Bahrain Mirror: The US military sales to Bahrain between 2017 and 2018 exceeded $6 billion, according to a research paper prepared by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The paper, published on February 26, 2018, was prepared by researcher Jodi Vittori, an expert on the linkages of corruption, state fragility, illicit finance, and US national security. The research paper is entitled: Bahrain's Fragility and Security Sector Procurement

In her summary of the paper, Vittori said that potential instability in Bahrain poses a significant threat to US strategic interests, pointing out that the United States gains immensely from basing rights in Bahrain, which is a key location in the Persian Gulf with its deepwater port and good airfield access. Nowhere else in the region provides such useful geography or facilities," she explains.

She considered that yet another sudden uprising by Bahrainis could endanger US military personnel and their families living in Bahrain and could threaten the ability of the United States to keep its bases.

Vittori in her paper goes on to say that Bahrain has been on a massive military spending binge, especially since restrictions on US arms sales to the country were lifted by the administration of Donald Trump: in 2017 and 2018, just the publicly known defense procurement contracts with the United States amounted to over $6 billion. That is a tall order for a country with an overall budget of about $10 billion per year.

"This military procurement splurge is occurring against a backdrop of long-term Bahraini financial trouble. Bahrain spends much more money than its oil, financial, and other sectors bring in."

The paper highlighted that Manama is thus in the midst of negotiating a five-year, $10-billion bailout package with its Arab allies that will include low-interest loans, spending cuts, and a new value-added tax. The $10-billion aid package will help the country plug fiscal holes in the short term, but will not substantially alter the long-term rent-seeking activity by the country's elites that keeps Bahrain in dire economic straits.

She adds that "as Bahraini citizens are being asked to tighten their financial belts due to the country's economic constraints, there are legitimate questions of how Bahrain will come up with the money to pay for new military purchases, as well as what they contribute to the kingdom's defense."

"The answer is that no one outside the Bahraini royal family seems to know," she says.

The research paper notes that "the Bahraini royal family is not obligated to put many public accounts-including security sector procurement- to scrutiny, so there is little transparency or accountability to these purchases," stressing that "this breakneck but unaccountable security sector procurement spending may create pressures on the legitimacy and, ultimately, the stability of the Bahraini regime."

Large purchases of weapons come at the expense of paying for other items like housing and economic development. Those same arms are also often turned on the population itself, especially the politically marginalized Shia majority, to repress dissent, Vittori points out in her paper.

She further states that "the lack of transparency and accountability over the security sector, as well as the repression it metes out, allows the regime to largely resist both internal and external calls for democratic reforms. With a population holding significant grievances with the monarchy and a political economy on shaky ground, large purchases without clear national security purposes, means to pay for them, or public accountability only further hurt the legitimacy of the regime."

The researcher sees that this potential for instability has important strategic ramifications for the United States, given Bahrain's role as a key basing location and ally in the Persian Gulf, noting that it is thus in the United States' interest to strongly encourage the Bahraini royal family to improve its security sector accountability and transparency, lest the lack thereof fuels domestic political grievances that may boil over and jeopardize U.S. objectives in the region.

The paper adds that Bahrain's monarchy has ruled through a combination of coercion, patronage, and sectarianism while extracting significant rents from Bahrain's economy. Yet this extractive and absolutist regime has fostered discontent among Bahrain's Shia majority and the population at large.

"The Bahraini security sector-and in particular its unaccountable purchases of security-related equipment and services-contributes decisively to the problem of state fragility."

Given its pivotal role in providing for Bahrain's security and supplying nearly all its weapons, Jodi Vittori says the United States has leverage, noting that it should use that leverage to push the Bahraini monarchy to reform its security sector procurement practices. Otherwise, unchecked security spending and endemic corruption will threaten to destabilize the Bahraini regime and imperil U.S. interests.

Arabic Version