The men walking down the street looked ordinary enough.
Ordinary, at least, for these days of tumult and protest in the Middle East.

They wore sneakers and jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts. Some
waved the national flag. Many held their hands up high. Some flashed peace
signs. A number were chanting, “Peaceful, peaceful.”

Up ahead, video footage shows, armored personnel carriers
sat in the street waiting. In a deadly raid the previous day, security forces
had cleared pro-democracy protesters from the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain’s
capital, Manama. This evening, the men were headed back to make their voices
heard.

The unmistakable crack-crack-crack of gunfire then erupted,
and most of the men scattered. Most, but not all. Video footage shows three who
never made it off the blacktop. One in an aqua shirt and dark track pants was
unmistakably shot in the head. In the time it takes for the camera to pan from
his body to the armored vehicles and back, he’s visibly lost a large amount of
blood.

Human Rights Watch would later report that Redha Bu Hameed
died of a gunshot wound to the head.

That incident, which occurred on February 18th, was one of a
series of violent actions by Bahrain’s security forces that left seven dead and
more than 200 injured last month. Reports noted that peaceful protesters had
been hit not only by rubber bullets and shotgun pellets, but – as in the case
of Bu Hameed – by live rounds.

The bullet that took Bu Hameed’s life may have been paid for
by U.S. taxpayers and given to the Bahrain defense force by the U.S. military.

The relationship represented by that bullet (or so many
others like it) between Bahrain, a tiny country of mostly Shi’a Muslim citizens
ruled by a Sunni king, and the Pentagon, has recently proven more powerful than
American democratic ideals, more powerful even than the president of the United
States.

Just how American bullets make their way into Bahraini guns,
into weapons used by troops suppressing pro-democracy protesters, opens a wider
window into the shadowy relationships between the Pentagon and a number of
autocratic states in the Arab world.

Look closely and outlines emerge of the ways in which the
Pentagon and those oil-rich nations have pressured the White House to help
subvert the popular democratic will sweeping across the greater Middle East.

Bullets and Black Hawks

A TomDispatch analysis of defense department documents
indicates that, since the 1990s, the United States has transferred large
quantities of military matériel, ranging from trucks and aircraft to
machine-gun parts and millions of rounds of live ammunition, to Bahrain’s
security forces. The defense Security Cooperation Agency did not respond to
repeated requests for information and clarification.

According to data from the defense Security Cooperation
Agency, the branch of the government that coordinates sales and transfers of
military equipment to allies, the U.S. has sent Bahrain dozens of
“excess” American tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopter
gunships.

The U.S. has also given the Bahrain defense force thousands
of .38 caliber pistols and millions of rounds of ammunition, from large-caliber
cannon shells to bullets for handguns.

To take one example, the U.S. supplied Bahrain with enough
.50 caliber rounds – used in sniper rifles and machine guns – to kill every
Bahraini in the kingdom four times over.

In addition to all these gifts of weaponry, ammunition and
fighting vehicles, the Pentagon in coordination with the State Department
oversaw Bahrain’s purchase of more than $386 million in defense items and
services from 2007 to 2009, the last three years on record.

These deals included the purchase of a wide range of items
from vehicles to weapons systems. Just this past summer, to cite one example,
the Pentagon announced a multimillion-dollar contract with Sikorsky Aircraft to
customize nine Black Hawk helicopters for Bahrain’s defense force.

About face

On February 14th, reacting to a growing protest movement
with violence, Bahrain’s security forces killed one demonstrator and wounded 25
others.

In the days of continued unrest that followed, reports
reached the White House that Bahraini troops had fired on pro-democracy
protesters from helicopters (Bahraini officials responded that witnesses had
mistaken a telephoto lens on a camera for a weapon).

Bahrain’s army also reportedly opened fire on ambulances
that came to tend to the wounded and mourners who had dropped to their knees to
pray.

“We call on restraint from the government,”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in the wake of Bahrain’s crackdown.
“We urge a return to a process that will result in real, meaningful
changes for the people there.”

President Obama was even more forceful in remarks addressing
state violence in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen: “The United States condemns
the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those
countries, and wherever else it may occur.”

Word then emerged that, under the provisions of a law known
as the Leahy Amendment, the administration was actively reviewing whether
military aid to various units or branches of Bahrain’s security forces should
be cut off due to human-rights violations.

