Washington’s State Islamic Allies

From: Washington's Long War on Syria

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Most people in the West remember the Arab Spring protests as touching the Arab republics—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and of course, Libya and Syria. They seldom remember, or know at all, that upheavals occurred in most of the Arab monarchies, as well. There were protests in Saudi Arabia (the world’s largest buyer of U.S. weapons), Bahrain (a British naval base from the early 1800s until the 1970s, when it became the home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet), as well as in Kuwait and Oman (also sites for a number of U.S. military installations). The protesters called for an end to monarchy and transition to representative democracy, along with a more equitable distribution of resources. Protests royal dictators—the emirs, sultans and kings of the Gulf Arab states, who ruled their subjects with an iron fist, and were doted on by Washington as allies—received comparatively less media attention than did unrest in Libya and Syria. The attention they did receive lacked the moralizing quality of press reports that addressed insurrections in the two secular Arab nationalist states. We heard endlessly about the use of lethal force to quell internal disturbances in Libya and Syria, and less about the use of the armed power of the state to suppress uprisings in the Arab Gulf kingdoms. When the Saudi monarchy dispatched tanks to Bahrain to crush protests there, Western journalists and commentators failed to mount the high moral horse from which they had excoriated Gaddafi and Assad for having the audacity to use the coercive powers of the state to contain armed rebellions. Rather than demonizing the Saudi authorities as vicious brutes who butchered a nascent movement for democracy, as they did authorities in Syria and Libya, Western media justified the monarchs’ crackdowns in realpolitik terms.

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