All GCC states close their embassies in Syria

Last week, it was announced by Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Secretary General Abdullatif Al-Zayani that Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, and Oman were closing their embassies in Syria, joining their fellow GCC-states Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who made a similar announcement earlier in the week.
This is just the latest provocation by the Gulf's autocratic monarchs during the Arab spring.  Qatar and Saudi Arabia helped lead the charge against Libyan leader Gadaffi, and have been openly arming the Syrian opposition fighters (with the tacit approval of Washington).  This is all in contrast to any internal opposition in the GCC states, which has been violently cracked down on, most blatantly in Bahrain, where Saudi and UAE troops were called in by the Bahraini rulers to put down protests.  While revolutions are fine elsewhere, the GCC monarchs are happy to hold onto their own thrones.
    Concerning their recent moves in Syria, the GCC is attributing the cause to the Syrian government's wanton use of violence, however with a short study of the regions history, other, less harmonious, motives are easily seen.
     Primarily, the GCC governments must be viewed as vassals of the U.S.-U.K military alliance in the Persian Gulf.  The area, known (minus Saudi Arabia) as the British Empire's "trucial coast," were some of the last states to receive independence after World War Two, some as late as the 1970s.  Moreover, this was a particular type of "independence," as the ruling monarchical families held onto their thrones, and the Western military powers maintained their arrangements.  In Saudi Arabia, which had never been under British dominion, the situation was not much different, dating back to the 1945 meeting between President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi King Ibn al-Saud aboard a war-ship on the Suez's Great Bitter Lake, where the U.S.-Saudi oil for protection relationship was born.

  In 1967, following London's proclamation that it was pulling back its military forces from east of the Suez canal, the U.S. moved in to be the international protector of the Persian Gulf.  Their first strategy was the "Nixon Doctrine," which aimed for regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia to serve as American proxy forces.  Accordingly, during the 1970's much of the new oil wealth in the region was spent on American weapon systems.  However, once the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979, Washington increasingly moved to exert its own military control over the region.  The Pentagon created a military command for the region, known originally as a "Rapid Deployment Force" and then as "Central Command," putting the area on the same footing as Europe, South America, and Asia.  Concurrently the White House began to exert more energy meddling in regional affairs.

Mediterranean Control: The NATO Ascendency

Following up on last week's piece on the recent discoveries of massive energy deposits in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, below I will attempt to sketch the history behind NATO's current posture in the vital water that connects Europe to Africa and the Middle East.

Part I:  The NATO Ascendency

      NATO's Mediterrean presence can be traced back to the military alliance's origins in 1949, when France and Italy were two of the treaties twelve original member states, along with the U.S., U.K., Netherlands, Canada, Belgium, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland.  At this time, the U.S. military also controlled Wheelus Air Force Base in Libya, as well as stationing what became the Navy's 6th fleet in Naples, Italy.  The U.K held on to their colony on the island of Cyprus, where they maintained two military bases--Akrotiri Air Base in the West and Dhekelia Army Base in the East.
     Shortly after NATO's birth, its true function as a Cold War political tool was revealed when Greece and Turkey, decidedly not on the North Atlantic, joined the alliance in 1952.  Both countries had been supported by American military aid since the declaration of the Truman doctrine in March 1947, which pledged to protect the two states from communist influences.  For Athens, this meant conducting a brutal civil war against the Greek communist party, the KKE, and its National Liberation Front (EAM) militia.  Historian Gabriel Kolko writes of this period:

The throttling of the opposition and the Left certainly provides the overriding framework within which one must assess the events in Greece; the repression persisted as the source of the domestic turmoil because it drove people to the mountains in desperation.  After the United States proclaimed the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 and assumed the military and economic costs that Greece's venal rules generated, the regime's incentive to find nonviolent, political solutions disappeared, and from the very beginning the U.S. consistently opposed a negotiated peace.  The cycle of repression and responses to it increased the scale of violence and eliminated human and civil rights, but the successive rightist regimes clearly initiated the casual chain...

Given their corruption and their inability to survive in a democratic political context, and the condition of the economy and the weakness of their army, repression was the Greek authorities' only recourse.  American officials nominally supported the demand of basic liberties but at the very same time encouraged a policy of massive forces evacuations in the regions where the rebels were strongest (Kolko, Century of War, 378).