he have fared better than Assad?

As for Iran, its increase in influence is also largely independent of the Iraq invasion. Working through Hezbollah, Iran has become a key player in Lebanon and in Syria, where it played a huge role in saving the Assad regime. Iran has also increased its influence by moving ever closer to developing nuclear weapons.

None of this has anything to do with the Iraq invasion (if one believes the CIA, the invasion actually caused Iran to suspend its nuclear program for several years). As for Iranian influence in Iraq itself, again it’s difficult to imagine that, absent the 2003 invasion, Iran wouldn’t have stirred up and abetted a rebellious Shiite majority population in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

But even if one believes (1) that the continuation of Saddam Hussein’s regime would have been, on balance, desirable and (2) that his regime would have skated past the Arab Spring, it’s still ridiculous for Rand Paul to let Obama off the hook. Obama must be judged independently of Bush. Even if he made merely a bad situation worse, Obama is to blame for that.

[snip]

Bush isn’t to blame for the fact that Obama pulled our military entirely out of Iraq. Bush isn’t to blame for the fact that, thereafter, al Qaeda reemerged. Bush isn’t to blame for the fact that, in the face of intelligence that al Qaeda was “becoming more and more dangerous,” Obama did nothing.

I'd been concerned about insufficient daylight between Rand's foreign policy views and those of his father.  His ability to see what the Most Equal Comrade has wrought in the middle east is too clouded to trust his judgement on any world-affairs issue from this point forward.