Revolution and counter-revolution in Bahrain and Libya

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THE US State Department urged US citizens on Tuesday not to travel to Bahrain and suggested Americans there should leave at once due to the ongoing political revolution against the feudal authorities.

This followed the entry of 1,000 Saudi troops with tanks and 500 Omani policemen into the country for the sole purpose of putting down the democratic revolution that has been gathering pace in the feudal kingdom.

The entry of these forces followed on from a visit of the US Defence Secretary Gates to Saudi Arabia last weekend.

The State Department said, referring to the democratic revolution, that Bahrain has experienced a ‘breakdown in law and order’, with ‘demonstrations degenerating into violent clashes between police and protesters’.

The invading forces are now poised to take deadly action against the democratic movement and the trade unions, who have stepped up their campaign for jobs and basic rights for Bahrainis and have condemned the US inspired Saudi military intervention as an ‘invasion’.

Currently the masses are occupying the financial centre of the state, the Bahrain Financial harbour.

Large areas of Manama are now controlled by the demonstrators and a clash with the Saudi forces is seen as inevitable.

Last Sunday’s clashes with local security forces resulted in more than 1,000 injured people being treated in hospital.

The key issue for the US, behind the democratic smokescreen, is maintaining the Kings and Emirs of the Gulf region, and their oppression of its peoples for the sake of access to the region’s oil and the super-profits that it brings.

Here democracy and democratic rights have been thrown out of the window as irrelevant when compared to the strategic access to the oil wealth.

At the same time as they are propping up the Kings and Emirs of the Gulf, the US and its petty allies such as the UK and France seem to have adopted the opposite policy in Libya, where they are seeking to impose a no-fly zone and take military action against the government of Colonel Gadaffi. They state that he must be overthrown, at whatever the cost.

Their essential policy, however, is completely consistent. It is to fight the Arab revolution everywhere it shows its face. In Bahrain, where it is developing, and in Libya, where it has raged for the past 40 years, and where a regime has been established on the basis of the nationalisation of the oil industry for the benefit of the Libyan masses not for the benefit of imperialism.

Secretary of State Clinton confers with the leaders of the Benghazi counter-revolution and seeks to convince Russia and China not to veto a resolution for a no-fly zone at the UN Security Council, as a prelude to full-scale military intervention.

At the same time the State Department condemns the ‘violent protesters’ of Bahrain.

US, and UK and French policy, is all about oil. The Benghazi counter-revolutionaries are willing to hand that oil over to them, ie to privatise it, while the Kings and Emirs of the Gulf stand guard over the oil wealth on behalf of the US.

This why the same Gulf feudalists were in the vanguard of the states demanding at the last meeting of the Arab League that a no-fly zone be imposed on Libya.

Those so-called lefts in the UK, who have been demanding that the Gadaffi regime be overthrown and that the US and the UK recognise the Benghazi counter-revolutionaries as the government, now stand exposed as the conscious or unconscious agents of the imperialist powers, unable to understand the difference between their left and their right.

These forces do not support the Arab revolution and the struggle of the Arab masses to defend what gains they have made.

They will also be completely unable to take the struggle of the British workers beyond just protest actions to the organisation of the general strike to bring down the coalition and to launch the British socialist revolution by going forward to a workers government.

Those that cannot defend the gains of the Libyan revolution against the imperialists and their counter-revolutionary friends will never be able to defend the gains of the British workers by organising the British socialist revolution.

Only the WRP, the British section of the Fourth International, is up to this task. Join it today.