Bastards in Bahrain.

Well the Grand Prix maintained its record of holding races in horrible regimes. The little island of Bahrain is just the most recent example, but there were the races in Apartheid South Africa and Fascist Spain of yesteryear. It was good to find updates in the mainstream, just a glimpse at the courageous pro-democracy movement: particularly the ongoing hunger strike by Abdulhadi al-Khawaja. The most recent protests and deaths at the hands of the police forces have received much more attention than they would have otherwise. The repression in Bahrain now has John Yates, once a candidate for the top job in the Met, to defend the House of Khalifa. Well, you've got to pay the mortgage somehow! On top of this, King Hamad has been invited to dine at the celebrations of the Queen's Jubilee. All of this comes over a year since the Saudi intervention in Bahrain was waged. The intervention embodied the West's anxiety at the prospect of democracy in the Middle East.

First it was Bahrain, then it was Libya. By then, Ben Ali and Mubarak had been swept away by the revolutionary contagion spreading rapidly from country to country. You can say it was oil in Libya, but you can't simply say that about Bahrain. The island isn't simply a major oil-producer unlike it's neighbours. There is a reason that the US Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain, it is well situated to defend the status quo. In the West the fear was that the uprising would establish a Shi'ite dominated state in the Gulf. This would go far to undermine the Arab facade of US client-states which keep a friendly hand on the oil spigot. It could mean a new ally for Iran, not to mention give ideas to the Shi'ite dominated eastern province of Saudi Arabia. This is at a time when the Iraqi government is looking to avoid another war with Iran and instead wants stable relations. Meanwhile a civil war rages in Syria with the Ba'ath Party just about clinging to power, its talons bloody as ever.

As with the violent repressions in Syria and Libya, the reason given in Bahrain was to defend the nation from 'foreign interference'. Similarly, in Egypt, Mubarak had anti-Semitic propaganda distributed as he called on Bibi Netanyahu to send the IDF into Tahrir Square. By then it was too late to save the tyrant, the military shunted Mubarak out of office hoping to buy-off the opposition. Meanwhile the Israeli political class watched with great unease as the US gave up on blocking elections in Egypt after it became impossible to save the dictator. And for good reason, Egypt has been a vital US proxy since Sadat dragged the country into a tacit alliance with Israel in the 1970s. By then Sadat had already imposed market reforms which destroyed the country's middle-class and opened the door to corruption. After the rebellions of 2011 suppressed, the serious question for the House of Khalifa is how to reformulate the old order.

Ironically, it was in eastern Arabia that a esoteric Ismaili sect set out to build a society based on reason and equality. By 899 the Qarmatians had established a utopian republic in what is now Bahrain. Its system of governance consisted of a council of six with a chief who was the first among equals. Out of a millenarian fervour the Qarmatians sacked Mecca in 930, stealing the Black Stone and dumping dead pilgrims in the Well of Zamzam. The Qarmatians may have first attempted to redirect the pilgrimage away from Mecca before holding it for ransom. Whatever the case, over 20 years later, the Black Stone was left shattered in the Great Mosque of Kufa in Iraq. The opportunity to seize control had come for the Qarmatians from the aftermath of the slave rebellion in Basra, which raged from 869 to 883 and had left Baghdad diminished in power. Hundreds of thousands of slaves participated as the rebels held that the most qualified man should reign - even if he is a black slave.

Even in recent history, Bahrain has seen uprisings and significant protest over the last 20 years for democracy with the state managing to fend-off each successive wave of opposition. Given that Bahrain is an important artery to the heart of capitalism in the Middle East, it may mean that the GCC itself has to been shaken up sufficiently to bring about democratic change. This would mean serious change in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and the UAE.  Notice there has been no regime change and no reform in any of these states. The repression was swift to prevent any serious opposition from even appearing on the streets. This is where most of the power in the region is concentrated, the epicentre of capital accumulation from an unsustainable energy trade. The Arab Spring has shaken a rotten status quo in the region to its core, but has yet to fundamentally change the Middle East. This isn't to say that it has been a failure, far from it, it means that it has to go further.

