Sunday, October 13, 2013

Queen's Birthday Long Weekend Post, Extra Bonus Bit

Besides looking at the set of stable democracies, there are other representative sets of countries that illustrate the same point.

Take the Arab-speaking world, for instance. Which countries would you feel reasonably comfortable  spending a few years working in? Which could you conceivably imagine yourself buying a holiday house in, if you came into a mess of money? I am going to take a wild guess and answer the question for you. The Arab-speaking countries that fit this description, IMHO, are:

Morocco
Jordan
Kuwait
Qatar
The United Arab Emirates
Oman

Until a few years ago, I would have put Tunisia on the list, too. And it would have been the only one that was not some sort of monarchy.

Which brings me obliquely to one more of the many evils resulting from the American Revolution. When the occupying forces set up a new government in Afghanistan, the logical thing would have been to invite the king back to form a government. After all, the only period Afghanistan has been a reasonably recognisable member of the modern 'family of nations'was under Mohammed Zahir Shah.
The failure to restore the monarchy - an institution that had moral legitimacy, and still lived in the memories of the older generation - was an act of gross negligence that led directly to the current mess.




2 comments:

Cornelius Gallows said...

Do you think that reinstating the monarchy might have been more likely had the invasion of Afghamistan been a genuine international operation (say UNSC-led) rather than a half-hearted US rockshow?

(Not a leading question BTW - I have virtually no knowledge of pre-war Afghanistan other than "Taliban = bad")

Dr Clam said...

Ayup!

I think I have railed before on this site, long long ago, about the relative effort put into building up an international coalition pre-Afghanistan cf. pre-Iraq. In terms of sovereign state-on-sovereign state crimes justifying military action, Afghanistan was the much more dubious case.