Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa
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Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa was Amir of Bahrain from 1961 until his death in 1999. John Kiriakou, posted to Bahrain as State Department second secretary for economic affairs from 1994 to 1996, described him as about five feet tall, "roly poly," and the "sweetest little guy you could ever meet in your life."

The beach palace

The Amir maintained an open-door policy at one of his beach palaces for foreigners from cultures without a habit of staring, so that Western women could swim in bikinis without harassment. Kiriakou says he "had a thing for Thai women," keeping four wives at once, all roughly a foot taller than he was. By arrangement with the U.S. ambassador, anything the Amir said informally at the beach palace was strictly off the record and never entered reporting cables, a promise that let him speak freely, and one he relied on to do so.

On King Hussein, Columbine, and Oklahoma City

The Amir told Kiriakou he disliked Jordan's King Hussein, comparing him to a flag that "flutters in the wind", changing allegiance with whatever pressure prevailed. After the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, he told Kiriakou it was the one thing he never understood about the United States: that Americans tolerated an unusually violent society even by Arab standards; Kiriakou says the Amir was genuinely heartbroken over it. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the Amir told Kiriakou he prayed the perpetrator was not Muslim.

Survival strategy

Kiriakou says the Amir understood that Iran could militarily overrun Bahrain in four hours, and so maintained close ties with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia as a survival strategy while developing the economy, though he never grasped why he should extend more support to his own Shia community, whose resentment fed the 1994 Intifada.

'Even by Arab standards'

The Amir's remark on American violence is one Kiriakou still repeats decades later, and he sets the scene carefully: two years in Bahrain that were "two of the happiest years of my life," a ruler he calls "a very kind and generous man" who opened his beach house at weekends so diplomats could swim, wives could wear a bikini and nobody would stare, and who invited them over for tea.

The conversation came right after the Oklahoma City bombing, once the conventional wisdom had turned away from a Muslim perpetrator. Kiriakou said he thought the same thing every day, that a Muslim attacker "would be so bad for us, for all of us." The Amir replied: "You know the thing about you Americans, you have an unusually violent society, even by Arab standards. You are accepting of violence that would be unacceptable in any other civilized country." Kiriakou's account of his own response is the reason he keeps telling it, "I didn't know how to respond to that, because he was right." The judgment is treated at length in "An unusually violent society".

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Bahrain Posting (1994,1996)
- Bahrain Intifada (1994)
- Bahrain Prime Minister "Mr. 10 Percent"
