Iraq Chaos, Fear of U.S. Realignment Feeds Bahrain Conspiracy Mill

If there's one thing disliked by most people, not to mention stock markets and autocratic leaders of nations held together by tenuous overlapping domestic and international political alliances, it's uncertainty.  Unfortunately, the somehow-unnoticed-until-four-days-ago ISIS takeover of broad swaths of Syria and Iraq has generated quite a bit of it now, and we seem to be approaching a full freak-out stage.

For most of the Arab Gulf, Kuwait being the notable exception given what happened after the last one, the specter of what Juan Cole calls the coming "Second Iran-Iraq War" is most frightening not because the GCC is likely to be caught in the (direct) cross-fire, but because it may finally cement what's been worrying Gulf Arabs -- leaders and ordinary citizens alike -- for the better part of three years: a tangible U.S.-Iranian rapprochement and, in the longer term, inevitable strategic alliance.

A post in Friday's New York Times gives a useful breakdown of the conflicting interests of the U.S., Iran, al-Maliki, the Gulf monarchies, Turkey, and the Iraqi Kurds, but the principle at work is simple enough: the enemy (Iran) of my enemy (radical Sunni insurgents) is my friend.  And when one begins to consider all the potential issue linkages that may be in play -- the Iranian nuclear program, the U.S. position on Syria, Iranian involvement with the Huthis in Yemen -- then the regional implications grow even more dizzying.

The upshot is that once-crazy-sounding claims by the likes of Khalifa bin Ahmad about secret U.S.-Iranian plots to overthrow Bahrain and the Gulf monarchies start to sound just un-crazy enough to get otherwise reasonable people riled up.  Hence the GDN's rendering of the U.S.S. George H. W. Bush preparing to unleash uranium-tipped Tomahawk missiles on Riffa, above.

Apart from analyses about converging U.S. and Iran rhetoric on Iraq, feeding this fear in Bahrain also is a more standard sort of scandal: reports of a "secret" U.S. document outlining a State Department program to "unseat" the Bahraini government.  The paper, apparently obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Middle East Briefing (more on these guys later), in fact is a classified overview of the well-known Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) program.  

The Middle East Briefing "exposé" begins,

The Obama Administration has been pursuing a policy of covert support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other insurgent movements in the Middle East since 2010. MEB has obtained a just-released U.S. State Department document through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that confirms the Obama Administration’s pro-active campaign for regime change throughout the Middle East and North Africa region.

The October 22, 2010 document, titled “Middle East Partnership Initiative: Overview,” spells out an elaborate structure of State Department programs aimed at directly building “civil society” organizations, particularly non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to alter the internal politics of the targeted countries in favor of U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives.

In short, this "secret" document essentially repeats what appears very prominently on the front page of the MEPI website, namely that "MEPI supports organizations and individuals in their efforts to promote political, economic, and social reform in the Middle East and North Africa." (In any case, one has a hard time believing that any real "secrets" would be disclosed to a Dubai-based risk analysis firm, FOIA or no FOIA.)  Indeed, if the "analysts" at Middle East Briefing were looking for real controversy, they would have done better simply to browse MEPI's Wikipedia entry, which includes among other historical details its creation by George W. Bush and the appointment of Dick Cheney's daughter as its first supervisor at the State Department.

On the other hand, how one connects this decade-long program to a "policy of covert support for the Muslim Brotherhood" is beyond my powers of intuition.  I recall many Bahraini students on MEPI programs while I was in the country, and the Muslim Brotherhood is about as far from their politics as one can imagine.

One presumes, then, that the anti-MB purpose relates to the particular views of the founders of this Middle East Briefing, whose website tells that its parent company, "Orient Advisory Group, ... is a research and risk assessment firm based in both Washington DC and Dubai UAE." Hrm, imagine that -- Muslim Brotherhood hysteria coming out of the UAE! Methinks things are beginning to make sense.

The mebriefing.com domain name was registered less than a year ago on September 26, 2013, and since then the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be a sustained focus.  For instance, this article on "cooperation" between Washington and the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood announces that "MEB will publish a series of reports based on documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the US State Department focusing on the US-Muslim Brotherhood 'understandings' in different moments of the relation between the two sides" -- of which the MEPI report is presumably one.

Of course, don't tell this to Bahraini officials, including the Interior Ministry's Assistant Undersecretary for Legal Affairs, as well as al-Asalah MP and anti-American extraordinaire Abd al-Halim Murad, who are busy calling for formal investigations and emergency parliamentary sessions, respectively.  Let's just pray they don't catch wind of the National Democratic Institute -- or the U.S. Navy base in Juffair!

Now for a few couple of items in lazy bullet-point form:

• The GDN has published Bahrain-related excerpts from Hillary Clinton's new submission in the category of the contrived pre-presidential-run memoir.


• Bassiouni gave an interview to Al-Monitor on Bahrain's BICI implementation on the sidelines of last week's U.S.-Islamic Forum in Doha, where he chaired a panel.