It May Be Bahraini Soldiers Firing on Bahraini Protesters but Uncle Sam Is Passing the Ammunition

American foreign policy is a shambles.   That's hardly surprising when firepower has come to rival diplomacy as the country's prime instrument of foreign policy.  It sets up an inevitable and inconsistent struggle between the Pentagon and the State Department that sometimes produces the very result America acts to prevent. 

All you need do is take a look at how Washington has catapulted Iran into regional domination of the Persian Gulf area.   America toppled Saddam and Iran emerged the big winner.   Now the US is helping Iranian influence spread through the Arab side of the Gulf with its blundering in Bahrain.

Just how American bullets make their way into Bahraini guns, into weapons used by troops suppressing pro-democracy protesters, opens a wider window into the shadowy relationships between the Pentagon and a number of autocratic states in the Arab world. Look closely and outlines emerge of the ways in which the Pentagon and those oil-rich nations have pressured the White House to help subvert the popular democratic will sweeping across the greater Middle East.

A TomDispatch  analysis of Defense Department documents indicates that, since the 1990s, the United States has transferred large quantities of military materiel, ranging from trucks and aircraft to machine-gun parts and millions of rounds of live ammunition, to Bahrain's security forces.

According to data from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the branch of the government that coordinates sales and transfers of military equipment to allies, the US has sent Bahrain dozens of "  excess"   American tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopter gunships.

The US has also given the Bahrain Defense Force thousands of .38 caliber pistols and millions of rounds of ammunition, from large-caliber cannon shells to bullets for handguns. To take one example, the US supplied Bahrain with enough .50 caliber rounds - used in sniper rifles and machine guns - to kill every Bahraini in the kingdom four times over. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency did not respond to repeated requests for information and clarification.

In addition to all these gifts of weaponry, ammunition, and fighting vehicles, the Pentagon in coordination with the State Department oversaw Bahrain's purchase of more than $386 million in defense items and services from 2007 to 2009, the last three years on record.
"  We call on restraint from the government,"   Secretary of State Hillary ClintonLibya, and Yemen: "  The United States condemns the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those countries, and wherever else it may occur."
 
...In the weeks since, Washington has markedly softened its tone. According to a recent report by Julian Barnes and Adam Entous in the Wall Street Journal, this resulted from a lobbying campaign directed at top officials at the Pentagon and the less powerful State Department by emissaries of Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and his allies in the Middle East. In the end, the Arab lobby ensured that, when it came to Bahrain, the White House wouldn't support "  regime change",   as in Egypt or Tunisia, but a strategy of theoretical future reform some diplomats are now calling "  regime alteration". said in the wake of Bahrain's crackdown.

...The Pentagon's relationship with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries has been cemented in several key ways seldom emphasized in American reporting on the region. Military aid is one key factor. Bahrain alone took home $20 million in US military assistance last year. In an allied area, there is the rarely discussed triangular marriage between defense contractors, the Gulf states, and the Pentagon.

The six Gulf nations (along with regional partner Jordan) are set to spend $70 billion on weaponry and equipment this year, and as much as $80 billion per year by 2015. As the Pentagon looks for ways to shore up the financial viability of weapons makers in tough economic times, the deep pockets of the Gulf States have taken on special importance.

Beginning last October, the Pentagon started secretly lobbying financial analysts and large institutional investors, talking up weapons-makers and other military contractors it buys from to bolster their long-term financial viability in the face of a possible future drop in Defense Department spending. The Gulf States represent another avenue toward the same goal. It's often said that the Pentagon is a "  monopsony",  the only buyer in town for its many giant contractors, but that isn't entirely true.

This is the oldest Pentagon scam in the book.   When money is tight, find countries that are supposedly threatened, transfer the weaponry you no longer way to them, then get Congress to send you bags of money to buy new stuff to fill up your arsenals.

When Gaddafi Unleashes His Armour on Pro-Democracy Protesters We Call It A "War Crime."

But when the King of Bahrain and his Saudi backers unleash their heavy machine guns against unarmed Bahraini pro-democracy protesters our leaders just dummy up.  Nobody in holier-than-thou Washington is condemning the Bahraini king for crimes against humanity.   No one is calling for his regal ass to be hauled before the International Court of Justice.

Hypocrisy?  You betcha.  But, it's not the same.   After all, the Bahraini protesters are Shiite Muslim, the same faith as those buggers in Iran.   They're not the good guys, the Sunni Muslim, the side that filled all those planes that flattened America's embassies, bombed the USS Cole and brought the World Trade Centers down into what became known as "ground zero."