“There’s evidence now that abuses have occurred,”
a senior congressional aide told the Wall Street Journal in response to video
footage of police and military violence in Bahrain. “The question is
specifically which units committed those abuses and whether or not any of our
assistance was used by them.”

In the weeks since, Washington has markedly softened its
tone. According to a recent report by Julian Barnes and Adam Entous in the Wall
Street Journal, this resulted from a lobbying campaign directed at top
officials at the Pentagon and the less powerful State Department by emissaries
of Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and his allies in the Middle East.

In the end, the Arab lobby ensured that, when it came to
Bahrain, the White House wouldn’t support “regime change,”  as in Egypt or Tunisia, but a strategy
of theoretical future reform some diplomats are now calling “regime
alteration.”

The six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council
include (in addition to Bahrain) Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates, all of which have extensive ties to the Pentagon.

The organization reportedly strong-armed the White House by
playing on fears that Iran might benefit if Bahrain embraced democracy and
that, as a result, the entire region might become destabilized in ways inimical
to U.S. power-projection policies.

“Starting with Bahrain, the administration has moved a
few notches toward emphasizing stability over majority rule,” according to
a U.S. official quoted by the Journal. “Everybody realized that Bahrain
was just too important to fail.”

It’s an oddly familiar phrase, so close to “too big to
fail,” last used before the government bailed out the giant insurance firm
AIG and major financial firms like Citigroup after the global economic meltdown
of 2008.

Bahrain is, of course, a small island in the Persian Gulf,
but it is also the home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which the Pentagon
counts as a crucial asset in the region. It is widely considered a stand-in for
neighboring Saudi Arabia, America’s gas station in the Gulf, and for
Washington, a nation much too important ever to fail.

The Pentagon’s relationship with the Gulf Cooperation
Council countries has been cemented in several key ways seldom emphasized in
American reporting on the region. Military aid is one key factor. Bahrain alone
took home $20 million in U.S. military assistance last year.

In an allied area, there is the rarely discussed triangular
marriage between defense contractors, the Gulf states, and the Pentagon. The
six Gulf nations (along with regional partner Jordan) are set to spend $70
billion on weaponry and equipment this year, and as much as $80 billion per
year by 2015.

As the Pentagon looks for ways to shore up the financial
viability of weapons makers in tough economic times, the deep pockets of the
Gulf States have taken on special importance.

Beginning last October, the Pentagon started secretly
lobbying financial analysts and large institutional investors, talking up
weapons makers and other military contractors it buys from, to bolster their
long-term financial viability in the face of a possible future drop in defense
department spending.

The Gulf States represent another avenue toward the same
goal. It’s often said that the Pentagon is a “monopsony,” the only
buyer in town for its many giant contractors, but that isn’t entirely true.

The Pentagon is also the sole conduit through which its Arab
partners in the Gulf can buy the most advanced weaponry on Earth. By acting as
a go-between, the Pentagon can ensure that the weapons manufacturers it relies
on will be financially sound well into the future.

A $60 billion deal with Saudi Arabia this past fall, for
example, ensured that Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and other mega-defense
contractors would remain healthy and profitable even if Pentagon spending goes
slack or begins to shrink in the years to come.

Pentagon reliance on Gulf money, however, has a price. It
couldn’t have taken the Arab lobby long to explain how quickly their spending
spree might come to an end if a cascade of revolutions suddenly turned the
region democratic.

An even more significant aspect of the relationship between
the Gulf states and the Department of Defense is the Pentagon’s shadowy
archipelago of bases across the Middle East.

While the Pentagon hides or downplays the existence of many
of them, and while Gulf countries often conceal their existence from their own
populations as much as possible, the U.S. military maintains sites in Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and of course Bahrain –
homeport for the Fifth Fleet, whose 30 ships, including two aircraft carriers,
patrol the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea.

Doughnuts not democracy

Last week, peaceful protesters aligned against Bahrain’s
monarchy gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Manama carrying signs reading
“Stop Supporting Dictators,” “Give Me Liberty or Give Me
Death,” and “The People Want Democracy.”  Many of them were women.

Ludovic Hood, a U.S. embassy official, reportedly brought a
box of doughnuts out to the protesters.

