The situation in Iraq is deteriorating rapidly, and the hawks are yelling that Obama is "weak" again. The truth is that the hawks have no coherent strategy, and haven't since 9/11. The closest thing was the original PNAC document from the 1990s. But that document assumed that US military power would have no difficulty remaking the world. Reality has shown this assumption to be false. The Bush invasion caused chaos and greatly increased the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism by seeming to prove Al Qaeda propaganda correct. They have a lot of responsibility for the mess we have now.
The conflict diagram from Think Progress shows just how messy the actual situation is. Many conservative hawks appear to believe that the conflict is simply between radical Islam and us. The reality is that there is a huge conflict between Shia and Sunni Islam, and many sub conflicts within that conflict. Any intervention by the US is implicitly taking sides in these conflicts.
So which side do we want to take? Saudi Arabia is probably supporting the Iraqi rebels. The natural ally against the rebels would be Iran. But of course the conservative hawks are adamantly against any accommodation with Iraq and strongly oppose the nuclear arms talks being conducted by the Obama administration. So as far as I can tell, the hawks want the US to fight the Assad regime in Syria, the jihadist Syrian rebels, the Iraqi rebels, the Taliban, and Iran. But they never mention the Saudi support for the Sunni jihadists, or the divided Pakistan government that both supports and fights the Taliban. Maybe even they realize we don't want to invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (plus conservative politicians probably don't want to anger the oil companies).
Senator McCain says that we should fight until the enemy is defeated. But I don't think he has the slightest idea what that would mean. Exactly which enemy, and how do we get an international ideology to surrender? Does he really expect that America should do an indefinite occupation of Iraq, against the strong opposition of the Iraqi people,, helping to strengthen the Iranian government and the Assad regime in the process?
If we intervene, we either have to take sides, with either side containing allies that conservative hawks consider enemies. Or we can fight against all sides at once, taking on a huge burden alone with the possibility that everyone in the region might unite in hating the US.
Just trying to write this in a coherent fashion is difficult, because the situation is so messy. Yet the hawks never consider these questions, they just call for action, implicitly they are calling for war. They have no strategy for what the aims of such a war would be, they just assume that we can frighten everybody somehow into doing what we want. Recent history has shown that won't happen.
We have to give up the idea that the United States can just control everybody in the world. We can't, the world does not want us to control them. I think this false idea that the US can control the world is what is behind the strategic incoherence of the hawks.