1000 troops from Saudi Arabia today crossed into Bahrain to help quell ongoing unrest there. The United Arab Emirates has said it is also ready to send troops to Bahrain as part of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) efforts and other GCC countries could follow suit. The GCC comprises Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Bahrain, a tiny kingdom, is home to the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet and is crucial to America’s military interventions in the region and the Obama administration has supported the Khalifa family through the unrest in contrast to its later efforts to remove the leaders of Libya, Tunisia and Egypt when it saw the public mood against them. The US today supported the arrival of Saudi troops in Bahrain. “We’ve seen the reports that you’re talking about. This is not an invasion of a country,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told a news briefing.

From this we can see that

• Despite claiming that they cannot intervene in Libya to save people being slaughtered by Gadaffi, the western backed rulers of Saudi Arabia, UAE and others are more than capable of sending troops to protect their fellow western backed ruler in Bahrain.

• Muslim countries do not need UN authorisation before deploying forces.

• Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others have troops and modern military equipment and do not need to rely on Western forces if they decide to act.

• These puppet regimes are capable of ignoring the colonial borders between the Muslims should they chose to act.

We should highlight these points to all so that the people of the region speak with one loud voice and demand that the Muslim armies of Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and the areas surrounding Libya intervene to 1) save their brothers and sisters from the massacres of Gadaffi and 2) prevent intervention by the greedy colonial powers whose interventions brought death and devastation to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“And what is the matter with you that you fight not in the cause of Allah and of the weak — men, women and children — who say, ‘Our Lord, take us out of this town, whose people are oppressors, and make for us some friend from Yourself, and make for us from Yourself some helper?” [ TMQ An-Nisa 4:75].