Make no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning.  Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the good old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut nuclear arsenal.  Eternally over-budget items like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, cherished by their services and well-lobbied congressional representatives, aren’t leaving the scene any time soon, though delays or cuts in purchase orders are planned.  All this should reassure us that, despite the talk of massive cuts, the U.S. military will continue to be the profligate, inefficient, and remarkably ineffective institution we’ve come to know and squander our treasure on.

Still, the cuts that matter are already in the works, the ones that will change the American way of war.  They may mean little in monetary terms -- the Pentagon budget is actually slated to increase through 2017 -- but in imperial terms they will make a difference.  A new way of preserving the embattled idea of an American planet is coming into focus and one thing ...

As ousted political and military leaders in the Middle East continue to seek immunity from war crimes prosecutions, the United Nations and international human rights groups are taking an increasingly tough stance against such legislation in Yemen, Egypt, and possibly in a post-conflict Syria.

"I think it's extremely serious," Jose Luis Diaz, who heads the Amnesty International office at the United Nations, told IPS.

He pointed out that measures providing immunity from prosecution for political or military leaders, who may be responsible for human rights violations, war crimes and/or crimes against humanity, are not only a slap in the face of the victims, but they also eat away at the still fragile gains made to consolidate international justice and fight impunity.

After 33 years of repressive rule, President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen has agreed to step down from office - following nearly 12 months of street protests - in exchange for immunity from prosecution, under a law passed by parliament last week.

In Egypt, the interim ruling military council is negotiating with the incoming government, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, for immunity from prosecution for military leaders responsible for the killings of peaceful demonstrators last year.

And if beleaguered Syrian President Bashar al-Assad relents to international pressure and decides to step down, it is very likely he will seek immunity from prosecution as part of a negotiated deal.

"We came out strongly against the immunity law for Saleh before it was adopted, as we consider it to be in breach of Yemen's obligations under international law to investigate and prosecute human rights violations," Luis Diaz told IPS.

He said that Saleh and others may feel safe from prosecution in Yemen for now, but the immunity law would not necessarily protect them from the courts elsewhere for some of ...

The self-immolation a year ago of Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi triggered a wave of popular protests that spread across the Arab world, forcing out dictators in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Now, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, too, seems near the end of his rule.

Together, these movements for change have come to be known as the Arab Spring. But what values are driving these movements, and what kind of change do their adherents want? A series of surveys in the Arab world last summer highlights some significant shifts in public opinion.

In surveys, 84% of Egyptians and 66% of Lebanese regarded democracy and economic prosperity as the Arab Spring’s goal. In both countries, only about 9% believed that these movements aimed to establish an Islamic government.

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For Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, where trend data are available, the Arab Spring reflected a significant shift in people’s values concerning national identity. In 2001, only 8% of Egyptians defined themselves as Egyptians above all, while 81% defined themselves as Muslims. In 2007, the results were roughly the same.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, however, these numbers changed dramatically: those defining themselves as Egyptians rose to 50%, 2% more than those who defined themselves as Muslims.  Among Iraqis, primary self-identification in national terms jumped from 23% of respondents in 2004 to 57% in 2011. Among Saudis, the figure jumped from 17% in 2003 to 46% in 2011, while the share of those claiming a primary Muslim identity dropped from 75% to 44%.

There has also been a shift toward secular politics ...

The White House has not yet formally decided whether to admit Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh to the United States for medical treatment, but Obama administration officials as recently as last week considered granting Saleh a visa, in part to "get him out of the region," a senior administration official said Tuesday.

One advantage the administration sees in letting Saleh come to the U.S. would be to remove from Yemen a symbol of the country's repression of its citizens and perhaps smooth the transition to new leadership, the official said.

"If he comes without a big entourage and he's in the hospital here, it does send a signal that he's really out. So that was the thinking," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

 Saleh was injured when a bomb exploded in a mosque within the presidential compound in Sanaa last June.

The White House announced Sunday that the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa received a request from Saleh's office that he be allowed to travel to the U.S. for medical care.

"He was really badly injured, so there's a real medical need," the official said.

