Saturday, December 17, 2011
The Vicksburg Post
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Arab Continued from Page D1. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the Gulf rulers have stepped up their games as the political center of gravity drifts in their direction. NATO’s air strikes in Libya got important Arab credibility from warplane contributions by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The Gulf’s six-nation political bloc also has tried to negotiate an exit for Yemen’s protest-battered president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and has taken the lead in Arab pressures on Syria’s Bashar Assad, one of Iran’s most critical partners. Yet Gulf rulers’ desire for change stops at their own borders. In March, they authorized a Saudi-led military force to help their neighbor, Bahrain, defend its 200-year-old unelected Sunni dynasty against pro-reform protests by the island’s Shiite majority. And here lies one of the paradoxes for U.S. statecraft in the Middle East: to align with rulers who are firmly vested in the status quo, but
not be cast as the spoilers of the Arab uprisings. “No one is immune from the waves of change,” said Nicholas Burns, a former No. 3 official at the State Department. “There’s certainly an effort to advise the Gulf Arabs to continue to get on the side of reform.” Burns believes the Arab Spring has taught U.S. diplomats valuable lessons in patience and perspective. “We are witnessing something that is transformative and whose full impact will play out over years, maybe decades, ahead,” said Burns, a professor of diplomacy and international politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Here is one of those times when the U.S. has to not overact and overreact.” But when events move fast, that may not be the easiest advice to follow. Mubarak was a loyal guardian of Egypt’s groundbreaking 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and there is no certainty that
Iraq Continued from Page D1. reconstruction. Even though a full-scale ground invasion from its neighbors may seem remote, the possibility of incursions from Turkey against Kurdish rebels, or Iranians along disputed border stretches or even from a Syria facing an internal revolt cannot be ruled out, especially at a time when the Arab Spring and the looming showdown between the West and Iran are raising tensions. External defense seemed a low priority in the early years of the war, when U.S. troops served as a deterrent. During those years, the main threat was posed by Shiite and Sunni extremists, including al-Qaida in Iraq, who were battling the Americans and their allies. Iraqi forces were organized and trained primarily to augment the U.S.-led force, using the U.S. military as a model. Soon, Iraqi commanders were giving power-point briefings, and their generals were handing out specially made coins emblazoned with their names and units as souvenirs. Iraqi soldiers at street checkpoints were wearing kneepads slouched down around their ankles, again just like their American counterparts.
But there wasn’t enough time to develop the full package — logistics, intelligence, medical services and a fully integrated command structure — for the Iraqis to operate as effectively without U.S. support. A budget crisis in 2009 and a lengthy political stalemate the following year “crippled both the qualitative development of Iraq’s forces and its ability to implement its own development plan,” wrote analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The head of Iraqi military intelligence, Hatem al-Magsousi, said it takes the Iraqis a week to plan and carry out a military operation they could execute in a day with American help. Such delays could be costly if al-Qaida — as expected — takes advantage of a security vacuum to reconstitute itself following major defeats on the battlefield in the final years of the war. “Unless the Iraqi security forces continue to put pressure on al-Qaida, they could regenerate capability and come back in an even worse way than they have in the past,” said a U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan.
Tribal Continued from Page D1. lence is a crime that occurs in steps,” said Timothy Purdon, the U.S. attorney for North Dakota. “First you slap someone. Then you punch them. Then you get a stick. Then you get a gun.” Tribal courts generally provide for a maximum sentence of a year in jail on domestic violence convictions. It’s a different world in federal court. But to prosecute there, authorities must show a defendant is a habitual domestic offender or that a gun was involved. Because tribal courts are not required to provide the same services as federal and state, such as providing a public defender, the convictions there fail to qualify as a past conviction in federal court. An American Indian woman has a 1-in-3 chance of being sexually assaulted in her lifetime, compared with 1-in-5 for the country as a whole, data shows. Sophia Renville Brown, a domestic abuse survivor who manages a women’s shelter on the Sisseton-Wahpeton reservation in the Dakotas, said she suspects those numbers are too low. Most cases go unreported because women are too ashamed. Cavanaugh was convicted of domestic abuse three times in tribal court. When federal prosecutors tried to prosecute him for a
July 2008 incident in which he was accused of slamming the head of his common-law wife against the dashboard of his car, a judge threw out the indictment. Because Cavanaugh did not have a lawyer in tribal court, the judge said, he could not be charged as a habitual offender. Purdon’s office appealed the decision and it was overturned in July. Meanwhile, a second federal appeals court reached the same conclusion in a case from Utah of a member of the Ute tribe. Adam Shavanaux was indicted for assaulting his domestic partner after having been twice convicted in tribal court of domestic assault. Shavanaux did not have a lawyer in tribal court. A judge threw out the indictment, a decision a federal appeals court also overturned in July. Both Cavanaugh and Shavanaux have appealed the decisions reinstating their indictments to the U.S. Supreme Court. Cavanaugh’s attorney, Alexander Reichert, said those decisions come at the expense of stripping Indians of their civil rights. “This goes to a much larger issue, and that is the fact that Congress has refused to acknowledge the fact that Indians have the right to counsel,” Reichert said.
whoever succeeds him will do likewise. Meanwhile, the Palestinians have overridden U.S. objections and asked the U.N. for statehood. “Our ability to influence is limited today more than at any time in the last 35 years,” said Graeme Bannerman, a former State Department analyst on Mideast affairs. That assessment may have some traction in places such as in Tunisia or Egypt, where the U.S. is widely viewed as tainted by its long alliance with Mubarak. But ask about America’s pull in other Mideast points — the free-spending Gulf, the new proto-state in Libya, even slow-healing Iraq and its Iran-friendly government — and the conversation is different. It is more measured about how the U.S. fits into the new Mideast. “It’s too early to tell
whether U.S. influence has diminished or indeed any change will happen because the Arab Spring is still in process,” said Nawaf Tell, former director of the University of Jordan Strategic Studies Center. Tell sees the Arab Spring as the death rattle of the Arab revolutions and coups defined by the all-powerful state and embodied by winner-take-all leaders: Egypt’s Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1954), Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi (1969), the 1970 putsch in Syria that brought Hafez Assad to power in Syria and now a dynasty-in-peril under his son, Bashar, and so on. “These regimes have exhausted their revolutionary credibility and have seen their legitimacy go bankrupt,” Tell said. And as with any big unraveling, there are new rules in the aftermath.
This may mean a less privileged position for U.S. interests and more legwork for Washington’s envoys, said Morris Reid, managing director of the Washington-based BGR Group, which works often in liaison roles between Mideast officials and U.S. companies. The U.S. approach “will be better,” he said, “not necessarily stronger.” “The U.S. will have to work harder for intelligence, diplomatic relations, commercial deals,” said Reid. “The U.S. will now have to prove their value as allies.” A showcase for that in the coming year is likely to be Iraq, and the contest for influence between neighboring Iran and the U.S., after U.S. military forces are gone. That rivalry in turn is influenced by events in Syria, Iran’s main Arab ally, and
the concerns of emirates and sheikdoms that lie just across the Persian Gulf. “Look at it this way: If you accept that the Arab Spring is a once in a four- or fivegenerations moment, then, of course, it will reorder the entire game of influence and politics by the big powers,” said Salman Shaikh, director of The Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. “U.S. leadership does matter,” he continued. “It’s naive to say it will become irrelevant. But it’s also wrong not to notice that America’s era as the region’s diplomatic superpower is coming to an end. The Arab Spring has brought much more independent-minded diplomacy by nations and a new empowerment among Arab people. America is a big player, but no longer Big Brother.”