On Monday, March 21, Bahraini king Hamad Isa bin Al Khalifa thanked the Saudis and the rest of the GCC for rescuing his country from an “external plot” – language widely interpreted as a reference to expansionist intentions by Iran. Bahrain and Iran had already mutually expelled each other’s diplomats. And according to the Washington Post, Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa has switched back to solidarity with the campaign against Qaddafi.

The actions of the GCC—supporting both the occupation of Bahrain and the liberation of Libya—illustrate the internal contradictions present throughout the Arab countries, but especially in the Saudi kingdom. It is doubtful, to say the least, that Qatar and the UAE would act independently of Saudi approval in joining the anti-Qaddafi effort.

This simultaneous support for repression in Bahrain and freedom in Libya has to do with 

something more than fear among the Arab Sunnis of Iranian-backed Shia assertiveness in the Gulf. Libya has no Shia minority. Rather, Saudi Arabia and the other GCC members are faced with a genuine dilemma: how to move forward to social and political reform while avoiding radical Islamist dominance. In the Saudi case, ideological hegemony by the state Wahhabi sect is the main source of discontent among the populace. Saudi King Abdullah clearly wants to avoid loss of control by the royal family, especially in the face of Iranian blandishments. These include incitement among the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia’s eastern region, which borders on Bahrain. But the Libyan revolution has posed the issue of lawless tyranny under cover of Arab nationalism too dramatically for the Saudis and GCC to remain indifferent to it.

called on the Bahraini Shias to “resist the enemy until you die or win.” In another expression of their exotic variety of cognitive dissonance, Iranian propaganda blared, “Qaddafi in Libya commits murder, and the U.S. supports his regime!”

Screeching complaints about the GCC move into Bahrain have also been heard in Shia mosques in Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan, and in the United States, Shias in New York have appealed for a “day of rage” to be held on Sunday, March 27, at United Nations Plaza, in protest against what they call “the cruel and criminal governments of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Yemen, and Libya.” But where were the non-Iranian Shias when, in 2009, almost the entire Iranian nation marched against the cruelest of all the Islamist regimes, that of Tehran, with its hallucinated threats to the world? Then, the Shias of Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and the U.S. held their tongues. At this point, the alignment of the U.S. and the Sunni Gulf states makes compelling sense, since the Iranian misrulers and the deranged Qaddafi have more in common with one another than the the West has differences with the GCC.