The New Bahraini Diplomacy: Screw All You Guys

-- "Man, I love this guy right here!"
-- "No, THIS guy!"

It is a telling descriptor of the state of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East that a American diplomat's expulsion from a country -- an allied country, no less -- elicits no more than perfunctory "deep concern" from the State Department, in the way that it might be "deeply concerned" about recent inflammatory comments by the Ecuadorian Minister of Agriculture, or about the recent shortage of hamour at LuLu.

Yet that's precisely where we are today in Bahrain, which does not even bother to call the U.S. bluff any longer, telling its longtime political-military patron instead to take its Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and shove it.  Tom Malinowski, former Washington director for Human Rights Watch appointed to his current position in 2012, got the boot Tuesday two days after attending the Ramadan majlis of al-Wifaq, where, as seen above, he caught up with his old buddy 'Ali Salman over some Johnny Walker Blue.

It would seem that photos from the event went viral -- including one that also included the DCM of U.S. Embassy Manama -- sparking mass spontaneous ventricular tachycardia among Bahraini Sunnis, who then appealed to the state to take action.  And the rest, as they say -- as they say -- is history. Before Malinowski could even land in Washington, 'Ali Salman was brought in for questioning, having violated the newly-instituted law against meetings with diplomatic representatives without official permission.  (It would seem to be the first time that the law, prompted in the first place by public outrage at the U.S. Ambassador's meetings with al-Wifaq, has been enforced.) Reuters reports that Sh. 'Ali has since been charged, along with Khalil al-Marzuq, himself only recently cleared on separate "terrorism" charges.

Apart from the aforementioned "deeply concerned" from the State Department and some comments by Malinowski himself, Bahrain's unprecedented move seems to have generated a disproportionately muted official reaction.  Perhaps State realizes now that it may not have been a great idea to send as political ambassador the former Washington Director of Human Rights Watch and author of a summer 2012 article titled "Bahrain: Prison Island." As Simon Henderson says in coverage at the Wall Street Journal, "It's pretty provocative to send someone who is an outspoken critic of your country to go and preach human rights. ... It might have been appropriate, but it's not diplomatic. ... You're asking the Bahrainis to eat humble pie."

Such is all the more true as Malinowski's apparent mission for the trip was to attempt to broker an agreement between al-Wifaq and "regime moderates" (i.e., the Crown Prince) that would secure the former's participation in upcoming parliamentary elections.  (Though it isn't clear from what I've read whether he met Sh. Salman before being booted.)  At a time when Gulf Sunnis see the U.S. aiding the Shi'a-led government in Iraq against a Sunni insurgency, continue to show no interest in stopping the bloodshed against Sunnis in Syria, and poised to sign a nuclear agreement with Iran, one could see where American involvement in Bahrain, symbolized in the person of Malinowski, may not have been viewed as impartial or to the likely benefit of ordinary Sunnis.

A cartoon in Akhbar al-Khaleej.  Malinowski to "Snake of the Embassy" (presumably U.S. Ambassador Krajeski): "You're a snake like me; why didn't they kick you out too?"

Finally, not helping matters also were recent events prior to Malinowski's visit, including a long piece in the New York Times tracing post-Arab Spring sectarianism back to Bahrain (one that did not include any quotations from government officials), and more importantly the killing of a police officer in a bombing in East Ekar the day before Malinowski's visit. Of course, critics would say that al-Wifaq and other oppositions societies, while claiming human rights violations and cultivating U.S. and Western attention on that basis, in fact are violating the rights of the rest of the country's residents by continuing to foment deadly extremism among members of their own community.

Illustrative of this range of reactions is a New York Times editorial that appeared after the expulsion titled "Bahrain's Bad Decision." The article is useful not in its substance, which is highly critical of the Bahraini move and does not even cite Malinowski's previous role at HRW, but in the readers' comments on the piece, which fall into the following three familiar categories:

• Idealist: Of course the U.S. is right to be critical of Bahrain's human rights record. The U.S. should have pulled out the Fifth Fleet a long time ago; if not for the U.S. Navy, the Al Khalifa wouldn't have a country left to oppress.
• Anti-Imperialist: Of course the U.S. is trying to overthrow the Bahraini government. Just look what they did in the Ukraine.  How is that working out exactly?  The Gulf monarchies are dictatorships but they're the only real friends the U.S. has, and we should stop repaying them by destabilizing their countries whenever we get a chance.
• Realist: If human rights were so important to the State Department or the U.S. government, then they should stop sending Assistant Secretaries every six months and instead do something about it, like threaten to pull out the Fifth Fleet. Short of that or some other costly signal that they are serious, they need to shut up about human rights in Bahrain and elsewhere, which only serves to give unfounded hope to the opposition, rile up government supporters, and insult everyone's intelligence. 

Finally, also on the subject of playing nicely (or not) with friends, Bahrain's FM finally has come out in the open with long-rumored accusations that Qatar is stealing its (Sunni) citizens, which Sh. Khalid cites as a main reason for the suspension of diplomatic relations in a televised interview. Gulf News quotes him as saying,

Many Bahraini citizens have been lured by Qatari nationality under the pretext that they have families in Qatar. The issue of nationality has a security dimension. Another issue is that the Qataris are discriminating between the citizens of Bahrain and are acting on a sectarian basis. If the Bahraini is Sunni and member of an Arab tribe in Bahrain, then the door is wide open [for Qatari citizenship]. However, if he is Shiite, the door is shut."

Of course, since the families being "lured" are all tribal families (I've heard Al Jalahma and Al Mana'i, e.g.) with other branches in Qatar, the characterization as "sectarian" in nature, while perhaps true in the sense of their being Sunni, owes simply to the fact that there are no Shi'i tribes in the northern Arabian Peninsula.