We Middle Eastern monarchs seem to have a pretty precarious existence.

The intent to convert indigenous peoples to Christianity and bring them under the sovereignty of foreign monarchs created widespread havoc, despite some early attempts at friendly treatment .

Monarchs today are reared to be ordinary, as suits their diminished role in national life. But democratic countries need symbols of the extraordinary if they are not to sink into permanent mediocrity.

For Tocqueville, the grab for centralized power by the absolutist Bourbon monarchs, followed by the French Revolution and Napoleon s Empire, had destroyed the good with the bad in France s neo feudal order. Decades later, the new order was still in flux.

Elections have begun to play a greater role in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman, but none uses free and fair elections to fill the most important and powerful political offices. Traditional monarchs still have broad powers of appointment and decree.

Congress, at its core, pursues a form of dynastic democracy with the characteristics of a Sultanistic regime a regime with no purpose or function apart from maintaining the leader s personal authority. But, though such leaders perhaps have more personal authority than even medieval monarchs, their authority is brittle.

Indeed, an attack would most likely increase America s reliance on unsavory Islamist rulers in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Some Arab monarchs have pledged to bankroll the US attack an investment that they would easily recover, given that the war talk has already increased oil prices.

Similarly, northern Italians don t like their tax money being used to help the south, but at least they still have a language more or less in common, as well as TV stars, a national soccer team, and Silvio Berlusconi. The Belgians only have a king, who is descended, like most European monarchs, from Germans.

Successive European and American governments share an atavistic fear of the Islamic alternative to Arab secular nationalists like Fatah, and so have defended the status quo. But repression of all Arab opposition movements by the region s monarchs and secular dictators meant that protection of the Mosque became the only umbrella under which to engage politically.

For nearly 60 years, universal suffrage has made successive French presidents the modern equivalents of elected monarchs, men who have concentrated in their hands more power than their counterparts in any other democratic country. Chirac s shortening of the presidential term from seven to five years has, paradoxically, resulted in an even greater concentration of presidential power.

While it is now clear that much of the Arab world is in transition, the end point is not yet clear. But Barack Obama s administration apparently has concluded that Arab monarchs are likely to survive, whereas Arab presidents are more likely to fall, and that it is acceptable for the United States to continue to coddle tyrannical kings.

In January 2005, on the occasion of the State visit to Morocco by King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia of Spain, the aforesaid agreements were reaffirmed at the highest level and the state of progress of the project studies was presented to the monarchs at an audience held for that purpose by King Mohamed VI.

27. In the light of the major changes that have occurred in the past 50 years in the sphere of human rights, it is a little surprising to recall that until very recently, and throughout virtually all mankind apos s history, the absolute power to determine which rights they allowed their subjects and to establish internal mechanisms for protecting them lay with sovereigns (monarchs, emperors, etc.) and later with States.