MANAMA, Bahrain -- I had a meeting in Bahrain, not far from where I live, on March 2, 2011, at about the midpoint of a month of street demonstrations that began with euphoria over Egypt and Tunisia's popular uprisings and ended in martial law.
There was no violence in Bahrain that day, but there were many road closures because denizens of the island's dusty villages had descended on the capital city to protest at the nearest thing resembling a central plaza -- the traffic circle called the Pearl Roundabout. Against my intentions I had to take a detour placing me on a street with no exits headed straight for the center of the Roundabout. Threading through a crowd of tens of thousands of people, I took half an hour to drive from one block in front of the circle to a more normal flow of traffic about two blocks beyond the circle.
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