A little followup on one passage from that Jeffrey Goldberg interview with Senator McCain:

"I don’t try to divine people’s motives. I look at their actions and
what they say. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the state of their
emotions. I do know what their nation’s stated purpose is, I do know
they continue in the development of nuclear weapons, and I know that
they continue to support terrorists who are bent on the destruction of
the state of Israel. You’ll have to ask someone who engages in this
psycho stuff to talk about their emotions."

Two
things jump out. Referring to the "nation's" stated purpose instead of
the "government's" stated purpose. When we talk about accountability
and foreign policy, conflating a citizenry with the decisionmakers at
the top (both internally and in marketing your foreign policy to your
own people) seems like a key element on the path to feeling OK about
going to war.

Two, the guy who says he can be the chief
negotiator in the region doesn't "try to divine people's motives"? I'm
no diplomat, and not to sound too thespian about it, but wouldn't
grasping the motivations of the parties at the table be kind of a
fundamental tool in creating a solution?

I mean, you're not
fixing an engine, you're figuring out what makes people tick in order
to improve your chances of getting what you want. Or is that kind of
"psycho stuff" too nuanced?

I've been a bit uncomfortable with
the hard Bush=McCain tack from the Dems, but maybe there's a little
more to it than I thought. After all this, our electorate will surely
connect the dots between an obvious disdain for real diplomacy and the
likelihood that our troops will get deployed and killed unnecessarily.

Won't we?