WHAT IS THE ARAB WORLD’S PROBLEM? Lee Smith review’s Ken Pollack’s new book, A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, and comments:

In recent years, former CIA analyst and Clinton-administration National Security Council staffer Kenneth Pollack has found himself so close to Bush administration Middle East policies—like regime change in Iraq and Gen. David Petraeus’ surge strategy—that it’s hardly surprising he’d now like to put some distance between himself and an unpopular White House. Thus, in A Path out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, Pollack adopts a countermeasure perfected over the last several years by Arab liberals concerned that any association with Bush is likely to lose them respect, if not their freedom or their lives: trash the White House pre-emptively and then restate the general principles of its Middle East policy.

I suspect we’ll see a lot of that in coming years, followed eventually by an “everyone knew this all along” conventional wisdom. On the other hand, it’s not working well enough to prevent lefties from posting angry screeds in the reader review section.