As I said in another thread:
The defining aspect of neoconservatism is the combination of unilateralism, readiness to use military force, and Wilsonian idealism. What you get from that is the Iraq War, wherein neoconservatives sincerely believed that the U.S. should use military force without UN approval to replace a hostile state with a friendly liberal democracy.
There's a huge difference between the $3 trillion war of choice that Bush launched in Iraq, and the more restrained U.S. interventions in Libya and Syria. In the former group, the U.S. flat-out invaded a country in defiance of the UN. In the latter group, the U.S. launched airstrikes and assisted the operations of rebels. The former is an example of neo-conservatism, the latter is not.
