{EOP}Bahrain's "revolution" and it's background - Detailed analysis

The new year has brought with it a strange wave of "revolutions" sweeping across the middle east. Enormous amount of coverage and dedicated airtime is being given to these revolts that are occurring in a very orderly manner across the Puppet States of United States of Zionism. We suggest our respected readers to not let the media make them scratch the surface, rather only an in-depth and comprehensive analysis can reveal the true sadistic picture of this blind manipulation of directionless illiterate Muslim masses across the globe. When, in 1968, the British government announced that Britain's formal protectorate in the Gulf would end in 1971, American planners were anxious and distraught. After Suez, the USZ had taken the lead in defending Anglo-American interests in the Middle East, but the structure of power in the 'East of Suez' was still conserved by the old colonial power. The Persian Gulf states at that time supplied 30% of total oil resources. The reconstruction of Europe and especially Japan after WWII was driven by Gulf oil. And the USZ had no alternative structure of security elaborated for when Britain let go.

Bahrain, off the eastern shore of the Saudi Kingdom, had been subject to many of the same basic forms of state and market formation as the Saudi monarchy itself. Its commercial markets were first penetrated by British capitalism when East India company adventurers first arrived in the eighteenth century. It became a British 'protectorate', courtesy of gunboat diplomacy (absolutely literally speaking), in 1861. The British had first imposed a 'General Treaty of Peace' on Gulf states, signalling their subordination to British power in the 1820s. This stated that Bahrain was not permitted to dispose of its territory except to the United Kingdom, or get involved in a relationship with any government without British consent. It was a way of keeping competing European powers out of the Gulf. The British later imposed their own “Resident in the Persian Gulf” to manage their growing paramountcy in the region through a series of local advisors in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait. All of this was supported and maintained by a large naval squadron. In return, Britain promised to support the rule of Shaikh Al Khalifa, which established the UK's tradition of supporting Sunni dynastic rule over a largely Shia population (And vice versa in other parts of Muslim lands) so that at the time of need, people can be manipulated and ignited in the name of Islam to topple the government who is disobedient to UK and East India Company. This system of rule was later centred on the British Raj, which maintained a Shaikhdom in Bahrain, and used the islands-state as a base for defending its regional interests, particularly during WWI.

Until the discovery and use of oil, Bahrain's major trades had included pearling, but throughout the 19th Century it diversified sufficiently for Manama to become the dominant trading city in the Gulf region, overtaking Basra and Kuwait. When oil was discovered in 1932, however, and Bahrain began exporting in 1934, it was just as traditional industries were suffering a severe decline amid global Depression similar to the one that is looming nowadays. Unemployment had been soaring, and the pearl industry sinking. The sudden availability of oil revenues, a third of which were nominally controlled by the Shaikdom, paid for state-led capitalist development. Bahrain became what some social scientists call a 'rentier state', in as much as it depended by far on revenues derived from the sale of its oil on international markets than from the productive efforts of the society as a whole. The modern state of Saudi Arabia was formed under King Abdul Aziz bin Saud with British support in 1932, and it too began to export oil, with the industry taking off in 1938. This is when the current ties with the Saudi kingdom and USZ capital were first forged.

Aramco Core Area, Dhahran (Saudi Arabia)

When Socal and Texaco initially combined in 1936 to form Aramco, the subsidiary was intended to run the oil concessions in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Aramco simultaneously created a public identity for itself as a partner in development and modernization, and reproduced the Jim Crow labour market structures then prevalent in the United States of Zionism. The racial hierarchies maintained in the labour force, with white American workers at the apex and migrant workers from southern Asia at the bottom, still have operative effects in Bahrain's political system today. But the PR efforts, which involved paying a platoon of journalists, writers and scholars, building up research centres. Writers like Wallace Stegner took the 'myth of the frontier' elaborated by Frederick Jackson Turner, in which America's rugged democratic experiment was held to depend on the restless advance westward as hardy American citizens settled and improved otherwise empty land, and applied it to the oil frontiers. There, the oil companies were the pioneering heroes of civilization, the natives barely registering except as grateful recipients of racial uplift. At the same time, the British established more bases on the islands to entrench its control.

In partnership with British imperialism, represented in the person of 'advisor' Charles Belgrave, the oil firms helped construct forms of governance, geographies of accumulation, and market structures that guaranteed that this miraculous substance of myriad uses, this black gold, this vital source of industrialisation and advancement, would be controlled and directed by the 'West'. Bahrain, along with other Gulf states, was controlled from British India until 1947. In the postwar era, Britain maintained its 'informal' empire in the Gulf through a system of local advisors and client regimes backed by military force. Modernization projects, such as the creation of a national education system, were built under British imperial tutelage. Challenges to the regime were assisted by British weaponry, as during the suppression of anti-British riots in the immediate post-war years, the containment of strikes by the left-wing National Union Committee, the crushing of pro-Egyptian demonstrations in 1956, and the putting down of the pro-independence March Intifada in 1965.

Until 1971, then, the British provided the security and patronage framework within which USZ oil capital operated. Under the banner of 'guided development', the British ruling class cultivated sterling-based networks of regional clients, and developed internal security apparati (mukhabarat) to sustain regimes which would operate only minimally within the integument of formal sovereignty. A global hierarchy of sovereign states operating an 'open door' policy was in principle compatible with USZ imperial hegemony, provided there was no revolutionary challenge to that hegemony. As such, the USZ had not initially worried overly about the Free Officers taking over Egypt in 1952, or Iraq in 1958. The real worry came later, in the 1960s, when Arab nationalism took a radical leftist turn. And though one context of Britain's declaration of withdrawal from its 'East of Suez' engagements was a traumatic defeat for Arab nationalism, there was still no certainty that ensuing movements and regimes would provide favourable territories for continued USZ capital accumulation. Britain's retreat from its imperial commitments 'East of Suez' reflected defeat of a similar kind to that being inflicted on the USZ in Vietnam - this despite often brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Malaysia and Aden (Yemen). Because of the growing political and economic costs of these commitments for a crisis-hit British capitalism, the Conservatives pledged to honour Wilson's withdrawal plans.

