The removal of Saddam Hussein

"In November 2001, General Wesley Clark, who had recently retired from his post as head of the US Southern Command, learned from a general he knew in the Pentagon that a memo had just come down from the office of the secretary of defense outlining the objective of the "take down" of seven Middle Eastern regimes over five years. The plan would start with the invasion of Iraq, and then go after Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, according to an account in Clark's 2003 book, Winning Modern Wars. The memo indicated the plan was to "come back and get Iran in five years". The neo-cons were very serious about going after Syria. In the weeks following the initial US blow at Saddam, Paul Wolfowitz, the chief neo-conservative architect of the Iraq invasion, argued unsuccessfully for taking advantage of the presumed military triumph there to overthrow the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, according to the right-leaning Insight magazine.

Within the administration, meanwhile, Wurmser was looking for the opportunity to propose a military option against Iran. In his September 2007 interview with the Telegraph shortly after leaving Cheney's office, he insisted that the United States must be willing to "escalate as far as we need to go to topple the [Iranian] regime if necessary". That opportunity seemed to present itself in the aftermath of Israel's failed attempt to deal a major blow to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Neo-conservatives aligned with Cheney argued that Iran was now threatening US dominance in the region, through its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territory and its nuclear program. They insisted that the administration had to push back by targeting Iran's Quds Force personnel in Iraq, increasing the naval presence in the Gulf and accusing Iran of supporting the killing of US troops." http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK01Ak01.html