Lessons from Bahrain – Washington’s Determination to Dominate Iran Corrodes U.S. Standing

How Washington’s Determination to Dominate Iran Corrodes U.S. Standing in the Middle East: Lessons from Bahrain
15 August, 2012 – The Race for IRan

As the United States pushes for regime change in Syria and American allies flock to suspend Syria from the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, it is illuminating to examine the strategic bankruptcy of U.S. policy toward Bahrain. For the deep flaws in Washington’s approach to Bahrain grow out of the same considerations that warp its policy toward Syria. And at the root of all these dangerously deficient policies is a dogged determination to contain and undermine the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Against this backdrop, Hillary appeared on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story Americas last week to discuss the political situation in Bahrain and Washington’s ongoing support for the Khalifa monarchy there; click here to view the segment or on the video above. The program opens with an interview with Maryam al-Khawaja, a Bahraini human rights activist. The panel discussion in which Hillary appears begins at 7:05 in the video.

Bahrain is arguably the most flagrant manifestation of American hypocrisy regarding the Arab spring. As the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister, Dr. Ali Akbar Salehi, noted in his Washington Post op ed on Syria last week, see here, “there have been conflicting responses to the civic movements sweeping the Arab world. A glaring example of these contradictions lies in Bahrain and the way some states have responded to the crackdown on the uprising there.” In his set up for the Inside Story episode, Al Jazeera’s moderator, Shihab Rattansi, notes that “for almost every single Arab country that has seen uprisings over the past two years, the U.S. has called for regime change—except for the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, one of its closest allies in the region.” Bahrain is, of course, the home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Three months ago, the United States resumed selling weapons to the Bahraini government, notwithstanding its extensive, ongoing, and well-documented violations of human rights and its failure to make any discernible progress toward meaningful political reform, much less a negotiated political settlement between the government and the opposition.

As Hillary points out, Washington cannot recalibrate its policy toward Bahrain without a fundamental reevaluation of its larger strategy in the Middle East. As a result of that strategy, she says, the United States is

“stuck with an ally like Bahrain, we’re stuck with some of the allies that we have in the Middle East. That’s because our strategic interest, as U.S. officials have framed it now for decades, is essentially oil and Israel. And oil is personified in the state of Saudi Arabia. So any country that is willing to align itself, to collude with Israel and Saudi Arabia, to give up their own sovereignty, to do whatever they do to their own citizens in order to work with Israel and Saudi Arabia in U.S. interests—those are our allies…Sometimes they’re better, sometimes they’re worse, sometimes they behave better, sometimes they don’t. But we’re stuck with them.”

Hillary notes that, with the “advent of the information revolution” in the Middle East, “it’s harder to be stuck with bad allies. It’s harder to justify having an alliance with a country, with a government that abuses its own citizens, and carries out policies that are against its own interests…You can’t stand there, like when I worked in the Bush administration with President Bush, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq with the King of Bahrain, smiling and saying ‘Everything is great.’ You can’t do that anymore. Even though it was wrong probably for the King of Bahrain to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we could get away with it then; we can’t get away with it now.”

Nevertheless, Hillary underscores that the United States, as its Middle East strategy is currently structured, “cannot support the opposition in Bahrain, because if the opposition had any real say in the government, they would never allow Bahrain to cede its territory to the United States for the Fifth Fleet, to be used as a platform to attack a much stronger neighbor [Iran]. That makes no sense strategically.” …more