IT WAS the 19th-century British statesman Lord Palmerston who coined the maxim that nations have no permanent friends, simply permanent interests. And rarely in recent times has that adage been so nakedly displayed as near here in the tiny Gulf petro-kingdom of Bahrain, the first place in the Middle East where the West indulged its obsession with oil.

This week, with the world distracted by Japan's mounting calamities, the remote Bahraini royals sent their armed forces into central Manana to crack the democratic heads that have reared recently in what last year was a most unlikely theatre of discord.

They were well supported by the militaries of neighbouring monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Bahrain's crackdown wasn't quite Gaddafi-esque but the state brutality was cut from similar cloth. Protesters guilty only of wanting a say in how their country and its wealth is managed were cut down by the state. Many more were beaten and maimed, as they retreated to the bosom of sympathetic mosques. Bahrain's ruling house of al-Khalifa, one of the world's richest dynasties, now has blood as well as petrocarbons on its hands.

The silence from Western countries has been deafening, a marked contrast with the revulsion delivered in spades to the wacky Gaddafis further west in Libya.

Bahrain hosts the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, the armada that secures America's oil interests in the Middle East. It is just 20 kilometres across a causeway to Dhahran, the Saudi boomtown that has reasonable claims to be the world capital of Petrolistan. A short drive south of Dhahran is the Ghawar Field, the world's most abundant oil deposit by some measure. Ghawar accounts for about half the oil output of Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil producer, which exports most of it to the US.