Bahrain returned all these favours by lending Washington and its NATO allies diplomatic cover forthe military intervention in Libya to oust Muammar Gaddafi. Bahrain, along with the other Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, lined up dutifully behind the US/NATO intervention to give it a veneer of Arab approval, and thus head off charges that the aerial bombardment of Libya is a Western imperialist war of aggression. The Gulf Arab monarchies have also performed the same political function of providing diplomatic cover for the US/NATO sanctions and threats of intervention against Syria.
But now here’s the rub. Bahrain stands out as a glaring contradiction to stated US government claims regarding its interventions in Libya and Syria. The fact that some 40 people have been killed in Bahrain for peacefully demanding democratic freedoms and basic human rights is an unmitigated damning indictment of the US-backed regime. Thousands have been injured – many horribly mutilated – from regime forces firing at unarmed peaceful demonstrators.
At least eight people have died from asphyxiation after regime forces fired teargas into homes. Thelatest victim was Jawad Ahmed (36). He died on 14 September, succumbing to teargas fired into his home in the village of Sitra. Relatives did not want to take the victim to the hospital out of fear that he would be arrested by regime forces – as is common in Bahrain where the hospitals have been under military command ever since the Saudi-led invasion to crackdown on the protesters in March. Only days before Jawad Ahmed’s death, a boy, Ali Jawad (14) was killed when he was shot in the head at close range with a teargas canister. [1]
In June, Bahrain’s King Hamad Al Khalifa promised a return to “normal” with a raft of initiatives that were hailed, and quite possibly formulated, by Washington as a positive move for reform: these included the official lifting of the state of emergency; a process of “national dialogue”; an independent probe into human rights violations; and the transfer of all prosecutions from military to civilian courts.
The unreformable Bahraini regime thus presents Washington with a thorny problem. Not only is the US government being shown to be on the side of tyrants in Bahrain, but its support of such a regime is exposing a chasm in Washington’s rhetoric about human rights in Libya, Syria and elsewhere across the Middle East. Bahrain may only be a tiny territory, but the reality of state terror and repression against unarmed civilians is blowing a huge hole in the US façade of protecting human rights and democratic freedom.
In this way, is the Al Khalifa regime in Bahrain in danger of hitting a threshold, which the US government can no longer tolerate because of its public relations liability? Recall how Washington supported to the last hour the dictatorships of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia. But when the public relations conundrum of supporting these tyrants became insufferable they were duly dispensed with. Could we be about to witness the same cynical abandonment of Washington’s tyrants in Bahrain?
The first sign of this shift may be gleaned from the remarkably critical coverage recently of the Bahraini regime in the New York Times and Washington Post. Given that these papers, along with other mainstream media, have so far given scant coverage to the violations in Bahrain, it is notable that these organs of US government thinking have come out with such unvarnished description of repression in the “important ally”. On 15 September, the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined: Bahrain Boils Under the Lid of Repression. “American willingness to look the other way has cast Washington as hypocritical,” bemoans the Times as it goes on to list a litany of human rights violations. “Backed by the armed intervention of Saudi Arabia, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa declared martial law in March, and though it was repealed June 1, the reverberations of the repression still echo across the island.”
In an editorial piece on 10 September, the Washington Post went further and hinted at official US strategic concerns over Bahrain: “The regime... hasn’t delivered — and now it is risking a new explosion of unrest that could destabilize not just Bahrain but the region around it... If Bahrain blows up, vital US interests will be at risk. The [Obama] administration should use its influence now.”
The vital US interests at stake under the increasingly unreliable Al Khalifa regime in Bahrain are high. They include the US naval command of the Persian Gulf oil trade; the spillover of Shia unrest in Bahrain into top oil producer Saudi Arabia; and the boost that this would give Iran’s influence in the region.
But just as important is the ongoing damage that the Al Khalifa regime is inflicting on Washington’s carefully crafted claims of supporting human rights and democracy across the region – and in Libya and Syria in particular. Bahrain nails the lie in Washington’s rhetoric; it throws a clunking big spanner in US foreign policy wheels. We shouldn’t be surprised therefore if the US Air Force is loading gold bullion for the hasty departure of King Hamad to Saudi Arabia.
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