Later that night, Sheikh H. and I talked politics again. Tired, he quietly noted that he hadn't been surprised to hear that the crown prince wasn't liked in the cafes. He said this accorded with his own sense of the future ruler's unpopularity. He added that others in the ruling family had serious doubts about the man, too. They worried that the crown prince was infatuated with the tiny military forces he commanded and wasn't savvy enough to handle the complexities of being emir. But, Sheikh H. admitted, nothing could be done about it.
Looking back, Crown Prince Hamad may have felt little need for the savvy of an emir. He succeeded his father in 1999, and, in 2002, elevated his own title from "His Highness the Emir" to the historically unprecedented "His Majesty the King of Bahrain." Today, he shakes that vainglorious title over a resentful patrimony less than one-third the size of Rhode Island.