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Features

Why the Middle East needs more kings

Constitutional monarchy is a cornerstone of many stable democracies – so why are we so keen to avoid it in places like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan?

26 September 2015

8:00 AM

26 September 2015

8:00 AM

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.

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