Why so many fewer deaths in Bahrain than Syria?

Foreigners arming an opposition in any country is an active attempt to create a civil war that will almost always be more destructive than government repression of protest. Civil war often does not result, after all of the fighting has ended, in a less repressive regime than before and at least for those who died cannot be considered worth it.

Countries that are part of the hegemonic structure the US maintains in the Middle East on Israel's behalf - Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia; pro-US factions in Lebanon and US formal NATO ally Turkey are equipping and supplying the armed opposition to the Syrian government.

While the US' colonies and allies in the region are arming the opposition, the Obama administration officially has opposed providing the opposition with weapons.

In coordinated messages, the White House and State Department said they still hope for a political solution. But faced with the daily onslaught by the Assad regime against Syrian civilians, officials dropped the administration's previous strident opposition to arming anti-regime forces. It remained unclear, though, what, if any, role the U.S. might play in providing such aid.

"We don't want to take actions that would contribute to the further militarization of Syria because that could take the country down a dangerous path," White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters. "But we don't rule out additional measures if the international community should wait too long and not take the kind of action that needs to be taken."

At minimum, if the US opposed the further militarization of Syria there are many things it could have been saying and doing over the past year that it has not. Barack Obama, typically, seems more concerned with presenting an image of non-involvement than with the amount of unnecessary and avoidable deaths. What is public about the US' position, that Assad must step down as a precondition to any resolution is, by design, unacceptable to any sovereign country facing foreign-supported armed opposition and predictably leads to increased suffering of Syrians people.

Despite fairly transparent lies, the United States is today working to subject Syria to a civil war that it hopes, regardless of who wins in the end, will weaken the country so that it will pose less of a strategic threat to Israel. This is what was done to Iraq, most intensely after the 2003 US invasion of that country.

In Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the US under Barack Obama actively assists in maintaining governments as unrepresentative as Assad's in Syria. If Israel's viability was not the US' primary regional concern, all four of these countries could gracefully transition to representative governments. Civil war is not necessary for the US to support democracy if that was the US' objective.

The US can and should withhold and threaten to withhold military and intelligence cooperation from its colonies to increase the pressure for graceful transitions to representative government. Even if those dictatorships were to resist US pressure, the US could withdraw its support and no longer be morally complicit in their repression of their people.

But alas, the United States is the most evil nation on Earth today. The people of Syria, just as much as the people of Palestine and also the people of the US' colonies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, UAE and others are suffering from the US' idea that an enforced majority state for fewer than six million Jewish people in Palestine outweighs the rights and even lives of over 400 million non-Jews in that region.