Bahrain’s case is idiosyncratic. It is a very small place—a population of about half a million citizens, plus an equal number of expatriate workers. The entire country sits on a small, flat, sandy island connected by a causeway to Saudi Arabia. Alongside Dubai, Bahrain established itself as a sort of moral free port, replete with bars and relatively uncensored television, where pent-up Saudis could go to unwind.

Bahrain’s Sunni royal family has been ruling over a Shia majority population since the eighteenth century, to the latter’s chronic dissatisfaction. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Tehran government saw Bahrain’s restive Shia as a potential wedge across the Gulf waters, one that might lead to the Shia populations in eastern Saudi Arabia, where most of the kingdom's oil sits. This proxy aspect of Bahrain’s internal politics has reinforced American support for the monarchy over the years; the ruling family, understandably insecure in Iran’s large shadow, has provided the United States Navy with basing rights as a means of aligning itself with a power that had the means and will to challenge Iran. Bahrain’s treatment of its Shia population, and particularly its political activists, was long a dismal record of repression and torture. After 2002, the monarchy wised up some, under American counselling, and it established a limited parliament and embarked on some new strategies of political and economic co-optation. (Amid the Egyptian upheaval, the King announced that he was giving every citizen of Bahrain a thousand dinars, about twenty-six hundred dollars.) Its record has improved, but the most recent State Department human-rights assessment of the country’s performance noted multiple reports of abuse in detention, and the report notes dryly, “Citizens did not have the right to change their government.”

The Bahraini opposition—some of whose factions have been influenced by Iran, but which, in total, is by no means a proxy for Tehran—has persisted with its resistance and illegal street protests. The street battles this week are typical of what has been going on in Bahrain, without much attention, on and off since the nineteen-eighties. From that 2005 visit, I’m still on the opposition’s e-mail lists, and they are absolutely unrelenting spammers, if that is not too harsh a word to describe people fighting for their rights. Perhaps it would better to note that Bahrain’s is a long-running revolt that lacks an “unsubscribe” option—and who would want to look away now?