Yet Saleh's departure from the region might also be welcomed by pro-democracy demonstrators in Yemen because it would "send a signal that he's not next door," the official added.

Still, the request is a delicate one for the Obama administration. The U.S. risks angering the broader Yemeni population if it is seen as sheltering Saleh, who many in Yemen want punished for the government's harsh crackdown on demonstrators over the past year.

 The administration is also mindful of history. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter permitted the shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, to enter the U.S. for medical attention. That decision was viewed as one of the causes of the Iranian street protests that led to the attack on the U.S. ...

A photograph on the front page of The Washington Post on October 27 showed Yemeni women burning their veils, a Bedouin tribal expression that appealed for assistance from tribesmen. With this action, the women appear to be saying that the official powers that ought to be safeguarding Yemeni women citizens instead are attacking them. The Associated Press photo, part of a gallery of shots of Yemeni women’s nonviolent actions, is visually stunning. While some onlookers might assume that the veil is a symbol of repression, to these Yemeni women it is part of their means of empowerment.

Yemen’s ongoing struggle is indicative of this year’s larger Arab Awakening in the way that women have assumed responsibility for speaking out politically.

My first awareness of Yemen’s Tawakkul Karman was a video made in Sanaa, Yemen, this past spring. In it (starting at about the 13-minute mark), her husband Mohammed explains that when they married she made him promise not to stop her from participating in public affairs, and he agreed. “She does something that I couldn’t do so I support her in everything she does,” he told Al Jazeera. He takes care of their three children and handles the callers on her cellular phones—plural—so that she can focus on the tasks of leadership. In October, we learned that Karman was one of three women who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, along with two Liberian women leaders, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson and Leymah Gbowee, for their work in nonviolent struggles for women’s safety and rights, as well as participation in building peace. A journalist and human rights advocate, Karman has become the personification of the Yemeni civil ...

The October 19 death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi allows us to see more clearly an underlying force at work in the Arab Awakening. From Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, movements have sought to end the presumption of father-son inheritance of rule. The passing on of power from father to son has been a characteristic of patriarchal tribal societies, in the Arab world and elsewhere. In Europe, the feudal system worked the same way. Yet democracies demand that power be passed on merit and popular acclaim, and not as an hereditary right.

One of the most remarkable features of the popular revolts of 2011 is a dialectic between archaic patrilineal dynasties that call themselves democracies and popular civil resistance movements that display their commitment to genuine democracy by remaining essentially leaderless—making all of those who take part in some sense a leader. The course of the violent rebellion in Libya has followed this pattern in some respects, but not in others.

In Tunisia, early in the 23-year politically repressive regime of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, political activists and scholars were aware of the extent of the clan’s corruption, and as the family took over national enterprises in 1995–2005 privatization schemes, knowledge of it became commonplace. Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, an unemployed fruit and vegetable seller set himself on fire in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010, sparking the “jasmine revolution.” Workers initially kindled the uprising, and the largest cities lit up in turn after a successful general strike in Sfax on January 12. Professionals, traders, merchants, and financiers soon joined as well, many of whom had been allied with the Bourguiba regime and with Ben Ali in his early years. The upheaval expanded to the upper crust as, on January 8, a delegation of business executives from Sousse, Ben Ali’s base, called the presidential palace in ...

Who the hell is David Barron?

Wikipedia says that name may refer to a British film producer, a soccer player, an actor or a sportswriter. Google says he could be a hairstylist in Atlanta. None of these, though, is the David Barron I have in mind. The one I want is the one who signed off on the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a very bad guy but, still, an American citizen. Barron was a U.S. government lawyer.

Never heard of him? Me neither. But according to published reports, he was one of two lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — the other was Martin Lederman — who in 2010 composed an approximately 50-page memo saying it was legally permissible to kill Awlaki even though he was a U.S. citizen and had not been convicted of so much as a traffic violation. Using plain common sense, they apparently argued that Awlaki — born in the United States or not — was an enemy combatant and could be treated as such. On Sept. 30, he was killed in a drone attack in Yemen.

