Libya-Bahrain: Two Weights, Two Measures

Eight people were sentenced to life in prison in Bahrain yesterday, and there was no question it was to titillate close ally Saudi Arabia (which Washington, faced with Gadhafi, has asked for help).

NATO continues the war in Libya without decisive success. Despite the deaths of dozens of civilians in bombings in recent days, and despite the growing hostility of the U.S. Congress, the Atlantic alliance is holding tight and continuing the offensive.

It is hard to guess what is happening beyond the media’s radar. We know very little of the logistical support provided to the National Transitional Council of Libya. The rebel oil chief complains about the insufficient funds provided by the coalition. The National Transitional Council has been promised a $500 million aid package and hopes to resume oil exports “soon.” According to British journalist Robert Fisk, Washington has secretly asked Saudi Arabia to provide weapons to the rebel forces (a tactic used since the late ‘70s). The Pentagon has acknowledged that an influx of weapons to Libya could benefit the armed groups in North Africa that claim allegiance to al-Qaida.

Western countries seem ready to do whatever it takes to overthrow the dictatorship in power in Libya — except perhaps Italy, which is probably too dependent on the oil (and petro-dollars) of its old colony to risk its decline. The major Western oil companies have too much to gain in Libya.

In Bahrain, It’s a Different Story

Eight leaders of the Shiite community in the small island off the Arab-Persian Gulf have been sentenced to life in prison for conspiring against the Sunni royal power, along with 13 others who have been accused of wrongdoing and will serve long sentences. To protest against the expedited trial, Shiite militants have once again erected barricades in the capital, Manama.

In all, more than 400 people have been prosecuted for their participation in the rebel movement that took shape during the month of March. The regime’s police have even tortured many people who were in hospitals for being wounded during the protests, accuses Doctors Without Borders.

Despite the very measured condemnation of Washington (which was content to inscribe the Kingdom of Bahrain into a list of countries violating human rights in the beginning of June), the torture of opponents seems to continue; and this despite the lifting of martial law on June 1.

The island of Bahrain is home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and is responsible for the security of the Arab-Persian Gulf. It is Saudi Arabia’s neighboring kingdom, which put an end to the major events of early March by deploying its [Saudi] troops on the island. The king of Bahrain later thanked Saudi Arabia for allowing him to circumvent what he called an “external plot.” Bahrain is connected to Saudi Arabia by a bridge, the King Fahd Causeway, the name of the king that ruled Saudi Arabia until 2005.

The island of Bahrain is composed of a majority Shiite population, with power in the hands of the Sunni. A similar situation prevails in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, located right across from Bahrain, which contains giant fields of crude oil — among the most abundant in the world. The repression in Bahrain sparked massive strikes within the Shiite community in Iraq, as well as strong protests from the Shiite regime in Iran.

Readers will surely blame me, as they did after my previous post on the causes of the Iraq war, of naïve optimism, of pushing open doors [i.e., stating the obvious]. I’ll let the piercing editor of Asia Times, Pepe Escobar, say the obvious: “As far as the inextricable Saudi/Washington nexus goes, democracy may be acceptable for Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. But it’s a very bad idea for Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other friendly Gulf dictatorships.”

The geopolitics of oil is the forgotten elephant in the middle of the room. When one wants to remember its presence, it imposes itself like an indigestible truism: too evident and too necessary to be assimilated into the public debate of democracies greedy for crude. What do you want my little lady? The elephant is too big to be moved!

Between 2009 and 2010, the amount of arms sales authorized by Washington to Bahrain went up from $88 million to $200 million. The troops of the Saudi National Guard in charge of normalizing the situation in Bahrain have always benefited from equipment and training by the United States. They were also trained by Great Britain.

France also has its “friendly dictatorship” in the Persian Gulf. The emirate of Abu Dhabi, home to a French military base since 2009 and about to inaugurate a new branch of the Louvre Museum, is the Arab country with the closest ties to the coalition now bombing Libya.

According to Robert Fisk, the pusillanimity of Washington with respect to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia “witnessed the lowest prestige of America in the region since Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz on the USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake in 1945.” Fisk, one of the most respected observers of politics in the world added, “Obama’s failure to support the Arab revolutions until they were all but over lost the U.S. most of its surviving credit in the region.”

The last time that an army of a Persian Gulf country entered another country in the Gulf, it was the Iraq army in Kuwait in August of 1990. … This month, a blogger from Kuwait was arrested in Bahrain for having posted on Twitter information about the repression of the rebellion on the island. The story makes strange concentric circles around that gulf, where more than half of the world’s oil reserves lie.

The inability of the United States and other Western democracies to say that it has been about Saudi Arabia can reverberate like a warning. As oil reserves run out elsewhere in the world, the powers in the Gulf, starting with Saudi Arabia, will become more and more important and less likely to take criticism. “The world will depend more and more on a smaller number of countries in the Middle East,” the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, warned a couple weeks ago.*

*Editor’s note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.