The Autumn of the Colonel.

Escape to Hell.

There is no sign of the Colonel, with his family safely in Algeria, after Tripoli was seized by Berber rebels from the West and not from the East which has since led to the National Transitional Council taking seat in Tripoli. The Berbers had been suppressed under Gaddafi and in the end the Berbers sought revenge against the regime. The disparate militias which comprise the rebels will no doubt hold onto territory and barter for political power. The rumours of his whereabouts continue, some say the Colonel is hauled up in a flat in Tripoli, the labyrinthine tunnels under Libyan soil, somewhere in Algeria, the Libyan desert or in his hometown of Sirte. There is talk at NATO of putting a bounty out on Gaddafi, probably around the size of that put on Osama bin Laden. Days ago NATO thought that there were around 8,000 pro-Gaddafi troops hiding in South Tripoli, waiting to engage the militias in urban warfare. It is difficult to say what will happen next, but we shouldn't rule out the possibility of a guerrilla war. NATO would prefer to see him liquidated while the National Council claim to want to see a trial as do the leaders behind the intervention.

Since the intervention began there have been some 8,000 bombing raids in which NATO has dropped 30,000 bombs, almost 200 bombs a day for 6 months and NATO has suffered no casualties whilst an estimated 60,000 Libyans have been killed. NATO even bombed the irrigation system which supplies northern Libya with the majority of its water, though there are reports that the Gaddafi loyalists have cut-off the water supply. The fact that Tripoli is reliant on imported water has not been raised much in the mainstream media. A city of 2 million requires a ready-source of drinkable water, it is difficult to assess where this is on the priority of the National Council let alone the Western powers behind them. There has been much more coverage of the release of Libyan assets and speculation about the next moves made by the still-at-large Colonel. There has been very little coverage of the exemption of Libyan banks from economic sanctions. There is plenty of praise for David Cameron in his role in the intervention, little mention of the way the British and the Americans crushed an attempt to indict Gaddafi for war crimes in March.

Now there are ominous signs of war crimes and racist violence in the wake of the regime's collapse. It should be kept in mind it was Gaddafi who put together death squads comprised of thugs imported from Chad, Niger and even Serbia. So the rebels have reasonable grounds to suspect migrants, but that certainly does not justify killing people on mass in such a fashion. All the while Libya is a major route for people looking to pass through to the coast and travel to the European mainland in search of a better life. The new regime has a promise to uphold to the EU regarding a strict blockade to illegal immigration from Africa to Europe. The Italians will be eager to sink any boats coming their way and Italian fishermen are essentially allowed to kill anyone who climbs aboard their boats. The days when Gaddafi once sent an Egyptian submarine to sink the QEII as it sailed in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of Israel. An order which was only countered when Sadat intervened and had the sub return to the base in Alexandria. Consequently, Sadat described Gaddafi as "100% sick in the head and possessed by the devil."

Colonel Gaddafi may still have the support of around 54 clans of the Warfalla tribe, the largest tribe in the country, which played a key role in the expulsion of Italian colonists after being neutral when the Italians first seized the country. No doubt the tipping point was the genocide committed by the Italians in which over 500,000 Libyans died between 1911 and 1941, at least 65,000 died in concentration camps in the Sirte desert. The grievances were never acknowledged, let alone resolved, as the country was seized by a intensely conservative monarchy with links to the old imperial powers. The monarchy soon gave the US and UK military bases in Libya. The discovery of oil in 1960 transformed Libya into one of the richest countries in Africa, which enabled programmes of modernisation and unification of society. These programmes were restricted by the conservative attitudes of the monarchy. Incidentally, the rebel flag of Benghazi is the old monarchy flag which is also a Senoussi flag and that might hint at a specific tribal affiliation of the TNC. It was Gaddafi who overthrew King Idris in 1969 and seized the state apparatus.

Interpellate This!

