PermanentSleep
03-18-2011, 07:51 PM
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-sum-all-fears-5032
The Sum of All Fears
Michael Scheuer March 17, 2011
With the West focused on Libya, Egypt, and Yemen, it may be in tiny Bahrain where Washington pays the piper for 35 years of intervention in the Arab world. A prolonged Sunni-Shia shooting war in Bahrain would make other regional events pale in importance to the United States and the West. Bahrain could well be the place where the world as we know it ends.
Since 1945, Washington has championed, funded (through oil purchases), and defended the Arab Peninsula’s tyrannies. It has backed the Sunni regimes’ suppression of Islamist firebrands, and those governments, in turn, defused some anti-regime ire among their senior clerics and militant Islamists by suppressing the hated Shia minority even more brutally.
These, to say the least, are compelling motivations for the Saudi-led GCC to use military forces to stop a Shia takeover of Bahrain. If the GCC undertakes lengthy military action, the Saudis and their partners may well drag the United States into the conflict via the blank-check war commitment Washington gave Riyadh long ago when it decided to protect the Saudi tyranny in return for easy, inexpensive access to oil. U.S. military involvement in Bahrain also is likely because Saudi armed forces, though armed with hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S.-made arms, are near-to hapless. There is every chance the Saudis, without U.S. help, could be stymied or even beaten by Bahraini Shia fighters. And, as icing on the Saudis' cake, violence in Bahrain would prompt Israel and its U.S.-citizen lobby to press Obama’s administration to help the Sunnis -- whom they hate, but less than Iran -- against those they will call "Iran-backed Shia Bahraini terrorists."
Some may think this scenario far-fetched, but who would have: expected the U.S. military to lose the Afghan and Iraq wars; thought Mubarak and other Arab tyrants would be overthrown; or believed al-Qaeda and its allies would be a threat ten years after 9/11. As always, U.S. interventionism is self-defeating, but as Washington presides over lost wars, a crumbling, tyrant-based strategy in the Arab world, and a growing domestic Islamist threat, the worst may be yet to come.
The Sum of All Fears
Michael Scheuer March 17, 2011
With the West focused on Libya, Egypt, and Yemen, it may be in tiny Bahrain where Washington pays the piper for 35 years of intervention in the Arab world. A prolonged Sunni-Shia shooting war in Bahrain would make other regional events pale in importance to the United States and the West. Bahrain could well be the place where the world as we know it ends.
Since 1945, Washington has championed, funded (through oil purchases), and defended the Arab Peninsula’s tyrannies. It has backed the Sunni regimes’ suppression of Islamist firebrands, and those governments, in turn, defused some anti-regime ire among their senior clerics and militant Islamists by suppressing the hated Shia minority even more brutally.
These, to say the least, are compelling motivations for the Saudi-led GCC to use military forces to stop a Shia takeover of Bahrain. If the GCC undertakes lengthy military action, the Saudis and their partners may well drag the United States into the conflict via the blank-check war commitment Washington gave Riyadh long ago when it decided to protect the Saudi tyranny in return for easy, inexpensive access to oil. U.S. military involvement in Bahrain also is likely because Saudi armed forces, though armed with hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S.-made arms, are near-to hapless. There is every chance the Saudis, without U.S. help, could be stymied or even beaten by Bahraini Shia fighters. And, as icing on the Saudis' cake, violence in Bahrain would prompt Israel and its U.S.-citizen lobby to press Obama’s administration to help the Sunnis -- whom they hate, but less than Iran -- against those they will call "Iran-backed Shia Bahraini terrorists."
Some may think this scenario far-fetched, but who would have: expected the U.S. military to lose the Afghan and Iraq wars; thought Mubarak and other Arab tyrants would be overthrown; or believed al-Qaeda and its allies would be a threat ten years after 9/11. As always, U.S. interventionism is self-defeating, but as Washington presides over lost wars, a crumbling, tyrant-based strategy in the Arab world, and a growing domestic Islamist threat, the worst may be yet to come.