A Bahraini citizen these days could well be repeating what the Egyptian citizen is saying: Arrows upon arrows are being shot at us from all directions, with the country coming under attack from international parties and groups that are the last party to be qualified to make accusations. In the end, all those are only projecting their past and present flaws and misdeeds upon others. Today, I will not criticize the Shia opposition in Bahrain. At any rate, my past criticism was always addressed to the leadership of the Al-Wefaq group, which represents Iran and not any real interests of the Bahraini people, and which seeks to establish an Iranian-style clerical regime. All I want to say is that the opposition cannot participate in the national dialogue, while at the same time it sends children armed with stones and Molotov cocktails to assault police patrols, and even schools. I have heard opposition leaders say: We are negotiating and resisting. However, they are only resisting the future of Bahrain for Iranian colonial reasons. To be sure, having militias in Shia villages and isolating villages from one another is not in the interest of Bahrain. King Hamad bin Isa told me that dialogue is the only way ahead, and I heard the same opinion from the Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Mubarak. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman has said time and again that dialogue is the only way, as did Foreign Minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed, who tried to get his voice across to the US administration. Before those all, and since the start of the crisis in 2011, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad gave me an overview stating the opposition's demands that he would fulfill through dialogue, and this remains his position today. The best thing I heard about the dialogue came from a senior Bahraini official, who said that the opposition was trying to buy time, and not to reach a settlement. The opposition, he said, was waiting to see the outcome of the transition taking place in the region, particularly in Syria. If the regime and Hezbollah emerge victorious, the opposition would step up its demands, he held, but if they are defeated, they would accept whatever is on offer. In the meantime, the US ambassador to Bahrain Thomas Krajeski criticized the way the security services have dealt with protests, but he failed to see how the “brave men" of the opposition send their young children into harm's way and incite them to terrorism. The US State Department also issued a report in 2012 on human rights in Bahrain, which ended up seeing the problem only with one eye. I do not know the US ambassador in Bahrain. He could be a holdover of the neocons, or simply an ignorant. Yet, I know US policy both as a student and a writer. The United States is the only country in the world that has deployed nuclear weapons against civilian targets, killing hundreds of thousands of people. The United States has backed every military dictator in South America, and helped topple democratically-elected governments. The United States killed millions of people in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere. As Arabs, we are yet to survive the US push for exporting its democracy, which has so far killed one million Arabs and Muslims in Iraq, in a war based on fabricated oil-related and Israeli premises. Not a single official in the Bush administration has been tried for their role in the carnage. Under the Bush administration, prisoners were tortured at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and some of them died under torture according to international reports. The same is true in the Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq. In the United States itself, around 10,000 people die in gun-related violence each year. The author of this column is someone in the political right with bourgeois ambitions and who is fond of the United States. Yet, he knows that America is no longer the country of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved the world from the threat of Nazism, or Dwight Eisenhower, who understood the threat of the military-industrial complex. Today, the United States is pursuing the policies put forward by the neoconservatives, the enemies of God and humanity. President Barack Obama is well-intentioned and is trying hard, but I fear that he will meet the same fate as Jimmy Carter, with the evil cabal defeating his good intentions. At least, the United States has had some legitimacy through its' history, which it can lean on to comment on this or that situation. However, what I do not understand is how Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran and heir to Imam Khomeini, can justify his comments about Bahrain, its government and opposition, and his remarks on rights issues there. Are Bahrain's Shia oppressed more than the Arabs of al-Ahwaz? Are there ministers, MPs, and senior businesspeople among the latter, like there are among the Shia of Bahrain? Furthermore, the reference to ‘petrodollars' is incomprehensible when it comes from a major oil-producing country, whose ayatollahs' foolish policies led to four rounds of sanctions by the UN Security Council, along with sanctions and an embargo by the United States and Europe – the countries of so-called ‘global arrogance'. God is on the side of the oppressed, yes, but the Iranian regime is not. The Iranian regime has led the Iranian people into poverty and hunger, and made their country a pariah in the world. Nevertheless, the Supreme Leader wants to pontificate about Bahrain. If the Supreme Leader had any wisdom, as his official title suggests, he would be seeking to solve his country's problems which did not exist prior to the ayatollahs' regime, before exporting problems to nearby and faraway countries. Beyond that, I hope that the national dialogue will culminate with a reconciliatory agreement. All the pillars of government in Bahrain insist on dialogue as the way forward, and the leaders of the five Shia opposition groups say the same thing. So I set aside the issues of terrorism, foreign allegiance, incitement, and the web of lies, to wish all the best for all the people of Bahrain, be they Sunni, Shia, Christian, or Jewish. I honor them all most highly if they honor most highly the interests of their country. [email protected]
