Why The Middle East Needs More Kings

[Rudolph]

Watch the videos of 1950s Iraq on YouTube and you glimpse something close to an idyll. It’s true that Pathé News was not big on gritty realism, but history relates that here it was not using a heavily rose-tinted lens; Hugh Trevor-Roper even went so far as to describe Iraq at the time as a Levantine Switzerland. Or you can go to Google Images, tap in ‘1960s Afghan women’ and be offered photographs of a mixed university biology class, and others of young women with short skirts, long hair and smiling faces.

This was life under the kings, and knowing what followed is enough to make a grown man weep. But let’s be hard-headed and forward-looking: the creation of new constitutional monarchies is a sensible solution to such clear and present dangers as Isis. Life without them has been a disaster in the Middle East. Why can’t we bring back the monarchs?

Read more: Why the Middle East needs more kings » The Spectator

 

[nascarlucy]

At this time, it would be very difficult to bring back any monarch who is no longer in power. Given what is going on in the Middle East, it would be a very brave soul who would do so as they would have to worry about they or their family being deposed or harmed. ISIS would be a major threat to them, their family or anyone who associated with them.

 

[Curryong]

Some monarchs in the region were far from raging successes as rulers. The playboy King Farouk of Egypt comes to mind.