'Fraudulent' Arab leaders as "indispensible US allies..."

"... Like Saudi Arabia, most countries in the Middle East are ruled by unelected -- or fraudulently elected -- heads of state. That creates a number of complications for foreign-policy planners in the rest of the world, who must deal with the very real possibility that the regimes they deal with today could undergo dramatic changes when the current leader leaves power -- whether by force, personal decision, or death. The risk comes across starkly in one of the recently revealed memos in the Wikileaks trove, in which the U.S. envoy to Egypt discusses the future of that all-important U.S. ally. In the 2009 cable preparing for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's trip to Washington, Ambassador Margaret Scobey refers to the question of who will succeed the 82-year-old Mubarak, leader of America's "indispensible Arab ally."...  After all, turmoil in Egypt, the most populous Arab country, could remake the Middle East..... Egypt's recent elections, even more of a sham than usual, showed just how little trust the regime has in its own people, pointing to the ever-present threat of just such turmoil. Unlike Egypt, Saudi Arabia holds no pretense of even being a democracy. As a monarchy, the country's leadership succession is fairly well-spelled out....  Even assuming that the same family continues to hold power in the country that holds the largest oil reserves in the world, each individual member of that family is different.... The next generation could bring even more dramatic change....  But although Saudi Arabia's succession is expected to be an orderly one, Middle Eastern dictatorships can prove extremely unpredictable. One of the most stable and Western-friendly of monarchies, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, abruptly changed its succession only moments before King Hussein's death ....  When Syria's President Bashar al-Assad took over from his father, Haffez, a decade ago, there was much optimism in the West that the younger Assad would prove to be far more moderate, ..... Bashar has formed an alliance with the West's current arch-foe Iran and become as much of an obstacle to reform as his father ever was......  The perils of succession to foreign-policy planning are evident even within the Palestinian Authority. Nobody knows who would take power after PA President Mahmoud Abbas exits the scene. .......  at least for now.  If the PA were taken over by Hamas, or by a more radical leader, the edifice of Western policy could also come crashing down..."