As was pointed out rather well today on Al Jazeera, Shiite Iran wasn't really a factor in Shiite majority Bahrain - not until WE turned our backs on the pro-democracy protesters.  Now, however, as our guys gun down the Shiite protesters in Bahrain's streets we've created a situation in which Iran is the only country siding with the protesters.   We have handed yet another unearned victory to Iran, one Tehran could not have achieved without our direct help.

You see, hypocrisy is a huge problem when you're no longer the world's only superpower and have people believing your military is invincible.   Once that global power illusion bursts the munchkins get all uppity.  It's a lesson that hasn't sunk in with Washington, even after a change of management.  They still believe they can pull this shit with impunity.   Ah - wrong.

Now we're the ones that have to straighten up and fly right.   If we keep playing schoolyard bully we're going to get called out and that's a fight we can no longer win.

The Cost of Democracy In Our Ally, Bahrain

Here's video of how our good Sunni ally, Bahrain, Kingdom of, embraces peaceful protest.   The pro-democracy group, armed only with placards, marched on Bahraini armoured vehicles in their path



This allows you a bit of perspective of how the protest would have been seen by Bahraini/Saudi soldiers manning their heavy automatic weapons from their armoured vehicles.   About halfway through the clip is the scene where, after the killings, the protesters return and sit down right in front of those same armoured vehicles.



Oh well, I suppose Canada should really keep its nose out of this.   It wouldn't do for an emerging fossil fuel superpower to criticize another rancid petro-state.

Shades of Hungary, 56 - Czechoslovakia, 68, Bahrain 2011

A military force from Saudi Arabia is reported to have entered Bahrain to supress anti-government demonstrations.

Mohammad al-Maskati, president of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, said several of his fellow activists had seen the troops arriving.

The opposition statement said it considered the arrival of any soldier or military vehicle “an overt occupation of the kingdom of Bahrain and a conspiracy against the unarmed people of Bahrain.” 

Anti-government protesters remained in the streets of Manama, the capital, on Monday, a day after thousands clashed with security forces in the worst day of confrontation since demonstrations began a month ago. The protests are part of the regional turmoil against autocracy but are fed in Bahrain by tensions between the majority Shia population and the Sunni royal family and elite. 


The demonstrators on Sunday effectively shut down the roads leading to the capital’s financial sector and held rallies at the main campus of the university as well. 

We didn't hesitate to condemn the Soviets when they crushed pro-democracy movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.   What are the chances we'll do the same to Saudi Arabia?

Sorry, I must have been daydreaming.   What was I thinking?   The protesters are Bahrain's Shiite majority, Shiite as in Shiite Iran.   This all somehow ties in with Iran and that ties in with nuclear weapon proliferation.   And besides, our buddies are the Sunnis and the anti-democratic rulers of Bahrain are Sunnis and let's not forget the oil factor and - oh well, screw oppression!  Heck, it's probably good for them.

How Bahrain's Sunni Minority Keeps Its Shia Majority Under Control

A big, and potentially telling, difference between the uprisings in Egypt and the rebellion now underway in Bahrain is the makeup of the national security services.

In Egypt, the large army was made up mainly of conscripts, citizen-soldiers.  These conscripts were tightly connected to their families and the civilian population.   Soldiers like that can't be relied upon to turn on their own people.  Otherwise, Hosni Mubarak might still be holding court in Cairo.

The rulers of Bahrain, a Sunni gang, realized a long time ago it was best not to raise a citizen army or security force when the population was 70% Shiite who needed to be kept firmly under state control.  So they resorted to gerrymandering their legislature to ensure Sunni political control and, according to BBC News, they built a mercenary police and security service recruited from foreign Sunnis.

Human rights activists, mostly Shia, organised frequent demonstrations to protest against the slow pace of democratisation and what they saw as the suppression of human rights.

I was also told of how the government was hiring men from Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Pakistan - all Sunni - to serve in the police and security forces.

Fast-tracked to citizenship, they were able to jump the queue for housing and also had voting rights that skewed the demographic in favour of candidates supported by the al-Khalifas.

...protesters were faced by police and security forces who were largely foreign recruits.
 
That may explain the ferocity of the attacks on peaceful demonstrators both on Monday and Tuesday when two people were killed, and again in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Unencumbered with either local connections or tribal loyalties, and green-lighted by the government to use whatever means necessary to break up the demonstration, video evidence shows them charging into sleeping men, women and children with tear gas, rubber bullets, batons and shotguns.

At least four of the dead were shot at close range. A doctor trying to help the wounded told of how he was severely beaten by men speaking Urdu - they were Pakistanis.

But time may be running out for Bahrain's ruling Sunni thugs and their foreign muscle.  The BBC report notes that the uprising has seen plenty of Bahraini Sunnis showing up to join their Shia countrymen in demanding the ouster of their rulers.

