The Rhetoric of Bahrain’s Strategic Importance, liberal myth? …is it really all about market share, selling weapons and consulting services to a “vertically integrated trading partners” of the GCC?

The Bahrain ‘Spring’: the revolution that wasn’t televised
by Corinna Mullin and Azadeh Shahshahani – 6 December 2011 – openDemocracy

Bahrain needs to set about the hard work of healing societal cleavages, to build the truly sovereign and democratic country which the majority of its citizens appear so determined to achieve. If their much-touted ‘democracy promotion’ rhetoric is to have any real significance, western governments must help rather than hinder this process.

Despite the recent flurry of news coverage of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report’s release last week, the story of the Bahraini pro-democracy uprising has been one of the least reported amongst those of the ‘Arab spring’. This goes for the regional Arab media, whose cheerleading and persistent coverage of uprisings elsewhere in the region contributed to whatever successes have been achieved, as well as for the majority of western press. This despite the fact that the violence and repression the Bahraini protesters met has matched, if not exceeded in some instances, those elsewhere in the region.

The stunted Bahraini revolution has also garnered much less rhetorical and material support from western governments. In Tunisia and Egypt, western governments supported, albeit belatedly, the expression of ‘people power’ against the repression and corruption of their former allies. In Syria, they have publicly called for regime change, and in Libya they actively engaged in ending Gaddafi’s 42 year rule. By contrast, there have only been muted calls for political reform and an end to the violence of the repressive Khalifa regime. This is perhaps not surprising considering all that is at stake for western governments in Bahrain.

First and foremost is the fact that Bahrain is home to the US Fifth Fleet, whose controversial stationing in the country’s port was the source of another pivotal anti-democratic moment in the island nation’s history. In August 1975, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa’s father, Emir Isa bin Salman Al Kahlifa, formally dissolved the national assembly after it failed to ratify the extension of the lease for the US naval units, essentially putting an end to the country’s short-lived experiment with a parliamentary monarchical system.

It seems unlikely that Bahrain’s strategic importance to the US will decline in the near future. As former US Fifth Fleet commander vice admiral Charles Moore said recently, quoting the late Middle East force commander and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe, Bahrain is “pound for pound, man for man, the best ally the United States has anywhere in the world”.

These double standards have not been lost on the Bahraini protestors. As Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights put it: ‘Democracy isn’t only for those countries the United States has a problem with.’
US and UK complicity in Khalifa regime’s crimes

In yet another delayed response, the US government announced in October that it would hold up a $53 million arms sale to Bahrain. Yet as in cases of Egypt and Tunisia, many people in Bahrain viewed this step, as well as those undertaken by the British government to suspend arms exports licences to the repressive Khalifa regime, as ‘too little, too late’. In the months before the protests began in February, the US sold more than $200m in weapons and equipment to Bahrain, including $760,000 in firearms. …more