Bahrain needs to set about the hard work of healing societal cleavages, to build the truly sovereign and democratic country which the majority of its citizens appear so determined to achieve. If their much-touted ‘democracy promotion’ rhetoric is to have any real significance, western governments must help rather than hinder this process.

Despite the recent flurry of news on the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report, the story of the Bahraini pro-democracy uprising has been one of the least reported amongst those of the ‘Arab spring’. This goes for the regional Arab media, whose cheerleading and persistent coverage of uprisings elsewhere in the region contributed to whatever successes have been achieved, as well as for the majority of western press. Despite the fact that the violence and repression faced by Bahraini protesters has matched, if not exceeded in some instances, those elsewhere in the region, the Bahraini revolution has not been adequately represented by the media.

The stunted Bahraini revolution has also garnered much less rhetorical and material support from western governments. In Tunisia and Egypt, western governments supported, albeit belatedly, the expression of ‘people power’ against the repression and corruption of their former allies. In Syria, they have publicly called for regime change, and in Libya they actively engaged in ending Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year rule. By contrast in Bahrain, they have only made muted calls for political reform and an end to the violence of the repressive Khalifa regime. This is perhaps not surprising considering all that is at stake for western governments in Bahrain.

First and foremost is the fact that Bahrain is home to the US Fifth Fleet, whose controversial stationing in the country’s port was the source of another pivotal anti-democratic moment in the island nation’s history. In August 1975, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa’s father, Emir Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, formally dissolved the national assembly after it failed to ratify the extension of the lease for the US naval units, essentially putting an end to the country’s short-lived experiment with a parliamentary monarchical system.

It seems unlikely that Bahrain’s strategic importance to the US will decline in the near future. As former US Fifth Fleet Commander Vice Admiral Charles Moore said recently, quoting the late Middle East force commander and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe, Bahrain is "pound for pound, man for man, the best ally the United States has anywhere in the world".

These double standards have not been lost on the Bahraini protestors. As Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights put it: ‘Democracy isn’t only for those countries the United States has a problem with.’

US and UK complicity in Khalifa regime’s crimes

In yet another delayed response, the US government announced in October that it would postpone a $53 million arms sale to Bahrain. Yet as in cases of Egypt and Tunisia, many people in Bahrain viewed this step, as well as those undertaken by the British government to suspend arms exports licences to the repressive Khalifa regime, as ‘too little, too late’. In the months before the protests began in February, the US sold more than $200m in weapons and equipment to Bahrain, including $760,000 in firearms.

Recent news that the former police chief of Philadelphia and Miami, John Timoney, has been recruited by Bahrain’s Interior Ministry to advise the Bahrainis on policing strategies, will come as no comfort to those in the opposition hoping that the next American intervention would be more constructive. They may be particularly sceptical considering his policing style was so notorious it came to be dubbed Timoney’s ‘Miami Model’ by Jeremy Scahill, a journalist who covered the chief’s heavy-handed policing of protests around the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000 and the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit meeting in Miami in 2003. Timoney’s militarized crowd control strategy involved ‘the heavy use of concussion grenades, pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and baton charges to disperse protesters.’

Adding insult to injury, according to recent revelations, a unit from Bahrain’s military was invited to the US to receive tips on ‘crowd control’ in a police training exercise called ‘Urban Shield 2011’. The training involved the collaboration of the Israeli Border Police unit, hardly known for their adherence to internationally recognized human rights standards, as well as the Oakland Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, which were involved in organizing a widely-condemned, violent raid last month on Occupy Oakland, part of the national/international protest movement against economic and social inequality.

If they were expecting a more supportive stance from the UK, another stalwart ally of their government, the Bahraini opposition will have certainly been disappointed by the delayed response out of London. It took the British government months to suspend its arms exports licences to the Khalifa regime, and even after doing so, they saw no contradiction in inviting the King’s representatives to the UK’s Arms Fair in September, where everything from ‘crowd control’ weapons and tear gas to F16 planes and unmanned drones were sold to the Bahraini regime.