A little “yippee” emitted from me when I heard the news. Awlaki was a traitor to his country and its values. He was allegedly a senior recruiter for al-Qaeda and was linked to the Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Malik Hasan as well as other attempted terror acts. Awlaki was not shy about his activities, and so they, not to mention his allegiance, were not in question.

There was a question, though, about what to do with him. The Constitution is persnickety about due process, ...

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to three women activists, two from Liberia and one from Yemen, in recognition of their nonviolent campaigns toward peace and women’s rights in conflict zones.

The 2011 laureates are: Africa’s first democratically elected female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, of Liberia; Leymah Gwobee, also of Liberia; and Tawakkul Karman, a Yemeni civil society campaigner who’s played a vocal role in her nation’s months-old uprising against the government.

“We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society,” said the citation read to reporters by Thorbjorn Jagland, a former Norwegian prime minister who heads the Oslo-based Nobel committee.

This year’s winners were the first women since Kenya’s late Wangari Maathai was named in 2004.

While analysts praised the Nobel panel for acknowledging the courage of women activists, some in the Arab world were disappointed that the prize wasn’t awarded to participants in the so-called Arab Spring revolts that have challenged authoritarian governments throughout the Middle East.

“This might be interpreted as a slight to the Arab world,” Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution’s Doha branch, told al Jazeera English. He called the decision “surprising and disappointing.”

It would have been difficult, however, for Arab protesters to fulfill the Nobel panel’s requirement that the prize go to an individual or organization. The uprisings, which first erupted in Tunisia and have now spread in some form to most of the Middle East and North Africa, involved millions of protesters and countless activist groups.

Also, even though the Arab protests began peacefully, some of them spiraled into armed rebellions when government forces used lethal force to crush ...

For the second year in a row, U.S. President Barack Obama has waived a Congressionally-mandated ban on military aid for four countries that use child soldiers.

The four countries that will continue to receive military assistance despite the use of child soldiers in their armed forces include Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Yemen and the newly independent nation of South Sudan, according to a memo released by the White House late Tuesday. 

All four, which are slated to receive a total of more than 200 million dollars in military aid in 2012, were given waivers by the administration last year, as well. 

The latest decision was denounced by Human Rights Watch (HRW) which said it showed “a lack of leadership and a disregard for U.S. law”.

“Countries that keep using child soldiers aren’t going to get serious about ending the practice until they see the U.S. is serious about withholding the money,” said Jo Becker, who heads HRW’s children’s rights division. 

“The Obama administration has been unwilling to make even small cuts to military assistance to governments exploiting children as soldiers,” she added. “Children are paying the price for its poor leadership.” 

Under the U.S. Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008, which took effect in 2010, Washington is banned from providing U.S. foreign military financing (FMF), military training, and several other military aid programmes to countries that recruit soldiers under the age of 18. 

Obama can waive the bans if he determines that doing so would serve “the national interest”.

Five countries, as well as the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) in what in July became South Sudan, were identified last year as using child soldiers during 2009. They included Chad, the DRC, Yemen, Somalia, and Myanmar. Of those, only Somalia and ...

President Obama’s authorization of the assassination of an American citizen, New Mexico–born Anwar al-Awlaki—in a drone attack that also killed American citizen Samir Khan, who was raised in New York City and North Carolina—drew high praise from execution-enthusiast Rick Perry, who congratulated Obama by name for “getting another key terrorist.”

But the bipartisan disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law stopped when Texas Congressman Ron Paul was asked about the air strike that on Friday killed the two Americans in Yemen.

The congressman, who is competing with Perry and others for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, has long complained about “war on terror” abuses that he sees as part of “the disintegration of American jurisprudence.”

And he was blunt in rejecting the victory-lap mentality that saw Obama Democrats and Perry Republicans celebrating the killing of American citizens.

“I don’t think that’s a good way to deal with our problems,” Paul said in New Hampshire. “Al-Awlaki was born here; he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. Nobody knows if he killed anybody. We know he might have been associated with the underwear bomber. But if the American people accept this blindly and casually—that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys—I think it’s sad.

Noting that no move was made to assassinate Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was arrested, tried and executed,