If We Lose Bahrain

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

Obscure to most Americans, but vitally important to the American military, the tiny island nation of Bahrain has become the latest Middle Eastern country to be caught in the throes of destabilizing unrest. At least four Bahraini protesters are now dead from the military’s swift response to Thursday’s tumultuous political demonstrations. As with most imperiled states in the region, the political reality of Bahrain is extremely complicated, and the matter of which faction is worthy of support — the populace or the authoritarian government — is no simple question. In many ways, Bahrain is one of the best examples of the Mideast democracy paradox; one that, if lost to the winds of fortune, would be devastating for regional stability, and probably the people of Bahrain as well.

A coveted Archipelago, Bahrain has a long history of domination by world powers. This includes the Persians, the Arabs, the Ottomans, and to some extent, the British. For most of the modern area, Bahrain has been an Islamic country, with roughly 70% of the population identifying as Shia Muslims, and 30%, Sunni. For the last decade, Bahrain had been a parliamentary monarchy, whose al-Khalifa dynasty, which is Sunni, has ruled for more than 200 years.

The current monarch, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, has been a devoted ally to the U.S. and to its strategic interests in Middle East, especially with respect to Iran. In turn, the U.S. has been a military aegis for the tiny Persian Gulf nation, installing the home base of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Jaffair, and actively preventing Iranian influence in the country and elsewhere in the region. This is important, as the Shia Iranian theocracy has often expressed kinship with the Bahraini Shia population, whom the minority-Sunnis frequently accuse of being clients of the Islamic Republic (although the Shiites adamantly deny this is the case). The American Fifth Fleet monitors important strategic waterways in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, and others. It also oversees operations from Afghanistan and Iraq from the Bahraini base.