Exactly. Some of the people who were involved in top level discussions years before the "Arab Spring" events kicked off have since come out and said that the plan was to topple several regimes in the Middle East that the US was looking to get rid of in short succession. I don't have the interview on hand where this was said but maybe someone else remembers and can link it. In essence what they planned was to get rid first and foremost of regimes that were left over from the cold war as former Soviet allies, all within the span of a few years.

They would take out Libya and Syria and work their way up to Iran. Imo what was unsaid is that the logical conclusion of this chain points directly at Russia. I believe they always wanted to eventually take another stab at taking Russia apart with a Chechen-wars-like conflict. And they would have free reign to do this once they had completely cleared the Middle East. Anyhow, for the Arab Spring the CIA prepared the ground with their NGOs very thoroughly. They were training color revolution operatives on how to employ social media and other destabilization methods years in advance.

Where color revolutions wouldn't work they would either resort to bombing or dirty war via CIA created jihadi proxies.

Edit: here is the clip where a US general talks about the "seven countries in five years" plot. CGTN and Al Jazeera have also reported on this.

No, the email from 2011 said AQ. At the time the groups that would eventually become ISIS were not yet branding themselves as such and were still just an outgrowth of Al Qaeda. But it's the same thing as if they were to say ISIS today.