General Wesley Clark once stated, “They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.” He recounted a conversation he had in 1991 with Paul Wolfowitz in which the then-number-3-Pentagon-official, told Clark: “One thing we did learn [from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East – and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran [sic], Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”