Over the last several days, the Syrian crisis has exploded back into the news. As the U.S. debates how to respond to the now two-year long struggle, here’s the what you need to know:

How this all began

The current crisis in Syria began in 2011, with civilian protests launched during a wave of pro-democracy sentiment known as the Arab Spring. Those protests were met with harsh repression from the Syrian government under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad. Assad’s regime continued to crackdown on protesters, eventually resorting to massive human rights abuses including torture, disappearances, extrajudicial executions and detention of medical patients. In response, civilians began to take up arms against the Syrian government, transforming a peaceful movement to increase democratic freedoms into an all-out civil war. Since the beginning of the conflict, more than 70,000 Syrians have died.

Who’s doing the fighting

Over the past two years, the make-up of the Syrian opposition has shifted considerably. In the beginning, the opposition was composed mostly of civil society leaders and Syrian citizens with a small armed group taking shape across the border in Turkey. Since then, the rebels have spawned an entire network of loosely affiliated groups fighting against the Assad regime — and each other at times. Instead of hiding across the border, rebels now openly control a large swath of territory in the north and west of the country as the Syrian government continues to push back.

While many of the rebel groups are secular, recent months have shown an influx of foreign fighters into the country, seeking to impose a harsh version of Islam upon Syria once the Assad regime falls. The U.S. has labeled one such group — Jabhat al-Nusra — a terrorist group for its close ties to Al Qaeda. These murky connections between the rebels and jihadis have proved difficult for Western governments seeking to effect the situation on the ground.

The effect on the Syrian people and the region

As time wore on in the conflict, the Syrian government unleashed more and greater violence was against civilians, including the use of armored vehicles, fixed-wing aircraft and mortars against whole neighborhoods. Making matters worse, rebels are now accused of taking part in atrocities as well.

This has all led to a massive humanitarian crisis in Syria and the surrounding region. As of March, more than one million Syrians have fled into the neighboring countries of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, placing a massive strain on those states’ governments. According to the United Nations, over 4.25 million Syrians are now internally displaced within the country.
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Tensions within the Republican Party on foreign policy reemerged on Thursday with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) taking a broad shot at the vision of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and his allies.

At an event at the Center for New American Security (CNAS), McCain took several not so subtle swipes at Paul’s recent attempts to take on the GOP’s foreign policy orthodoxy and singled out the anti-drone filibuster Paul led in March as an example of Republicans yielding to political pressure to back something easy rather than asking tough questions about foreign policy:

McCAIN: Last month, most Republican senators joined a filibuster to protest the President’s policies on the use of armed drones. Rather than debating the very real issues associated with targeted killings, my colleagues chose to focus instead on the theoretical possibility that the President would use a drone to kill Americans on U.S. soil, even if they’re not engaged in hostilities. As misguided as this exercise was, the political pressures on Republicans were significant and many ultimately did — including many who know better.

While he did not name names, among the more senior Republicans who joined in the filibuster were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX). McCain in the immediate aftermath of the drones filibuster referred to Paul and co-filibuster leader Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as “wacko birds,” a phrase he later apologized for using.

McCain admitted that the GOP needs to change its positions on counter-terrorism and other policies, listing several measures he would be putting forward in the coming weeks and months, including an update to the the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force, which his fellow Republicans are likely to embrace. Others, like revisions to U.S. foreign aid strategy towards Egypt and reining in Defense Department spending on costly and underperforming projects will likely earn him more enmity from various blocs within his party.

The Iraq War debacle and much of the Bush administration’s counter-terror policies led Americans to realize that Republicans were selling junk national security policy. Yet at the same time, the neocon stranglehold on the GOP remains alive and well (a sticking point Mitt Romney was faced with during last year’s presidential election).

Since the election, the Party’s soul-searching on foreign policy has broken into the public as struggles for the future of the party on foreign affairs have been frequent. Various sides have been loosely led by Paul, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and McCain and none seems ready to yield. And at present, it appears that the fight can only be overcome by adhering to a very slim set of neocon-esque foreign policy principles, or, as Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel discovered during his nomination battle, face accusations of apostasy and risk internal isolation.

So far, McCain is fine with having the debate, but appears to be wondering whether there is room for his views in the GOP. “Right now the far left and far right in America are coming together in favor of pulling us back from the world,” McCain warned at CNAS. “The President and I have had our differences, many of those differences will persist. But there are times these days when I feel I have more in common on foreign policy with President Obama than I do with some in my own party.”

