(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - The report says former US President George Bush designated Bahrain as a “major non NATO ally” in March 2002.
To shed some light on the issue, We talk with Jeff Steinberg, with the Executive Intelligence Review from Washington.
Q: This pact designates Bahrain as a major non NATO ally, facilitating US arms sales to the country. The US has already been criticized for keeping mum on the crackdown on protesters in Bahrain. But this simply takes it to a whole new step now, doesn't it?
Steinberg: Well, it does but I think it is important to bear in mind that going all the way back to the early 1980s at the time of the Iraq-Iran war that you have the establishment of the [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council [(P)GCC] which of course Saudi Arabia is the most significant member of but Saudi Arabia and the other five member states formed a security path in which they had an understanding with the United States that the internal security of all of those countries would be a common security arrangement in which for example in the recent period we saw the Saudi military crossing the causeway into Bahrain but that the other side of the arrangement was that the [P]GCC as a group and all the member countries would have a pact with the United States to defend against external threats.
So this is a long standing arrangement and of course part of it involves the fact that at the end of the Vietnam War in the mid 1970s, the US was desperate to find countries that would be willing to buy major US military equipment to offset the fact that a lot of equipments that had been produced for Vietnam were no longer needed.
So there is all kinds of economic as well as military agreement and frankly the US has built up these relationships which tends to compromise the US ability to operate as a kind of honest broker.
So when the Arab spring events developed in Bahrain, the US was really in a conflict of interest from the very beginning. What they were interested in was seeing a legitimate expansion of liberties and maybe a move towards the constitutional monarchy which was all set by the security arrangements and as you pointed out these were treaty agreements reached under the Bush administration and actually much earlier.
But they found the American regimes from being able to have a full diplomatic relationship in which there is an encouragement to internal freedoms and development of better internal politics. So the US is definitely both benefiting but also hamstrung in these relationships.
Q: Right, I'd like you to elaborate on that because with the start of the uprisings and revolutions in the region, time was ripe for the US to build new bridges with the people of these countries as opposed to the despotic regimes they had risen up against and the extend of that support certainly is not going in that direction. Why hasn't the US followed that path?
Steinberg: Well, you know, it is a very uneven picture and of course, as I say, the treaty agreement, the military treaty agreements, with Bahrain and with the other [P]GCC countries really do restrict the United States.
They basically oblige the United States to put security considerations over the interest of encouraging true openings of democracy and better relationships for the people of those countries.
In the case of Bahrain, I think it is important to realize that the initial protests were not sectarian. The Saudis tried to pose the Bahrain revolt as if it was somehow or other a kind of Iranian intervention using the Shiite majority to try to overthrow the monarchy.
There was nothing like that going on but increasingly the strategy was to take what will legitimate interests that where both Shia and Sunni people working together and to turn it into strictly sectarian issue and to try to basically shift the blame on Iran when there was absolutely no evidence of Iranian participation.
So the American foreign policy, in this part of the world, has been badly discredited and in the eyes of the majority of people, the United States is in fact playing a role that runs very counter to our actual history.
Remember, we made a revolution against the British empire who established our nation's independence and sovereignty and here we are and certainly in the eyes of the people of Bahrain and many of these other countries taking the side of imperial powers and defense of reactionary monarchist regimes.
It is a very unfortunate situation and I think the US winds up being a big loser in this along with the people who have legitimate aspirations for better conditions of life and more active participation in the government decisions.
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