To be 100 percent honest, if you’d asked me a few days ago to tell you anything—anything—about Bahrain, I would have said, “Uh … mmm … yeah … uh.”
No longer.
As I write this, I am sitting in Cosi, sipping for a Diet Coke with a squirt of chocolate syrup. Tonight I will go out with my wife for dinner. Right now, it’s beautiful out. Soft music is playing from the speakers above. I’m wearing sandals. Kids are at school.
And, in Bahrain, a nation I knew nothing about, the government is killing people because they’re tired of being oppressed and want to do something about it.
I always find the “When should the U.S. step in and do something?” question an impossibly difficult one. When entered Iraq, and though the president was slaughtering his own, that was a huge mistake. Ditto Afghanistan, with certain differences. Can we just send troops to Behrain to stop the killing? To oppose a government that has provided support for our Middle Eastern strategies, even as it does this to its own citizens? Sadly, no.
We can just watch, issue statements and listen to the chilling voice of a doctor helpless to do anything.