The hostage crisis was over, the timing just happened to be right for Reagan, he did absolutely nothing to free them.

I strongly disagree with the assumption that Bush attacked Iraq because of mass burial sites. Hussein began filling them up from the minute we propped him up into power . . . we went through three presidents letting him kill his own people without caring . . . and Hussein's atrocities were well documented and known by Bush & Co. when he was running for president and he made no bones about no nation-building, world policing, etc. Now it can be said 9-11 changed his mind about engaging the world, so i'm willing to accept that part of his rationale may be a sincere effort to protect America, but absent that, he would have never gone near Iraq, no matter how many mass graves, if it wasn't full of oil and strategically important. His administration isn't actively stopping the filling of mass graves in any number of countries around the world.