Draw A Firm Line

 Therefore, the Henry Jackson Society:

1. Believes that modern liberal democracies set an example to which the rest of the world should aspire.
2. Supports a ‘forward strategy’ – involving diplomatic, economic, cultural, and/or political means — to assist those countries that are not yet liberal and democratic to become so.
3. Supports the maintenance of a strong military, by the United States, the countries of the European Union and other democratic powers, armed with expeditionary capabilities with a global reach, that can protect our homelands from strategic threats, forestall terrorist attacks, and prevent genocide or massive ethnic cleansing.
4. Supports the necessary furtherance of European military modernisation and integration under British leadership, preferably within NATO.
5. Stresses the importance of unity between the world’s great democracies, represented by institutions such as NATO, the European Union and the OECD, amongst many others.
6. Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that the political or human rights pronouncements of any international or regional organisation which admits undemocratic states lack the legitimacy to which they would be entitled if all their members were democracies.
7. Gives two cheers for capitalism. There are limits to the market, which needs to serve the Democratic Community and should be reconciled to the environment.
8. Accepts that we have to set priorities and that sometimes we have to compromise, but insists that we should never lose sight of our fundamental values. This means that alliances with repressive regimes can only be temporary. It also means a strong commitment to individual and civil liberties in democratic states, even and especially when we are under attack.

Or, as the Euston Manifesto puts it:

We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently "understand", reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy — regimes that oppress their own peoples and movements that aspire to do so. We draw a firm line between ourselves and those left-liberal voices today quick to offer an apologetic explanation for such political forces.

In the last few days and hours, at and arising out of the Gulf Cooperation Conference in Riyadh, it has become clear that these principles face spectacular violation in the form of the American-backed scheme for Saudi Arabia, if not quite to annex Bahrain outright, then certainly to do so for all practical purposes, thereby to secure the base of the United States Fifth Fleet, which the fairly and increasingly democratic polity there might wish to expel, possibly even causing voters in the United States to question exactly why they were paying for it and for so very many other such unconstitutional military colonies circling the globe. Asking questions, not least, about why the preservation of those colonies should involve the sort of injustices perpetrated on the Chagos Islands, or on Ascension Island, or putatively and monstrously in Bahrain.

Bahrain is pluralist, with at least eight indigenous ethnic groups, including a small but very ancient and entrenched Jewish community which maintains the Gulf’s only synagogue and Jewish cemetery, and also including a community of black African descent, part of the East African diaspora in the East hardly known about by those very used to the West African diaspora in the West. Around one fifth of the inhabitants of Bahrain is non-Muslim, and around half of that is Christian. The women’s headscarf is strictly optional. No one disputes that Bahraini Muslims are two-thirds Shi’ite. Correspondingly, no one disputes that Bahraini Muslims are one-third Sunni. The Shi’ites in Bahrain are a very great deal better off than they are in Saudi Arabia. That is before we even start about the descendants of African slaves, never mind about Christians or Jews. Those last may not enter the Kingdom.

Bahrain is also fundamentally and increasingly democratic. All legislation requires the approval of both Houses of Parliament, and, while one of those Houses is entirely appointed by the monarch (as in Britain or Canada), the other is entirely elected by universal suffrage. The Upper House, to which women are regularly appointed to make up for their dearth in the elected Lower House, includes a Jewish man and a Christian woman; the latter was the first woman ever to chair a Parliament in the Arab world. The Ambassador to the United States is a Jewish woman, the first Jewish ambassador of any modern Arab state, although the third woman to be an Ambassador of Bahrain. She was previously an elected parliamentarian. Notably, she describes her Jewish identity as unconnected, either to the State of Israel, which Bahrain does not recognise, or to the Holocaust, of which she knew nothing until she was 14.

Her British higher education and British husband, as well as the fact that the synagogue brings in its rabbis from Britain, point to the very close ties indeed between that country and this. We installed the Al Khalifa in 1783, and they have done everything to keep up the link ever since. From Bahrain, via Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to Oman is Britain’s natural and longstanding sphere of influence, as their rulers would and do tell you. It is beyond me why they are not in the Commonwealth. Whereas Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are the American sphere of influence. A Saudi takeover of Bahrain, doubtless with Qatar, Oman and the Emirates to follow, would not quite be an American annexation of Canada, or an American invasion of a Commonwealth Realm or a British Overseas Territory in the West Indies, or a repetition of the injustice against the British inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, or entirely reminiscent of the suppression of the democratic representation of the British people of Ascension Island. But it would not be very far off.

The present state of affairs in Bahrain is perfectly acceptable even to the Salafi Members of Parliament. We have characteristically failed to ask which, if any, part of it the demonstrators wished to conserve. Which, if any, part of it would be conserved by transformation into a Saudi satellite state, either? Again, we have not asked. Again, we never do. It is very, very, very high time that we did.