Stuck in one of the seemingly permanent traffic jams on the wide highways of its capital, Manama, where the colourful mosaic of the Friday Mosque's minaret competes for attention with the extraplanetarily futuristic twin towers of the World Trade Centre, you cannot easily imagine the shadow of war falling over Bahrain.
But if there is a country in the region that has every reason to be apprehensive about a Western military confrontation with Iran it is the Arab world's only island state.