While Americans marked this Memorial Day by honoring the fallen of the nation's wars, Republican Senator John McCain was inside Syria making the case for the next one. As reported in the Daily Beast, McCain slipped across the Turkish border to meet with Syrian rebels.
As Josh Rogin detailed, McCain's surprise visit, the first by an American official since Ambassador Robert Ford's earlier this month, appeared to produce the message the Arizona Republican wanted to take back to Washington:

McCain, one of the fiercest critics of the Obama administration's Syria policy, made the unannounced visit across the Turkey-Syria border with Gen. Salem Idris, the leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army. He stayed in the country for several hours before returning to Turkey. Both in Syria and Turkey, McCain and Idris met with assembled leaders of Free Syrian Army units that traveled from around the country to see the U.S. senator. Inside those meetings, rebel leaders called on the United States to step up its support to the Syrian armed opposition and provide them with heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and airstrikes on the Syrian regime and the forces of Hezbollah, which is increasingly active in Syria.

McCain's meetings with rebel military and civilian leaders from Qusayr, Idlib, Damascus, and Aleppo took place even as European Union members deadlocked over providing arms to the fractured opponents of the Assad regime. For his part, General Idris was very pleased with the trip organized by the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based group that works with the Free Syrian Army:

"The visit of Senator McCain to Syria is very important and very useful especially at this time. We need American help to have change on the ground; we are now in a very critical situation."

Critical, indeed. In recent weeks, Assad forces have regained the initiative as Shiite fighters from Hezbollah have poured in from Lebanon. But while Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah called his Iranian proxies to take their fight against "America, Israel and the takfiris" into Syria, Shiite areas of Beirut were shelled in apparent retaliation. While Lebanese government and Sunni leaders warned that Hezbollah's intervention could trigger new sectarian fighting in Lebanon, Iraq seems on the brink of a new civil war. Even as the Maliki government's crackdown on its political opponents is spawning new alliances between Sunni tribal leaders and Al Qaeda fighters split during the 2007 surge, Iraqi Shiites and AQ militiamen are crossing the border to fight for and against Bashar al-Assad.
Despite the rapidly changing situation on the ground, John McCain seems undeterred by the growing sectarian violence in Syria that may soon engulf Lebanon and Iraq as well. Thirty years ago, however, McCain took the opposite position. As President Reagan prepared to send U.S. Marines on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, McCain warned against it. As CNN recalled in 2008:

McCain said "I do not see any obtainable objectives in Lebanon" and that "the longer we stay there, the harder it will be to leave." On Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide attack at the Marine headquarters in Beirut killed 241 U.S. service members.
"In Lebanon, I stood up to President Reagan, my hero, and said, if we send Marines in there, how can we possibly beneficially affect this situation? And said we shouldn't. Unfortunately, almost 300 brave young Marines were killed." McCain said at the debate.

Now, McCain has little patience with a planned peace conference in Geneva or consultations with Assad's patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin. "All it does," McCain said last week, "is delay us considering doing what we really need to do."
Whatever that is.