The USZ strategy in the Gulf was thus to engage in a Metternichian 'power-balancing' strategy. This involved strengthening its ally, the Shah, who asserted an Iranian claim to Bahrain, while also working to bolster the opposing Ba'athist regime in Iraq. With respect to Bahrain, a USZ naval squadron took up where the British navy departed. The formally independent emirate of Bahrain maintained its cosy relationship with Anglo-American power. Despite the creation of a parliament elected solely by male voters in 1973, the monarch retained the ability to impose laws by decree, such as the highly repressive State Security Law.Surging oil revenues in the 1970s contributed to the restoration of relative political stability, and attracted waves of migrant workers from civil war struck Lebanon and from southern Asia. The decline of the Left and of Arab nationalism in the same period opened the field of dissent to Islamists inspired by the then orchestrated Iranian revolution of 1979, when Shah turned against USZ and the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain attempted a coup in 1981. In this context, the Anglo-American archipelago became an important counter-weight to the Islamic Republic, as its hosting of the USZ Navy's 'Fifth Fleet' provided a basis for the USZ military to threaten and contain Iran while Saddam Hussein mounted his invasion.

The ties with the Saudi kingdom, which was engaged in a region-wide struggle to prevent the influence of the Iranian "revolution" from spreading, were crucial in helping the Bahrain monarch brutally crush the Islamists. In 1981, the Gulf Cooperation Council was forged to coordinate economic and political strategies among six key Gulf states, under Saudi hegemony. Economic associations were created to avoid the duplication of outlay. The Saudi-Kuwaiti-Bahraini Petrochemicals Company (Gulf Petrochemicals Company) was also formed. The Saudi-Bahrain connection was even rendered manifest by the King Fahd Causeway, a World Bank supported white elephant which has connected the Aramco city of Dahran to the refineries of Bahrain since completion in 1986. When oil prices collapsed in the 1990s, unemployment protests culminated in a wave of uprisings took place lasting from 1994 to 2000. The challenge to the monarchy united leftists, Islamists and liberals, and was met with much the same forms of indiscriminate violence by Saudi-backed security forces as we have witnessed recently. In fact, the attacks were clearly and deliberately targeted at Shi'ite areas. 

The uprising only ended when a new ameer promised a series of liberalizing political reforms specified in the National Action Charter, which - while carefully conserving private property and the market - included some promises of social justice, the defense of public property, and in reality the extension of same kind of “gunboat democracy”. The official state of emergency imposed since 1975 was dropped, and women were permitted to vote in the circus of elections for the first time in 2002. This reform was intended to do what repression had not succeeded in doing, conserving the power of the ruling clan.

The uprising in Bahrain began on the 10th anniversary of the National Action Charter being passed by a so called referendum. The accumulated grievances over the continuous suppression of grass root level, deliberate and dictated discrimination against the Shia, the use of torture and repression, and the lack of workers' rights were already producing a serious challenge to the monarchy. But then, Tunisia. Then, Egypt. As protests were prepared for 14th February, the regime panicked. The kingdom ordered that every family be given 1000 Bahraini dinars (equivalent to $2,600) to celebrate the anniversary of the National Action Charter. But the bribe didn't work. Nor did the King's gesture of releasing 450 political prisoners. Iran is playing a very strange role by continuously highlighting Shia sentiments and giving examples of 1979's so called revolution to emotionally energize the anti-government protests keeping in mind it's previous claims about Bahrain. The police used tear gas and rubber bullets on 14th February. On 15th, they panicked and fired on the funeral of a protester killed the previous day to further intensify the protests. Protesters took control of the Pearl Roundabout in Manama. On 16th, the protests grew larger. On 17th, hundreds were injured and dozens killed as police attacked the occupation of Pearl Square. The government imposed a state of emergency. Security forces crackdowns included the murder of paramedics tending to injured protesters. An important thing to note here is that not a single statement came from USZ or any other Zionist regime against the government of Bahrain unlike their repetitive statements and even military mobilizations against Libya's Gaddafi. The reality is that due to the earlier CIA orchestrated and deliberately sparked protests in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the waves of uprising have started penetrating on their own into the long suppressed Muslim masses of the Middle East.

This chart clearly shows the reason behind an international silence on Bahrain as compared to Egypt and Libya - Bahrain's regime, if removed, can cause a major economic crisis for Anglo American Oil Mafia

Weapons from Britain and the USZ sustain Bahrain's crackdown, and the Saudi kingdom is reported to be supporting the repression in Bahrain. So, as in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East - above all Palestine - what the rebels are up against is not just their own state but a global configuration of power predicated on oil flows that stands behind it. It is that system of power based on neoliberal accumulation and oil capital. If the Bahrain monarchy falls, then the crisis of USZ imperialism is intensified. The country may cease to host the USZ Navy. Saudi Arabia may no longer have its junior ally, and its own population, not least the Shia majority, may start to build on the protests already in evidence.

At some point, the USZ will have to up its ante. But what will it do? Invade? Let Israhell off the leash? And if it does either of these things, what are the chances that it may just radicalise and spread the revolution further still? In reality, the New World Order is doomed and Israhell's inevitable demise is haunting the Zionist Globalists.