Those who had been paying attention to neoconservative writing since the 1980s could have been aware that neocon interest in a strong American military wasn’t confined to defeating the threat that Soviet Communism posed.
There was a streak of truimphalism in them. And a belief that the world could be remade to fit their own idea of how it ought to be. “The End of History and the Last Man” by one of their own, Francis Fukuyama, was a blueprint for what these neocon lords of the universe had in mind.
America ended up as the sole military superpower when the USSR fell and our neocon pals wanted to use that opportunity to re-engineer the world, starting with the Middle East. They intended to select some Arab state and pound it into submission and then turn it into a Western style democracy. Easy peasy according to these geniuses, because of course in their mind the whole Islam thing was going to be nothing to worry about.
Some people who had been paying attention to all of this could smell a rat when that same crowd began insisting that Iraq just had to be invaded and Saddam Hussein overthrown.
You made excellent points in your replies. Our fellow Freeper, Svartalfiar, responded to me but did not include you in his reply.