Is the House of Saud Orchestrating the Atrocities in Bahrain?

America's original Best Friend Forever in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, may be behind the violent repression of Shia dissent in neighbouring Bahrain.  But veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisk says it's a move that reeks of desperation by the Sunni run Gulf States.   Reporting from Bahrain, Fisk says the Sunni trump card - armed violence - may be faltering.   Bahrain's Shia majority seem to be losing their fear of their Sunni king and his armed thugs, the police and army.

Rumours burned like petrol in Bahrain yesterday and many medical staff were insisting that up to 60 corpses had been taken from Pearl Square on Thursday morning and that police were seen by crowds loading bodies into three refrigerated trucks. One man showed me a mobile phone snapshot in which the three trucks could be seen clearly, parked behind several army armoured personnel carriers. According to other demonstrators, the vehicles, which bore Saudi registration plates, were later seen on the highway to Saudi Arabia. It is easy to dismiss such ghoulish stories, but I found one man – another male nurse at the hospital who works under the umbrella of the United Nations – who told me that an American colleague, he gave his name as "  Jarrod",   had videotaped the bodies being put into the trucks but was then arrested by the police and had not been seen since.

Why has the royal family of Bahrain allowed its soldiers to open fire at peaceful demonstrators? To turn on Bahraini civilians with live fire within 24 hours of the earlier killings seems like an act of lunacy.

But the heavy hand of Saudi Arabia may not be far away. The Saudis are fearful that the demonstrations in Manama and the towns of Bahrain will light equally provocative fires in the east of their kingdom, where a substantial Shia minority lives around Dhahran and other towns close to the Kuwaiti border. Their desire to see the Shia of Bahrain crushed as quickly as possible was made very clear at Thursday's Gulf summit here, with all the sheikhs and princes agreeing that there would be no Egyptian-style revolution in a kingdom which has a Shia majority of perhaps 70 per cent and a small Sunni minority which includes the royal family.

Yet Egypt's revolution is on everyone's lips in Bahrain. Outside the hospital, they were shouting: "  The people want to topple the minister,"  a slight variation of the chant of the Egyptians who got rid of Mubarak, "  The people want to topple the government."

And many in the crowd said – as the Egyptians said – that they had lost their fear of the authorities, of the police and army.

Washington appears intent on sitting this one out.  Then again the Obama administration didn't really intervene with Mubarak until the Egyptian dictator's fate was pretty much decided.  But Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait aren't Egypt, they're oil states and American self-interest may ultimately eclipse any humanitarian qualms about repression of troublesome Shiites.  As The New York Times reports, Washington has been indifferent to recent complaints of human rights abuses,  "  in a kingdom that is an economic and military hub in the Persian Gulf."

 " In a January 2010 cable, the American Embassy in Bahrain criticized the human rights group Freedom House for downgrading Bahrain’s rating from “partly free” to “not free” in its global survey of political rights and civil liberties. The cable asserted that Freedom House had been successfully lobbied by a radical Shiite movement, known as Haq, which rejects the government’s reform efforts.


Another cable passed along doubts about a Human Rights Watch report that said the police were using torture in interrogations — saying it relied heavily on allegations made by members of the same group — though the embassy did urge the Bahraini authorities to undertake a “timely and credible” investigation.

“The embassy was feeding this happy talk for years,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch. “Bahrain was moving on a genuine reform path for several years, but it did a significant U-turn in the last year, and I think the U.S. government was well behind the curve.” 

Could Arab Demonstrations Spark an Islamic Civil War?

The world is watching uprising spreading throughout the Arab world but the unrest in Bahrain is different than the rest.   In this country the majority is Shiite Muslim, nearly three in four.   However the monarch is Sunni and that seems to hold true for the general civil and military power base.

Bahrain's king has now unleashed Sunni firepower on the Shia crowd. The Telegraph reports that the Sunni forces have turned anti-aircraft guns and helicopter gunships on the demonstrators.

As security forces then began to fire anti-air craft guns over their heads and the air filled with tear gas, the protesters' will finally broke.


But even as they fled in headlong panic, a helicopter sprayed gunfire at them and more fell. Paramedics from ambulances that had rushed to the scene darted forward to help the wounded, but they too were shot at. Several were detained and at least one ambulance was impounded.

... Those caught up in the violence were mourners, returning from funerals of three people killed before dawn the previous day when police opened fire on protesters, many of whom were asleep, in a successful bid to regain control of Pearl Roundabout. 

The Shia protesters say they don't want to topple their king.  Instead what they're demanding is a constitutional monarchy in which they have equality with the Sunni minority.

Saudi Arabia also has a sizeable Shia population who just happen to be the majority in the area of the country's major oil fields.