Ideology is not simply in the heads of human beings it is material in nature, in order for a belief to be held the minds of the masses it must first of all shape the lives of the people as a whole. Only in this way will the ideology retain its hegemonic status and continue to function in spite of what thoughts might go through the heads of certain people. It could be argued that the Saudi state preceded capitalism on the Arabian peninsula and so it played a large role in the way it emerged in the Middle East, though it might be more nuanced to say that the state can be deduced from the structural needs of capitalism. The state-repression in Saudi Arabia has guaranteed the free reign of capital. But it takes more than the repressive agencies of the state (e.g. the military and the police) to protect the social order and to reproduce the existing social relations of production. This is where Islam as ideology comes into the picture as embodied in the institutional forms of the state apparatus, which ranges from the family and schools to corporations and the media.

Osama bin Laden was born into the Saudi bourgeoisie, his father was the head of a company which built 80% of roads in Saudi Arabia and has done rather well out of the relationship between the Saudi ruling class and the US government. The life Osama bin Laden led mirrors the contorted relationship between corporate base and Islamic superstructure in Saudi Arabia, the transition from Saudi oligarch to radical Islamist. Initially it might seem as though a thing is defined by its function in the arrangement, while a hammer may be used to knock nails into wood it can also be used to bash someone's head in. But it is not that the hammer has been removed from it's intended usage, rather it is defined as a torture tool when it is used as one. So we might understood bin Laden's place in ideology as defined not as the "leap" from his privileged origins to his life of fanaticism. Rather we should designate him in regards to what exact function his actions played in the world, the impotence of Islamist Terror and the way al-Qaeda contributed to the ideological constellation in the West.

At the end of the Cold War the grand narrative that the US was in a war with the Soviet Union finally drew to a close as "shock therapy" swept Russia clean of really existing socialism. The interests of capital that were invested in that narrative were now deprived of a way to make sense of the world and, in particular, the actions undertaken by Western governments. Eventually a new narrative had to open up and the attacks of September 11th 2001 heralded a new narrative of the "War on Terror". The ideological development served the Bush administration, the liberal commentariat and even al-Qaeda. It gave the government and the media a meaningful way to report on global events for public consumption. It also sells papers, boosts approval ratings for politicians and provides a way for Islamists to recruit young angry men in the Middle East. The materiality of all of this was the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Osama bin Laden became the face of international terrorism as the constellation shifted from anti-Communism to counter-terrorism.

Louis Althusser developed a fascinating account of the way individuals become the subjects of ideology. It is through interpellation by the state apparatus in the process of socialisation that the individual is hailed. The individual recognises themselves in this call of a grand Subject capable of legitimately holding them accountable. The grand Subject might take a form appropriate to the context, from God and the Nation to the King and the Ulama. The media, as well as educational institutions and corporations are the materiality of ideology and each is a segment of the state apparatus. Ideology is not just belief in the heads of politicians, it is in the fabric of society and the practices of life on a day-to-day basis. It is more like the Freudian unconscious, it is not just a residue but it is central to the way we imagine our relation to specific experiences. This is the way ideology becomes engrained in the minds of citizens. Only through shaping the material can ideology shape people, so that the system and by extension the world can be understood in unquestionable terms as almost a natural phenomenon.

Ideology does not primarily involve theoretical explanations of 'how the world works', so much as provide accounts of who individuals are and where in the political world such individuals fit. In this ideological process, the relation of the subject to the world can become distorted as the subject is ascribed a functional role (as a citizen, a voter etc.) as if it is chosen by them. Thus, we find a man can go from an upstanding member of society from a respected family to a wanted criminal. The places we hold in such structures are politically decisive, whether it be in the pecking order in a corporation or in kinship as a son or a mother. People will perform as if these roles are the free realisation of their subjective potential. It took many years for Osama bin Laden to go beyond just the conservative reading of the Qur'an which he delved into as a student of economics. The notion of the autonomous individual is a product of ideological misrecognition. As Marx wrote in The Brumaire "Men make their own history, but not of their own free will not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted."

