Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark
Al-Jazeera has made a moving documentary about the protests and the reign of terror that followed. There is growing pressure on the channel to stop its broadcast, after all Qatar is part of the GCC. Hopefully it will survive on YouTube.
What is completely missing from this documentary is any geopolitical context. The fact of the matter is that the White House authorized the Saudi invasion and the brutal crackdown by the al Khalifa regime. I have covered these matters at length, for example here and here. This is routinely depicted as 'Obama's hands are tied' in the paper of record.
Policymakers are convinced that a Shi'ite majority democratic regime will ally itself with Iran due to sectarian gravity. Its utter nonsense of course. A prosperous Shi'ite-majority democracy right on the doorstep of Iran will undermine the Islamic regime's efforts to crush its own democracy protestors. Policymakers are scared of any change in the status quo and any threat to stability in this strategically most important region. In foreign policy literature, stability is a technical word–a regime is considered stable if it is pro-Western and pro-Business. Noam Chomsky explains it much better.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaTKDMYOBOU]