Non Sibi Sed Patriae

The United States Fifth Fleet is stationed at Bahrain. It is therefore utterly inconceivable that any country has lived to tell the tale after having invaded Bahrain, unless that invasion had occurred with express American permission, if not on specific American instruction. Unless that country was the United States Navy's vicious old enemy, Israel, which it was not.

Saudi Arabia, home of Wahhabism and homeland of Osama Bin Laden, has acted as America's proxy. Not necessarily in a bad cause, since that action may very well have saved a pluralistic and increasingly democratic state closely allied to Britain. But certainly, though rightly, to put down an uprising such as tends to appeal to the sentimental ignorance of neocons and other Trotskyists, and of liberal interventions. And probably such as to extend Wahhabi influence over the Sunni third of Bahrain's Muslim eighty per cent.

Why didn't the Fifth Fleet's accompanying Marines do it? Better still, why didn't Britain?