Libya without Gaddafi.

"I am the one who created Libya, and I will be the one to destroy it." - Muammar al-Gaddafi

The personalised regime of Colonel Gaddafi has taken a page out of the Israelis' book and resorted to using cluster bombs against the population. The 1.2 million people who have been maimed, mutilated or murdered under him is a long way from the reforms delivered in the 1970s which provided the Libyan people with free health-care and free education. Nasser said of Gaddafi shortly before his death "I rather like Gaddafi. He reminds me of myself when I was that age." By the end of the decade Gaddafi had emerged as the dominant figure from a power struggle in the regime with a faction seeking to embark on greater socio-economic development. With the rival faction crushed, Gaddafi moved to support terrorist groups abroad until he became a scapegoat for the US government and Libya endured a US bombing campaign. The evidence which ties the Libyan regime to the Lockerbie bombing and the disco bombing in Germany is highly questionable. But it is undoubtedly true that Gaddafi supported the IRA and other groups.

And yet we know that the US and the UK, among other states, have intervened to block attempts to charge Gaddafi with the crimes he has committed against his own people. This is just after the international tribunal on crimes committed in Sierra Leone and the trial of Charles Taylor came to an end. All the while the media focus in Britain is still on the matter of al-Megrahi and David Cameron talks as if Gaddafi will face a war crimes tribunal. Keep in mind that it would seem that the Obama administration are bailing out the regime in Tripoli. The Central Bank of Libya has been exempted from the sanctions imposed on the country by the US. Though it is not that the US is looking to prop up the Colonel, the regime is to be reconstituted including the bourgeois tendencies of Benghazi that have agreed to respect old oil arrangements and may have even agreed recognise the state of Israel. It should also be noted that the military leadership of the rebels have links with the CIA.

The National Council in Benghazi is not totally representative of the rebellion as a grass-roots movement for democracy. The National Council consists of professional politicians and military officials, mostly defectors from the Gaddafi regime. As many of the rebels have been maimed and killed in battle, the rebellion overall has lost it's "popular character" in that the real decisions are being made in Benghazi. The rebel forces are being armed with weapons from Qatar and there have been moves to export Libyan oil through Qatar. These are the reasons that the recent summit was held in Doha, it had nothing to do with what might be best for Libyans. Though the possibility of recognising the National Council as the official government of Libya was discussed. It should also be noted that Qatar has been in bed with the US for many years. Qatar was on board with the intervention from the beginning and was one of the biggest advocates of a no-fly zone.

The way in which Qatar has acted is not a simple expression of self-interest, it should be understood as a part of the GCC as well as an extension of US-Israeli interests in the region. The major issues are oil and the tacit alliance between Israel and many Arab states. The fall of Gaddafi is welcome because he has outlived his usefulness, the rebels have seized control of the oil fields in the country and have produced a government which is even more insidiously pro-Western than before. It may even be under this leadership that the country could undergo further neoliberal reforms, which would continue the decline of health-care, education and standards of living. All of which began as Gaddafi sought to improve relations with the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union and had succeeded by the early 2000s. But as the rebel forces might be able to take Tripoli there has been talk of a "boots on the ground" intervention and a partitioned country as previously mentioned.

Whether or not the rebels can actually take Tripoli is the most important factor, a fractured nation could be the result of this conflict and a Gulf emirate model could emerge in the oil-rich east whilst western Libya descends into poverty. This might be seen as a pragmatic solution by the US, Britain and France. A further inflammation of tensions between rival tribes, as well as religious sects, as class interests relate to the geographic situation of particular tribes. This is a serious possibility as a great deal of the oil fields have been secured. A partition along such lines would be a disaster, as similar partitions have been in Ireland, Cyprus and Palestine. Even if Tripoli is taken Libya might only emerge as a bourgeois democracy, at best, with the regime only fragmented and the Colonel deposed. This might make it a wonderful holiday destination for white people, whether or not it would improve health-care in the country is another matter.

