KRG Taking Over More Oil Fields

Sometimes, you get lucky.  You write something and a couple of days later you get confirmation.

Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has just announced that they have taken over the production facilities in Bai Hassan and Kirkuk oil fields.

The two oil fields are said to have a combined daily output capacity of some 400,000 barrels per day, AFP quotes a ministry spokesman as saying.

Interestingly, Prime Minister Maliki claimed that KRG was a safe haven for ISIS fighters. This remark earned him a sharp rebuke from Masoud Barzani and the withdrawal of Kurdish MPs from government.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, who is himself a Kurdish politician, told Reuters news agency on Friday that the Kurdish political bloc had suspended all day-to-day government business after Mr Maliki's remarks. 

He said the country risked division if an inclusive government was not formed soon, adding: "The country is now divided literally into three states - Kurdish, a black state [Isis] and Baghdad."

In other words, the partitioning of Iraq that was launched by ISIS is now underway.

And the Kurds are solidifying their grip on Kirkuk and neighboring oil fields.

ISIS and What Is Happening in Iraq?

I am fascinated by ISIS, the shadowy group that popped out of nowhere to defeat the Iraqi army and to invade large swaths of Iraq (and Syria).

By now, you know that the abbreviation stands for Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (Sham is the Arabic name for Damascus and it refers to the larger region dominated by Damascus, which is historically known as the Levant, hence the alternate abbreviation ISIL used by some publications).

They became well known for their brutal mass executions, which they meticulously film and upload to various sites, for their harsh and strict Sharia rule, which they impose immediately on populations they control, for their ruthless persecution of their opponents, for their popularity among the Western Jihadis, the disaffected "useful idiots" in search for the meaning of life, and for their incredible wealth, estimated to be in the range of several billion dollars.

Is ISIS An Al Qaeda Franchise?

ISIS is supposed to be an Al Qaeda franchise. But besides acting like the true heirs of the apocryphal Hashishin and thereby cementing the image of Muslims as "the barbaric and bloodthirsty other" they are very different from Al Qaeda (AQ) affiliated groups.

You may object to the term franchise but it is accurate, as AQ is a true franchise operation: the corporate headquarters provide the brand, the ideology and the advertising tools for global recruitment. And they let the franchisee run the local store as they see fit. AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq), AQIM (Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, AQAP (Al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula), AQIM (Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia) and Jabhat al Nusra (al Nusra Front) in Syria are all franchise operations (the same can be said of al Shabab in Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria or Lashkar e Taiba in Pakistan and a bunch of others but they are peripheral to our discussion).

The global aim of AQ operations is to overthrow their local governments, which they see as aligned with Western -read infidel- interests and supplant them with a true Jihadist administration. By that they mean a system as close as possible to what they believe was the rule in 8th century Mecca and Medina (hence the denomination Salafi).

As they pursue this goal zealously, they refuse to form alliances with infidels (even though Bin Ladin started out as a CIA collaborator) but they work with other Jihadi groups when it is advantageous for them.

ISIS hardly fits the regular AQ mold. And therein lies my fascination. I have a feeling their plan goes beyond butchering and terrorizing people or creating a genuine caliphate. They seem too cynical for their actions and stated aims to be taken at face value.

What Is Different About ISIS?


First off, it is the only AQ affiliate to leave the organization. The supreme leader of ISIS, (a shadowy Iraqi thug by the name of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) is said to be the founder of AQ in Mesopotamia, then of AQ in Iraq.

But a couple of years ago, he decided to call upon the AQ affiliate in Syria, the Jabhat al Nusra (al Nusra Front) for them to accept his leadership and join his new outfit called ISIS. The guy who runs Jabhat al Nusrah (A Syrian thug by the name of Mohammed al Joulani) asked Ayman Zawahiri, Bin Laden's number 2 and the current CEO of AQ, whether it is a good idea.

Zawahiri said no. Al-Baghdadi's response was to declare his independence.

This led to the second distinguishing feature of ISIS, which is to attack fellow Jihadis. They target not only the Qatar-funded Ahfad al-Rasul but also AQ franchise units like Jabhat al Nusrah. While sending suicide bombers to kill other Jihadis, al Baghdadi also launched a campaign to get the al Nusra fighters to defect to ISIS, which they did by the thousands. It did not hurt that ISIS could pay its soldiers handsomely ($200/month, which is a lot of money for the region).

