Calming Bahrain’s two seas

    The military intervention in Bahrain by the Gulf Cooperation Council is most likely to further divide the country along sectarian lines and force the Bahraini crisis to spill over to the rest of the region. We have already heard the echoes from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. The GCC military intervention is likely to be remembered as a miscalculated step, and it might bring about the very results that it is trying to prevent: the legitimizing of Iranian interference, the transformation of the Bahraini crisis from a political to a geopolitical problem, from a local disagreement to a regional standoff. Most immediately, the GCC interference is widening the gap between Bahraini Sunnis and Shia.  Every Arab dictator has said that his country is not Tunisia, or Egypt. These declarations have in some cases proved self-delusions, as we have seen in Libya and Yemen. In Bahrain, however, the argument