The Importance of the GCC.

The Heart of Capitalism in the Middle East.

The Gulf Cooperation Council consists of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. It is generally dominated by Saudi Arabia, which is the largest and most prominent member-state with the biggest oil reserves. As part of globalisation, the GCC is a form of economic integration on the Arab Peninsula. Since 1981 it has moved to a customs union with joint-armed forces and there is now talk of a monetary union. The GCC being the heart of capitalism in the Middle East, itself a huge investor in the global economy with a prominent place in global finance as well as the oil trade. All of these states have a tacit alliance with Israel. Gaddafi has dubbed the council the "Gulf Uncooperative Council" as it recently sided with the US against him. The GCC is actively involved in the exportation of oil from the rebel-controlled east of the country. The GCC organised the recent summit in Qatar and has been supplying the Libyan rebels with arms.

US interests in the region rely on the ability of the GCC to repress opposition in countries like Bahrain. With Saudi Arabia in the lead, the Peninsula Shield Force, the military wing of the GCC has intervened against the uprising in Bahrain with the supposed aim of protecting the country and it's military infrastructure from "foreign interference". Officially, the fear is that the Shi'ite population might be trying to establish an Islamic state in the Gulf modelled on Iran. Interestingly, the GCC was formed in an effort by these countries to insulate themselves from the conflict between Iran and Iraq. Though the GCC supported Saddam Hussein against Ayatollah Khomeini for fear of that the "Islamic Revolution" could spread. In such a scenario the precious oil fields could be threatened, as the people living on the land are predominantly Shi'ite Muslim. When Iraq attempted to annex Kuwait in 1990 the GCC immediately made moves to ostracise Iraq and went on to participate in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq.

The Peninsula Shield Force is a counter-revolutionary force which any uprising will have to confront and fend off in order to succeed. This kind of force is necessary to maintain order as the contradiction between market and mosque can undermine such order. The tendency of the market is towards a secular, relativistic and rational individualism. So long as the hegemony of capitalism is maintained and the population remain obedient to that extent, what goes on behind closed doors is a secondary affair. Secularism and relativism are opposed to the Judeo-Islamic values and beliefs prevalent in a place like the United Arab Emirates. The contradiction emerges as the Islamic establishment is necessary for the market to reign unperturbed. The Saudi Princes can only sit around drinking whiskey and smoking expensive cigars because there is a puritan order that formally forbids this behaviour but permisses the concentration of such immense wealth.

There is something of this contradiction in US foreign policy, in that the support lent to Islamism is in contradiction with the "promotion" of neoliberalism. The economic and spiritual wasteland created by liberal capitalism, leaves people to search for an exclusive identity as a source of meaning. It can be found in nationalist and fundamentalist ideology. Arab nationalism offers a secular model, which would be preferable for capitalism, it also has plans for socialistic reforms and a unified pan-Arab state. On the other hand, Islamism posits an identity based on a rigid interpretation of Islam combined with a promised "rebirth" of the Caliphate through terrorism. A version of either can be utilised provided that it is hollowed out. So long as the Taliban will build an oil pipe-line for Unocal, the bans on all music, art and culture can be tolerated. Similarly, Egypt was rehabilitated after the socialistic reforms were reversed and relations with Israel opened up in the 1970s.

The economic interests of the GCC converge with the interests of the US and Israel, in terms of oil and security. The US Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain for this reason. What is less well known is that Qatar is home to a major outpost of US military coordination, one of nearly 30 similar outposts around the world, as well as a huge air-force from where attacks on Pakistan might have been launched by the US. The GCC played a vital role in the coordination of the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the bombing of Pakistan. There are also over 100,000 US troops stationed on military bases in GCC states. The major US objectives are to maintain the tacit alliance between Arab states and Israel whilst the extraction of oil can continue, which presupposes a repressed population. With these objectives in mind the US is acting to change the trajectory of the recent uprisings and "guide" the revolutionary fervour in accordance with it's own ends.