Saudi Arabia led 2,000 Arab troops across a causeway into the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain this week, potentially turning the clash between Bahrain’s Sunni rulers and its majority-Shiite population into a regional conflict with Iran. A day later, the Bahraini government declared martial law and sent its own troops to quell the monthlong protest in the capital’s Pearl Square with tear gas, armored cars, and shotguns. As sectarian clashes broke out elsewhere in the country, at least five protesters, two police, and one Saudi soldier were killed.
The Saudis were “not in a mode for listening” to Washington’s calls for restraint, an administration official told The New York Times. The regime was so concerned about the recent protests among its own restive Shiite majority that it tried to buy some goodwill with $37 billion in new social programs. A successful Shiite uprising against the Sunni autocrats next door, the Saudis fear, could spark a renewed rebellion within their own country. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, where hard-liners consider Bahrain an occupied province, condemned the Saudi military intervention as “very foul and doomed.”
“No one is going to take any lessons” from Ahmadinejad on dealing with protesters, said ArabNews.com in an editorial. After all, Iran simply “hangs them.” Saudi Arabia sent troops only after Bahrain’s reform movement had mutated “into a brooding brutal religious divide.” Better we Arabs intervene for our brethren than allow Iran to undertake “an indisputable invasion of Arab lands” that would trigger war.
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The Saudis are “overreacting, even panicking,’’ said the Financial Times. The ruling family was clearly rattled by the fall of close ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and the spread of Shiite uprisings throughout the region. But cracking down too hard on Saudis clamoring for more jobs and some social and political freedom will only serve to push “a mass reform movement into the arms of revolutionaries.” Instead of diminishing the influence of Iran and its proxies, “which barely have a toehold on the Arabian Peninsula,” the Saudis are practically inviting them “to come charging in.”
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