Dylan Matthews interviews J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami.

Michael Slackman notes that across the Middle East, European countries, Israel, and even the Bush administration are looking to engagement and diplomacy to try to resolve outstanding issues, rather than counting on futile policies of “isolation” and coercion.

Which is, in my view, all to the good. But it’s also a reminder of an important extent in which John McCain would not be merely an extension of the Bush administration. Bush, never one to admit an error, hasn’t made a big deal about it but since at least Israel’s failed invasion of Lebanon in 2006 the administration has substantially crawled back from its previous lunatic policies in favor of something more resembling a pragmatic approach to the Middle East (and of course North Korea). McCain, however, gives every indications of wanting to go back to an earlier, purer phase of Bushism when neocons were riding high and Robert Gates was nowhere to be seen in the halls of power.

Plausibly, the weird combination of McCain’s traditional dislike of and contempt for Bush, combined with their objectively similar opinions on policy matters, is making things worse here. On some level, the Bush administration has gotten less crazy because they’ve seen the results of their earlier blunders. But McCain seems to think poorly enough of Bush as a man and as a leader to believe that Bush rather than Bush’s ideas are to blame for these problems. Thus, in his view, if only we’d had John “I know how to win wars” McCain in the White House earlier, everything might have been fine. So if he’s president, we might go and try the whole thing over again, reliving the policies of 2002-2005 until McCain can prove to himself that, no, even the legendary Awesomeness of John McCain can’t make unworkable policies work.

Meanwhile, I’d say Sean-Paul Kelly is probably too optimistic that recent Iran-related developments mean there’s really going to be a Bush-era breakthough, but I hope he’s right.

I’m glad that armor piercing attacks against US forces in Iraq have declined but attributing this to the success of the Basra offensive which was supposed to have somehow — and nobody in the article explains any causal mechanism — to have crippled Iranian capabilities is a bit bizarre. It’s not clear how much of these attacks ever had anything to do with Iran, but insofar as Iran is playing a role the obvious cause of a decline in the tempo of attacks is efforts at “appeasement” like the Bush administration’s somewhat renewed interest in diplomacy with Teheran and so forth.

Interesting Elisabeth Bumiller look at the sprawling group of 300 people who are in some sense “foreign policy advisers” to the Obama campaign. Marc Ambinder remarks:

The McCain response to all this — John doesn’t need daily talking points — is a reflection on Obama’s learning curve, although McCain is also very clearly learning as he is going, too.

I think that’s a pretty revelatory passage. It’s true that, in some sense, McCain doesn’t need daily talking points. But the reason he doesn’t need daily talking points isn’t that he can talk about national security issues with fluency and skill without them. Lacking daily talking points, he’s repeatedly confused Sunni and Shiite, repeatedly forgotten that Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist, changed his position on Afghanistan twice in 24 hours, etc. In short, he’s made a ton of gaffes just as you would expect from an underprepared candidate. But he’s allowed to get away with a lack of adequate preparation because, in the mind of the press, his years in captivity decades ago are adequate demonstration that he understands national security issues even though there’s no real basis for that view.

So far so bad, but what’s doubly frustrating about this is that not only does McCain get kid gloves treatment about his national security gaffes, but his campaign then gets away with bragging about it as if it’s proof that he’s some kind of tough guy. “John doesn’t need daily talking points,” they say. And he doesn’t — because the press lets him get away with egregious errors.

The Air Force has really been a service adrift in the “war on terror” era, getting into all kinds of fights with other players and generally having difficulty endearing itself to the rest of the security establishment as a useful tool. I suspect the news that top Air Force generals have been wasting not only money but an absurd amount of time on installing “comfort capsules” on “military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world” with an eye to making sure “that leaders can talk, work and rest comfortably in the air.”

In partial defense of the Air Force, I suppose, I would say that semi-abusive use of military planes as private jets in circumstances when commercial vehicles would work fine seems to have become one of the most cherished perks of civilian officials in both the executive branch and the congress. Under the circumstances, one can sort of understand how the Air Force came to feel that it’s air taxi mission required this kind of high-level attention. Long story short, in addition to cutting this specific BS out, we really ought to reform the whole way the use of military transportation works. See here for some examples of dubious practices that cost taxpayers a remarkable amount of dough.