In the course of a Slate review of a new Ken Pollack book about Mideast strategy, Lee Smith brings the old-fashioned racism:

Middle Eastern regimes are not the source of the region’s problems. As the decapitation of Saddam Hussein’s regime showed, the psychopaths, princes, and presidents for life who rule Arab states are merely the hothouse flowers of a poisonous political culture. "The States are as the men are," Plato writes in The Republic. "They grow out of human characters." The failure to respect this basic and ancient political principle marks by far the greatest intellectual error of neocon Middle East policy and thus of the entire liberal intelligentsia from which it arises. As we saw with Hezbollah’s orgiastic celebrations for released child-murderer Samir Kuntar, the problem with the Arab world is Arab societies themselves.

If only we understood that the trouble with the Middle East is that it’s filled with Arabs! If only we abandoned our sniveling liberal presuppositions and realized the Arabs are savages, riddled with anti-civilizational pathology! If only we recognized that the Arab will forever be the Arab! It’s appalling that you get to say things like this in middlebrow publications like Slate. If there was even a fraction of stuff this vitriolic about the Eternal Jew or the Backward Christian the writer would never find an outlet for his ranting this side of an al-Qaeda message board.