A handful of media outlets are reporting news that Dick Cheney is now warning that the United States is in “deep doo doo” regarding its relations with North Korea.

Of course the reclusive communist regime has been doing a lot of saber rattling in recent weeks and that does indeed pose challenges for the United States. But as interesting as it is to report a comparison of the situation on the Korean peninsula to dog droppings, what’s really news here is not what Cheney said, it’s who he said it to, the Hill reports:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney discussed tensions on the Korean peninsula with Republican leaders in Congress in a closed-door meeting Tuesday, warning them that the United States was in danger. [...]

The former vice president spoke to GOP lawmakers, at the invitation of Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).

Top House Republicans turning to the former vice president — behind closed doors — to give foreign policy advice to the GOP caucus sounds a lot like what Mitt Romney had to do during last year’s campaign: solicit Cheney’s wisdom and money, but don’t let too many people know about it. And there’s good reason: the American people don’t like him, mainly because his ideas and policies are unpopular and have been completely discredited.

But the crowd loved it. “We appreciate the vice president for sharing his insight and experience on the matter,” a McCarthy aid said. Rep. Steve Southerland (R-FL) said Cheney — who was apparently also wearing a cowboy hat — “looked really good, spoke really clearly, lucidly.”

Cheney reportedly tried to shed some light on what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is up to by harking back to his days of dealing with (but really not actually knowing anything about) Saddam Hussein, noting “you never know what they’re thinking.” Indeed. (Apparently Cheney bringing up his history with Saddam Hussein didn’t set off red flags with this particular group of Republicans.)

Back in 2002, then-Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) had said on numerous occasions that he did not think the Bush administration had made a strong enough case for the U.S. to invade Iraq. The White House needed Armey or, it was thought, the war authorization from Congress would fall apart. So before the vote, Cheney reportedly met privately with Armey and told him that he had sound intelligence he couldn’t discuss publicly because it was so horrifying: that Hussein had direct ties to al Qaeda and that Iraq was making progress toward a miniature nuclear weapon that it could one day hand off to the terror group. Armey then supported the resolution and Cheney, of course, turned out to be wildly wrong. “I deserved better than to be bullshitted by the vice president,” Armey told Cheney biographer Barton Gellman.

And Cheney continues to this day to maintain that torturing al-Qaeda suspects was the right thing to do.

This is the person the Republican Party is still listening to on foreign policy. And considering that much of its rebranding efforts are turning out to be miserable failures, it’s not surprise then that the GOP — much like Mitt Romney during last year’s presidential campaign — just can’t quit Dick Cheney and the neocons.

As for North Korea, is the U.S. really in “deep doo doo”? Korea expert Andrei Lankov wrote in today’s New York Times that “it does not make sense to credulously take their fake belligerence at face value and give them the attention they want now. It would be better if people in Washington and New York took a lesson from the people of Seoul” and ignore it.

“I’m waiting for the architects of those policies to get up and say it didn’t work, but it’s tough to expect that because they never articulated what the hell they were doing.” This is what conservative activist Grover Norquist told the Huffington Post in a piece published today on what the anniversary of the Iraq war means for the Republican Party and foreign policy (spoiler: it’s in disarray).

But Norquist hit on an important point. While a majority of Americans — and indeed the rest of the world — know and have recognized that the Iraq war was a complete debacle that never should have taken place, those who dreamed of taking down Saddam Hussein long before 9/11 and cooked up the intelligence to make it happen either refuse to find any fault in the overall decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or their role in it.

The Daily Beast reported yesterday that some of the Iraq war’s boosters are expressing “few regrets.” The American Enterprise Institute foreign and defense policy studies vice president Danielle Pletka laid all the bad stuff that happened in Iraq on Barack Obama: “Had President Obama chosen not to withdraw from Iraq, it would be a different picture there.” Sure, Ms. Pletka.

And today, the war’s top architects seized the 10-year anniversary to play some historical defense. Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary famous for painting a rosy picture about the war that bore no relation to reality, patted himself on the back for helping liberate Iraq:

10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.

— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) March 19, 2013

How liberating is it for the tens of thousands of Iraqis, including civilians, who were killed as a result of the war? We also wonder if the millions of Iraqis who are now refugees or internally displaced feel liberated. And as NBC News notes today, Iraq “is considered one of the most corrupt in the world, and many of the improvements promised have not materialized. Sectarian tensions regularly explode into open violence.” Liberation, indeed.

Richard Perle — who was chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the run-up to the war — wrote in USA Today on Tuesday that it’s “senseless to argue” that because Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMD that “the decision to remove him was wrong.” Actually, Perle himself made that argument In 2009, he saying, “we would not have invaded” if Saddam had no WMD. Nevertheless, Perle says “the decision to remove Saddam was right,” it’s just that “the decision to occupy Iraq was not.”

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Neocon leader Bill Kristol is upset that Americans have soured on war. “Are the American people war weary? Yes, to some degree,” Kristol acknowledges in a new piece in the Weekly Standard, but, he adds, “Could there be a worse prescription for American foreign policy than giving in to popular war weariness? No.”

Kristol is commenting on the recent intra-GOP spat between Sen. Ron Paul (R-KY) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain referred to Paul as a “wacko bird” for his isolationist tendencies and his 13-hour filibuster critique of President Obama’s targeted killing program (McCain has since apologized), while Paul shot back last week at CPAC, saying McCain’s foreign policy wing of the GOP as “has grown stale and moss covered.”

Kristol jumped in to defend McCain, arguing that Republicans should try again to convince Americans that they shouldn’t be so bearish on war:

Now we’re weary again. And there are many politicians all too willing to seek power and popularity by encouraging weariness rather than point out its perils. [...]

The task of a serious opposition party is to rally the nation to its responsibilities and long-term interests. The task of GOP political leaders is to educate the public about the dangers of the world and to inspire people to rise above their weariness. The task of American conservatives is not to let an understandable Obama-weariness turn into weariness in fighting the nation’s enemies or in supporting our troops in the field.

Got that? The Republican Party must convince the American people that they must RISE ABOVE their collective skepticism about war solving America’s problems. But why? Because Kristol and Co. want to go to war with Iran. “It’s long since been time for the United States to speak to this regime in the language it understands—force,” Kristol wrote in the Standard nearly two years ago. Last year his factually challenged pressure group called for an end to negotiations with Iran, saying in an ad campaign that “it’s time to act.” And what was the main reason Kristol opposed Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense? Hagel apparently was too skeptical about starting war with Iran.

But Americans don’t want to go to war with Iran — partly because of war weariness, but also because it’s not a very good idea. Kristol knows this, which is why he’s trying to recruit Republicans to his cause to help him convince us otherwise. Who does he have so far? From his new Standard piece:

[Rep. Tom] Cotton [R-AR] is 35 years old. He’s not stale or moss-covered. A combat veteran, he understands real war weariness. But he also understands it needs to be resisted and overcome. Above all, he understands, as did the GOP of old, the GOP of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, that while we may not be interested in war, our enemies remain interested in us.

Cotton was last seen suggesting that Iraq may have had something to do with 9/11. Perhaps then Kristol does know what he’s doing.

A new report by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that nearly 200,000 people, including soldiers and civilians, were killed in the war in Iraq President George W. Bush launched 10 years ago.

The report also found that American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.

“Nearly every government that goes to war underestimates its duration, neglects to tally all the costs, and overestimates the political objectives that will be accomplished by war’s violence,” said Boston University professor of political science and project co-director Neta C. Crawford.

Indeed, the war devastated the Iraqi health care system and allowed militants to hone their skills and export them to neighboring conflicts:

Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries.

Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to seek health care outside the country.

The Watson Institute project — which involves “30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations, and other organizations” — comes on the heals of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction’s final report released last week finding that the U.S. spent $60 billion on reconstruction efforts in Iraq and that $10 billion of it was wasted on fraud and abuse.

Reuters reported that Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, didn’t dispute the report’s findings but said the U.S.’s post-invasion battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group that did not exist prior to March 19, 2003 — made the war worth it.

“It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.”

Meanwhile, the AP reported this afternoon that “a string of explosions tore through central Baghdad within minutes of each other on Thursday, followed by what appeared to be a coordinated assault by gunmen who battled security forces in the Iraqi capital.” The AP said the attack — which reportedly killed 12 people — “bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’s Iraq arm.”

