By Michael Werz

Yesterday’s Mexican presidential elections mark the culmination of a tremendous comeback-story. Ousted after over seven decades in power in 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is back in control of “Los Pinos” and the Mexican government, determined to restore its image and broaden Mexico’s relationship with the United States.

The PRI had been a symbol of corporatism and entrenchment for decades, famously called the “perfect dictatorship,” for its grip of the Mexican economy and political stage. But the party has reinvented itself in recent years, eschewing its autocratic past and renouncing the party “dinosaurs” despised by many Mexicans. The PRI recorded a narrow victory with 38 percent of the vote on Sunday through a young candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, who had few ties to the old regime. The closer-than-expected result at the polls failed to give the PRI the strong electoral mandate and Congressional majority for which it had hoped, meaning Peña Nieto’s first term will be a time for cooperation, conciliation, and pragmatic politics. President-elect Peña Nieto promised as much in his unthreatening campaign, and his legacy will be measured against this pledge and his ability to check the older factions within the PRI.

The election offers reason for cautious optimism; it was free, fair, and enjoyed over 62 percent voter participation. The result showcases Mexico’s tremendous progress implementing democratic procedures, which have made it one of the most transparent electoral processes in the Hemisphere despite the ongoing violence surrounding the war on drugs.

The election also provides an opportunity for the next American administration. The central problem facing U.S.-Mexican relations is the large gap that remains in U.S. public perceptions of Mexico, which are too often a breathtakingly simplistic focus on drugs, migration, and an outdated belief in building walls. This narrow perspective ignores the two countries’ interdependence and important changes in Mexican society.

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A Washington Post report recently suggested that the U.S. drone campaign in Yemen against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was backfiring, purportedly “increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.” A new report in Foreign Affairs, by contrast, comes to the opposite conclusion.

Christopher Swift, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law, traveled to Yemen and found that “the factors driving young men into the insurgency are overwhelmingly economic” and are not a result of blowback from drone strikes. Indeed, according the Yemenis Swift interviewed, the drone strikes were hurting AQAP:

[T]o my astonishment, none of the individuals I interviewed drew a causal relationship between U.S. drone strikes and al Qaeda recruiting. Indeed, of the 40 men in this cohort, only five believed that U.S. drone strikes were helping al Qaeda more than they were hurting it. …

Those living in active conflict zones drew clear distinctions between earlier U.S. operations, such as the Majala bombing, and more recent strikes on senior al Qaeda figures. “Things were very bad in 2009,” a tribal militia commander from Abyan province told me, “but now the drones are seen as helping us.” He explained that Yemenis could “accept [drones] as long as there are no more civilian casualties.”

The striking difference between the Washington Post and Foreign Affairs accounts of the drone campaign may be a consequence of the two stories’ sourcing. While the Post interviewed “tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists and officials from four provinces in southern Yemen,” Swift met with Yemeni journalists and “tribal leaders, Islamist politicians, Salafist clerics, and other sources” that were “older, more conservative, and more skeptical of U.S. motives.”

But it’s clear that the aftereffects of drone strikes are far from well understood. Drones look to be playing a significant role in bringing al-Qaeda’s defeat “within reach,” but the conflicting reports on the campaign’s consequences serve as reminders of the negative aspects of this nascent counter-terrorism tool. As Swift notes, the strikes in Yemen and Pakistan can kill a number of innocent civilians. The drone program is also unpopular internationally and shrouded in secrecy domestically.

Syed Farhaj Hassan dropped out of college in 2001 and joined the U.S. Army. In 2003, he was at the vanguard of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Now, the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) spying program on his New Jersey Muslim community has the current Army reservist up in arms again — this time through the courts.

Hassan, who learned of the spying from the AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series, is one of a number of New Jersey Muslims suing the NYPD over its surveillance program of Muslims across the Hudson River from its own jurisdiction. He says he feels “betrayed” by the spying program, which he says is an “invasion of our privacy” and targets innocent people. But Hassan’s participation in the suit is, like his service in Iraq, focused on defending the rights of others:

I was upset that this was happening to a community, simply based on their faith…

My concern as a concerned citizen, as an active participant in democracy is: Who’s next and what’s next? That’s what upsets me.