“These sweets are a good gesture, but we hope it is
translated into practical actions,” said Mohammed Hassan, who wore the
white turban of a cleric.

Zeinab al-Khawaja, a protest leader, told Al Jazeera that
she hoped the U.S. wouldn’t be drawn into Bahrain’s uprising. “We want
America not to get involved, we can overthrow this regime,” she said.

The United States is, however, already deeply involved. To
one side it’s given a box of doughnuts; to the other, helicopter gunships,
armored personnel carriers, and millions of bullets – equipment that played a
significant role in the recent violent crackdowns.

In the midst of the violence, Human Rights Watch called upon
the United States and other international donors to immediately suspend
military assistance to Bahrain. The British government announced that it had
begun a review of its military exports, while France suspended exports of any
military equipment to the kingdom.

Though the Obama administration, too, has begun a review,
money talks as loudly in foreign policy as it does in domestic politics.

The lobbying campaign by the Pentagon and its Middle Eastern
partners is likely to sideline any serious move toward an arms export cut-off,
leaving the U.S. once again in familiar territory – supporting an
anti-democratic ruler against his people.

“Without revisiting all the events over the last three weeks,
I think history will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation
in Egypt that we were on the right side of history,” Obama explained after
the fall of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak – an overstatement, to say the
least, given the administration’s mixed messages until Mubarak’s departure was
a fait accompli.

But when it comes to Bahrain, even such half-hearted support
for change seems increasingly out of bounds.

Last year, the U.S. navy and the government of Bahrain
hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for a construction project slated to develop
70 acres of prime waterfront property in Manama. Scheduled for completion in
2015, the complex is slated to include new port facilities, barracks for
troops, administrative buildings, a dining facility, and a recreation center,
among other amenities, at a price tag of $580 million.

“The investment in the waterfront construction project
will provide a better quality of life for our sailors and coalition partners,
well into the future,” said Lieutenant Commander Keith Benson of the
navy’s Bahrain contingent at the time. “This project signifies a
continuing relationship and the trust, friendship and camaraderie that exists
between the U.S. and Bahraini naval forces.”

As it happens, that type of “camaraderie” seems to
be more powerful than the president of the United States’ commitment to support
peaceful, democratic change in the oil-rich region.

After Mubarak’s ouster, Obama noted that “it was the
moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing, but
nonviolence, moral force, that bent the arc of history toward justice once
more.”

The Pentagon, according to the Wall Street Journal, has
joined the effort to bend the arc of history in a different direction – against
Bahrain’s pro-democracy protesters. Its cozy relationships with arms dealers
and autocratic Arab states, cemented by big defense contracts and shadowy
military bases, explain why.

White House officials claim that their support for Bahrain’s
monarchy isn’t unconditional and that they expect rapid progress on real
reforms. What that means, however, is evidently up to the Pentagon.

It’s notable that late last week one top U.S. official
traveled to Bahrain. He wasn’t a diplomat. And he didn’t meet with the
opposition (Not even for a doughnut-drop photo op).

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived for talks with
King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa to
convey, said Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell, “reassurance of our
support.”

“I’m convinced that they both are serious about real
reform and about moving forward,” Gates said afterwards. At the same time,
he raised the specter of Iran.

While granting that the regime there had yet to foment
protests across the region, Gates asserted, “there is clear evidence that
as the process is protracted – particularly in Bahrain – that the Iranians are
looking for ways to exploit it and create problems.”

The secretary of defense expressed sympathy for Bahrain’s
rulers being “between a rock and a hard place” and other officials
have asserted that the aspirations of the pro-democracy protesters in the
street were inhibiting substantive talks with more moderate opposition groups.

“I think what the government needs is for everybody to
take a deep breath and provide a little space for this dialogue to go
forward,” he said. In the end, he told reporters, U.S. prospects for
continued military basing in Bahrain were solid. “I don’t see any evidence
that our presence will be affected in the near or middle-term,” Gates added.

In the immediate wake of Gates’ visit, the Gulf Cooperation
Council has conspicuously sent a contingent of Saudi troops into Bahrain to
help put down the protests.

Cowed by the Pentagon and its partners in the Arab lobby,
the Obama administration has seemingly cast its lot with Bahrain’s
anti-democratic forces and left little ambiguity as to which side of history
it’s actually on.

This article first appeared on TomDispatch.com.