As the overlong saga that has been Chuck Hagel’s Secretary of Defense nomination comes to a close, it’s worth looking back on the number of ways in which conservatives predicted his impending downfall.

In addition to the many instances in which the right distorted Hagel’s record, the list of ways that these predictions turned out to be mistaken — and it is extensive — bridges conspiracy theories and cynical political calculations, attacks on character and long-standing grudges, both policy and personal. Now that the Senate has voted to break the Republican filibuster of Hagel’s nomination and he has been officially confirmed, here’s a list of some of the right wing’s more farcical predictions in its pursuit of trying to prevent Hagel from becoming the next Pentagon chief:

1. “Send us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite.”

Before Hagel’s nomination was even officially announced, the neoconservative smear machine was gearing up to make sure Hagel would pay for opposing the war in Iraq. In the first of many stories centered around a quote from an anonymous Senate aide, the Weekly Standard quoted one as saying, “Send us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite.”

However, the claim that Hagel is an anti-Semite effectively died soon after the Council on Foreign Relations’ Elliott Abrams lobbed it in an NPR interview, causing CFR’s President Richard Haass himself to smack the claim down. In the aftermath, only a few have dared to make the accusation directly against Hagel, instead resorting to misleading statements about his pro-Israel stance.

2. Democrats will turn on Chuck Hagel.

Politicos were speculating for weeks ahead of the announcement that the former Republican Senator would have a tough time gaining support among Democrats. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) topped several lists of those who would turn on Hagel, with non-committal comments of his blasted out by venues like The Weekly Standard.

Mainstream media got in on this idea as well, with NBC News’ Chuck Todd saying as many as ten Democrats might oppose Hagel and the National Journal writing up why Democrats don’t love him. In the end, though, it turned out that not only did Schumer announce his full support of Hagel, not a single Democrat voted against cloture for Hagel.

3. The LGBT community won’t accept Hagel.

In the days leading up to Hagel’s nomination, Republicans appeared to have found their long-lost concern for the equal rights of gays and lesbians. Hagel in 1998 said that James Hormel, then-President Bill Clinton’s nominee for Ambassador to Luxembourg, was “aggressively gay,” and thus unfit for the post. Right-wing concern trolling commenced, including Washington Post blogger Jen Rubin’s prediction that “along with the eggnog and mistletoe, Hagel will disappear after the holidays.” The attack reached its peak with the Log Cabin Republicans’ purchase of two full-page ads against Hagel.

That charge fizzled quickly, however. Hagel apologized publicly for his comments, which Hormel accepted graciously. Former staffers came out in support of Hagel, the Human Rights Campaign withdrew its complaints, and the opposition that Republicans hoped to elicit from the gay community never materialized.

4. GOP will walkout on Hagel vote.

With the Democrats unlikely to turn on Hagel, Republicans then opted to do everything they could to delay a vote on Hagel indefinitely. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) was forced to postpone moving Hagel out of committee by a hold from Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Ted Cruz (R-TX). News outlets soon reported — via more anonymous sources — that Republicans would walk out on the committee vote for Hagel. ThinkProgress learned differently, and Hagel moved out of committee with barely an incident.

5. Hagel will withdraw.

After Hagel’s confirmation hearing, Foreign Policy blogger Tom Ricks saw “50-50” odds that Hagel would withdraw. Hagel’s personal confidants said he would not withdraw his nomination and when asked about the matter, White House spokesman Jay Carney said “absolutely not.” Republicans took no chances, choosing to make history by filibustering a Defense Secretary-nominee for the first time, going against previous stances on up-or-down votes on nominees. Despite that filibuster’s obvious inability to hold, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and 14 of his colleagues still sent President Obama a letter to pull Hagel — despite still not having the votes to block confirmation.

6. Hagel’s secret speeches will sink his nomination.

Republicans and the right-wing media have been desperately hunting for nefarious speeches given by Hagel after his time in the Senate as a way to block his confirmation. One of those speeches, given before the liberal pro-Israel group J Street in 2009, was sure to be the silver bullet that ended Hagel’s nomination according to Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. Rubin — who has written over 100 posts trying to derail Hagel — claimed that J Street was hiding the video out of fear for what it showed. J Street eventually released the video in question, which was received with a yawn by most of the world.

