Bahrain unrest special case says Clinton

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FORMER US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has described the unrest which hit Bahrain in February-March 2011 as being a "special case" in the so-called Arab Spring that unfolded from North Africa to the Middle East.

"Bahrain was a very complicated case as events took the path of sectarianism," she says in her memoir, Hard Choices.

According to London-based Al Arab newspaper, Clinton described the "difficult time" she had in dealing with the situation unfolding in Bahrain.

She said that Bahrain saw no reason to inform the US before calling on the GCC military forces to intervene.

"Bahrain chose to act without informing the US beforehand," she says in her book.

She says she had a "very delicate" phone call with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal on hearing about the GCC military intervention in Bahrain.

She quoted the Saudi minister as telling her: "Let protesters go home for the situation to regain its normal course in Bahrain."

She pointed out that the Saudi foreign minister accused Iran overtly of harbouring extremists in Bahrain.

The new book is a methodical march through the challenges Clinton encountered as the US secretary of state from 2009-2013.

In her description, virtually every foreign policy problem presented hard choices: the intractable Middle East, Russia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Libya, the Arab Spring and more.

But she also writes about her years as the nation's top diplomat as a "personal journey", both literal (112 countries and nearly one million miles) and figurative, taking her "from the painful end of the 2008 campaign to an unexpected partnership and friendship with my former rival Barack Obama".

A team of Washington Post reporters read through the book and picked out chapter-by-chapter highlights.

Clinton describes US reaction to the unfolding protests that became the Arab Spring, starting with the first stirrings of protest in Tunisia and tracking through reactions to demonstrations in various other countries, including Yemen, Bahrain and, notably, Egypt.

She defends traditional US alliances with autocratic regimes as being a part of balancing various US interests against one another, defining a pragmatic approach that would have the US push regimes toward democratic reform while also forming alliances with those willing to advance US security interests.

She describes herself as being consistently more cautious about siding with protesters, who promise an uncertain future over longtime, if autocratic, US allies - particularly in Egypt.

She suggests her position aligned her with Joe Biden and Defence Secretary Robert Gates in opposition to others in the White House, who she suggests were swept away by idealism and wanted to move more quickly to help usher Hosni Mubarak from power.

However, she never names the White House officials who held a different view from her own.