Watch a video of Hassan being interviewed:

Hassan’s military record makes clear that he’s not an opponent of providing security for Americans. “If there is actionable intel, then by all means, conduct the law-enforcement operation that you need to,” he told the Star-Ledger. But that doesn’t mean spying on innocent Muslims simply for being Muslim. In fact, he says, this could be counter-productive. He says trusting relationships meticulously built up between law enforcement and Muslim-American communities could be set back by more than a decade by the surveillance:

All the inroads that certain departments of the government have made (with Muslim communities), have been thrown asunder, i.e., the FBI perhaps — or municipal police departments — because of the actions of this one police department. And this is national.

It’s a slap in the face.

The FBI’s Special Agent in Charge in Newark agrees. “It’s starting to have a negative impact,” special agent Michael Ward said. “When people pull back cooperation it creates additional risks.”

Other top officials are concerned about the program as well. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) objected to being left in the dark about the spying, and the Justice Department said in February it was reviewing the issue.

Conservative commentators and advisers to Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team have been chattering to the press a lot in the past few weeks, often on background to discuss in internal machinations over policy. The result is an emerging picture of a Romney team fractured by a lack of focus and unable to draw a sharp distinction between the candidate’s policies and those of President Obama.

Two press accounts today bolster the notion of disarray on Romney’s foreign policy team. In an article in the Daily Beast, neoconservative American Enterprise Institute vice president of foreign policy and defense studies Danielle Pletka — whose husband Stephen Rademaker advises Romney — lamented the lack of a top tier foreign policy spokesman for Romney who can speak to the press and keep the candidate abreast of developments, which in effect is keeping foreign policy on the back-burner:

One of the things that troubles me is that there is no lead foreign policy person who is traveling with the governor and who is there to talk to the press. … [Foreign policy] is one of President Obama’s biggest failings and the American people need to hear a debate about more than the economy.”

Former John Bolton aide Richard Grenell’s tenure as the campaign foreign policy spokesman ended almost before it started when the openly-gay Grenell resigned after the campaign buckled under pressure from right-wing groups and kept him cloistered during a critical foreign policy conference call with reporters.

One aide recalled to the Daily Beast a weekly team conference call where one adviser raised a report in Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency — known for its blatantly false propaganda — that Russia, Iran, Syria and China would stage a joint military exercise. The adviser told the Daily Beast:

It was so lame. These conference calls are really for people who have an hour in a half of time every week to waste.

The disarray was also on display in a Washington Times article from Monday. In the story, Romney advisers outlined a policy centered on supporting allies and not publicly diverging from supporting allies’ positions (something that already happened when an adviser trashed the British prime minister).

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A new report conducted by the Marine Corps [PDF] reveals that Camp Lejeune, the largest Marine Corps base on the East Coast, reported 70 cases of sexual assault. Corps wide, the Marines reported 346 cases of sexual assaults, a 10 percent increase from 2011.

“We have been ineffective at addressing and eliminating sexual assault within our ranks,” the report states. “In far too many cases across the Marine Corps, poor command climates due to unengaged leadership are eroding the trust necessary for victims to safely report these crimes.”

The International Business Times charted the reported incidents at Marine bases worldwide. For example, Okinawa, Japan reported 67 sexual assaults and Camp Pendleton in San Diego reported 64.

“[R]esearch shows that sexual assault is one of the most underreported crimes in the United States,” Marie Brodie, manager for Marine Corps Community Services Lejeune Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program, told The Jacksonville Daily News. Estimates suggest that approximately 80 percent of sexual assaults in the Marine Corps go unreported.

As evidenced in the documentary “The Invisible War,” the military’s system of vesting investigative, prosecutorial and sentencing responsibilities to a unit’s commanding officer is part of the problem. Since sexual assaults are perceived as matters of unit discipline, commanding officers have little incentive or ability to refer the investigation up the chain of command or to an independent prosecutor.

Rachel Natelson, legal director of the Service Women’s Action Network, blogged in the New York Times on Friday that the military justice system is in desperate need of reforms if it is to address the growing problem of sexual assaults. She wrote:

Command discretion, moreover, affects offenders as well as victims, leaving those of lower rank and achievement vulnerable to outsize punishment. In fact, it was to protect the rights of defendants from misguided prosecution that Canada, Britain and Australia successively transferred authority over criminal cases from the commanding officer to an independent prosecutor, on the premise that courts-martial were not sufficiently separated from the military chain of command to be considered impartial tribunals by constitutional and international treaty standards.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently announced a plan to shift authority over sex crimes to senior ranking officers instead of the junior commanders who frequently handle such cases and several Congressional offices have introduced legislation to transfer such cases to military proecutors and allow members of the armed services access to federal courts for civil tor and discrimination claims.