The right then hoped that Hagel’s long-sought after comments to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League would be the final nail in his coffin — the speech turned out to be a dud. A supposedly explosive comment made by Hagel, calling the State Department an “adjunct” of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, was likewise denied by a professor in attendance at the speech.

7. Hagel’s ties to the “Friends of Hamas” will end his bid.

Attempts by the likes of Sen. Cruz to insinuate that Hagel has received funding from shady sources likewise hasn’t been able to stand up to scrutiny. One such effort claimed that Hagel had the backing of a group called the “Friends of Hamas.” That claim — later revealed to have started as a joke — was spread across the right-wing before being debunked. The so-called “Friends of Hamas” doesn’t exist. In the end, Hagel survived a set of lengthy confirmation battles that in the words of Sen. Levin “far exceed” the scrutiny previous nominees have faced.

(Photo: Scripps Howard Foundation Wire)

The Senate on Tuesday voted to break the Republican-led filibuster of Chuck Hagel’s nomination to become the next Secretary of Defense, clearing the way for his confirmation.

Senate Republicans made history earlier this month by successfully filibustering a president’s Defense Secretary nominee for the first time in U.S. history.

But a number of Republicans who voted to uphold the filibuster — including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) — joined Democrats in breaking the filibuster on Tuesday. Overall, 18 Republicans voted for cloture, which ultimately passed by a vote of 71-27.

The neocons, later joined by Senate Republicans, spent two-and-a-half months trying to prevent Hagel’s nomination and eventual confirmation, mostly by promoting false claims and smears that Hagel is an anti-Semite, anti-Israel and pro-Iran, all of which with either debunked or lacked credibility to stick. Hagel’s detractors then turned to a kitchen-sink strategy by distorting his record and making wild claims, for example that Hagel accepted money from America’s enemies and that the former Republican senator has ties to, as it turns out, non-existant terror groups.

According to Senate rules, a final up-or-down vote on Hagel’s nomination will take place no later than 30 hours from today’s cloture vote. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) said today that he hopes the vote will take place later on this afternoon.

One of the more ridiculous criticisms of Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be Secretary of Defense is the claim that the government of Iran is rooting for him. The idea is that Iran’s rulers are somehow encouraged by President Obama having chosen a Secretary of Defense who has voiced concerns about the possible consequences of a U.S. attack on Iran (concerns shared, of course, by both previous Secretaries of Defense.) The fact that the sum total of evidence for this claim is one misleading CBS News headline (to a story in which the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman responded to the nomination with boilerplate language hoping for “practical changes” to U.S. foreign policy) hasn’t stopped it from hardening into the newest article of neoconservative faith.

In today’s New York Times, RAND Iran analyst Alireza Nader responds to these claims. “The Iranian regime is hardly cheering Hagel on,” Nader writes, “despite what some of his critics say.”

Yes, Hagel sounds cautious about a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but such a campaign isn’t what keeps the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, up at night. An American strike would spur the Iranian public to rally around the flag and buck up a wobbling, wheezing theocracy — and an Israeli strike would do so in spades.

The Iranian leadership’s real worry is not American planes but Iranian protesters. Their deepest anxieties revolve around a Persian version of Tahrir Square, a replay of the 2009 Green uprising that wasn’t ended by the regime’s violent repression. Strange as it may sound, the Islamic Republic is a lot more frightened of the imprisoned Iranian human rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh than it is of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As such, Hagel’s nomination was greeted in Tehran with a shrug, not a sigh of relief. The Islamic Republic hardly thinks that with Hagel nominated, it’s off the nuclear hook. Iran’s leaders see U.S. “hostility” as institutionalized and systematized, not produced by partisan politics or individual appointments. As Hossein Salami, a top-ranking Revolutionary Guards officer, said of Hagel, “We view the United States as a political and ideological system driven by its strategic interests rather than by individual politicians.”

“What the Islamic Republic fears most isn’t that American officials will be blustery and belligerent,” Nader concludes. “It’s that they will be patient and pragmatic.”

The idea that Iran’s rulers are pleased by the prospect of a Secretary of Defense who is cautious about military force (and would be displeased by a Secretary of Defense who appeared less cautious) is based in a fundamental misreading of what the regime actually fears. But don’t expect the fact that President Obama’s efforts to reasonably engage with Iran have done more to isolate it than all of the Bush administration’s threats ever did to make any dent in U.S. hawks’ apparently unshakeable belief in the transformative power of bluster.