Page 1 of
2 How a
tiny kingdom strong-armed the
US By Nick Turse
The
men walking down the street looked ordinary
enough. Ordinary, at least, for these days of
tumult and protest in the Middle East. They wore
sneakers and jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts. Some
waved the national flag. Many held their hands up
high. Some flashed peace signs. A number were
chanting, "Peaceful, peaceful."
Up ahead,
video footage shows, armored personnel carriers
sat in the street waiting. In a deadly raid the
previous day, security forces had cleared
pro-democracy protesters from the Pearl roundabout
in Bahrain's capital, Manama. This evening, the
men were headed back to make their voices heard.
The unmistakable crack-crack-crack of
gunfire then erupted, and most of the men
scattered. Most, but not all. Video footage shows
three who never made it off the blacktop. One in
an aqua
shirt
and dark track pants was unmistakably shot in the
head. In the time it takes for the camera to pan
from his body to the armored vehicles and back,
he's visibly lost a large amount of blood.
Human Rights Watch would later report that
Redha Bu Hameed died of a gunshot wound to the
head.
That incident, which occurred on
February 18, was one of a series of violent
actions by Bahrain's security forces that left
seven dead and more than 200 injured last month.
Reports noted that peaceful protesters had been
hit not only by rubber bullets and shotgun
pellets, but - as in the case of Bu Hameed - by
live rounds.
The bullet that took Bu
Hameed's life may have been paid for by US
taxpayers and given to the Bahrain Defense Force
by the US military. The relationship represented
by that bullet (or so many others like it) between
Bahrain, a tiny country of mostly Shi'ite Muslim
citizens ruled by a Sunni king, and the Pentagon
has recently proven more powerful than American
democratic ideals, more powerful even than the
president of the United States.
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.
Bullets
and Blackhawks 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.
These deals included the
purchase of a wide range of items from vehicles to
weapons systems. Just this past summer, to cite
one example, the Pentagon announced a
multimillion-dollar contract with Sikorsky
Aircraft to customize nine Blackhawk helicopters
for Bahrain's Defense Force.
About
face On February 14, reacting to a growing
protest movement with violence, Bahrain's security
forces killed one demonstrator and wounded 25
others. In the days of continued unrest that
followed, reports reached the White House that
Bahraini troops had fired on pro-democracy
protesters from helicopters. (Bahraini officials
responded that witnesses had mistaken a telephoto
lens on a camera for a weapon.) Bahrain's army
also reportedly opened fire on ambulances that
came to tend to the wounded and mourners who had
dropped to their knees to pray.
"We call
on restraint from the government," Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton said in the wake of
Bahrain's crackdown. "We urge a return to a
process that will result in real, meaningful
changes for the people there." President Barack
Obama was even more forceful in remarks addressing
state violence in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen: "The
United States condemns the use of violence by
governments against peaceful protesters in those
countries, and wherever else it may occur."
Word then emerged that, under the
provisions of a law known as the Leahy Amendment,
the administration was actively reviewing whether
military aid to various units or branches of
Bahrain's security forces should be cut off due to
human-rights violations. "There's evidence now
that abuses have occurred," a senior congressional
aide told the Wall Street Journal in response to
video footage of police and military violence in
Bahrain. "The question is specifically which units
committed those abuses and whether or not any of
our assistance was used by them."
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".
The six member states
of the Gulf Cooperation Council include (in
addition to Bahrain) Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all of which
have extensive ties to the Pentagon. The
organization reportedly strong-armed the White
House by playing on fears that Iran might benefit
if Bahrain embraced democracy and that, as a
result, the entire region might become
destabilized in ways inimical to US
power-projection policies.
"Starting with
Bahrain, the administration has moved a few
notches toward emphasizing stability over majority
rule," according to a US official quoted by the
Journal. "Everybody realized that Bahrain was just
too important to fail."
It's an oddly
familiar phrase, so close to "too big to fail",
last used before the government bailed out the
giant insurance firm AIG and major financial firms
like Citigroup after the global economic meltdown
of 2008. Bahrain is a small island in the Persian
Gulf, but it is also the home of the US Navy's
Fifth Fleet, which the Pentagon counts as a
crucial asset in the region. It is widely
considered a stand-in for neighboring Saudi
Arabia, America's gas station in the Gulf, and for
the Washington, a nation much too important ever
to fail.
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.
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