I thought polls showed most Americans now wanted soldiers to return to Iraq and that it was the Republicans slamming Obama for supporting the Syrian rebels. Now when Graham makes the next logical step he's some neo-liberal right-wing warmonger coming out of left field.
The McCain/Graham school of hawks supports arming "moderate Syrian rebels", because they think we need to prop up US-allied factions over there. The Cruz/Bachmann school of hawks think any kind of political solution on the ground in Iraq and Syria is hopeless, so we should just bomb them all and let God sort it out. Peter Beinart explains the dichotomy between these schools of thought:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/how-to-defeat-isis-according-to-ted-cruz/380500/
EDIT: Also useful on understanding the two camps of GOP hawks: This ~3.5 video segment from a Bloggingheads discussion from 2011: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/3105?in=13:03&out=16:38
Presumably Cruz et al just want to bomb ISIS in Iraq and Syria, in their redoubts, as opposed to bombing Damascus and Bagdad, no?
Yeah, I was exaggerating about the "bomb them all and let God sort it out".
My point is, Cruz basically thinks that we have no allies in the Arab world. We should just bomb our enemies (in this case ISIS), and not worry about creating any kind of political solution, because a political solution is impossible. McCain and Graham say yes, we do have allies in the Arab world, and we should be arming them, and using them to create a political solution.