Thirdly, to my knowledge, ISIS has never engaged Syrian government troops. You read this right. In fact, largely because of that, many Syrians believe that the organization was created and is being sponsored by the current Syrian government. They simply do not seem interested in defeating al Assad. Their goal appears to be to create a new government in parts of Iraq and Syria.

Jabhat al-Nusra stresses the fight against Assad, while ISIS tends to be more focused on establishing its own rule on conquered territory. Nusra has pursued a strategy of slowly building support for an Islamic state, while ISIS is far more ruthless, carrying out sectarian attacks and imposing sharia law immediately. And while Nusra, despite its large contingent of foreign fighters, is seen as a home-grown problem, Syrians at the border frequently described Da’ash as foreign “occupiers” in their country.

Fourth, the military successes of ISIS in Iraq hide many surprising elements.

In 2013, ISIS fighters were numbered around 7,000. Since then, their ranks swelled with new recruits and defections from other Jihadi groups. But ISIS is still not a huge army. Yet a few weeks ago, they faced a much larger and reasonably well equipped force and destroyed them in record time.

How could that be?

We later found out that ISIS forces were joined by former Baathist soldiers and the joint group was led by Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, the former Vice President and  and Deputy Chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council.

Referring to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s fighters, Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has researched the Naqshbandia group, said, “They couldn’t have seized a fraction of what they did without coordinated alliances with other Sunni groups.”

In some areas under militant control, including areas around Mosul, Kirkuk and Tikrit, he said, “there are definitely pockets where the Naqshbandias are wearing the pants.”

Think about that for a second.

The most Jihadi group of all Jihadi groups fights together with Baathist soldiers and accepts the command of one of Saddam's generals. Incidentally, al Douri is the highest ranking Saddam ally to evade capture and he is the leader of the Army of the Men of the Naqshibandi Order (JRTN). No one could explain how he avoided capture for over ten years in an occupied country.

Moreover, it turns out that the ISIS supreme military tactician is a Chechen by the name of Tarkhan Batirashvili:

The next bizarre part of the ISIS puzzle involves the Jihadist credited with being the ‘military mastermind’ of the recent ISIS victories, Tarkhan Batirashvili. If his name doesn’t sound very Arabic, it’s because it’s not. Tarkhan Batrashvili is a Russian - actually an ethnic Chechen from near the Chechen border to Georgia. But to give himself a more Arabic flair, he also goes by the name Emir (what else?) Umar al Shishani.  (...)

According to a November, 2013 report in The Wall Street Journal, Emir Umar or Batrashvili as you prefer, has made the wars in Syria and Iraq “into a geopolitical struggle between the US and Russia.”

Noticed how his name sounds Georgian?

Jeffrey Silverman, Georgia Bureau Chief for the US-based Veterans Today (VT) website, told me that Batrashvili “is a product of a joint program of the US through a front NGO called Jvari, which was set up by US Intelligence and the Georgian National Security Council, dating back to the early days of the Pankisi Gorge.” (...)

Silverman maintains that Jvari in Rustavi, near the capital, Tbilisi, gathered together Afghan Mujahideen war veterans, Chechens, Georgians and sundry Arab Jihadists. They were sent to the infamous Pankisi Gorge region, a kind-of no-man’s lawless area, for later deployment, including Iraq and Syria.

Incidentally, his father and grand father are all church-going Christians. Apparently, from Georgia they were sent to Syria and Iraq through Turkey with the active collaboration of Georgian, Turkish and American intelligence services.

Which brings me to the fifth contradictory fact about ISIS: the connection to Turkey. There were some reports that Turkey allowed training camps for ISIS to be set up in Turkey but I think the bulk of them were in Jordan. However, it is clear that Turkey opened its borders to ISIS fighters and allowed free circulation of Jihadis, arms and supplies. For its part, ISIS tried to occupy strategically located towns to control border access. They also harassed PYD, the Syrian arm of the PKK, to please Turkey and massacred civilians in Rojava.

The cooperation between Jihadis and Turkey was so cozy that, when Seymour Hersh claimed that Turkey helped Jabhat al Nusra with that infamous Sarin attack, it sounded quite credible. (Apparently, there were questions but the allegations stuck.)

Turkey's reasons to help out ISIS may be stupid enough. What is curious is the fact that, as Daniel Pipes (a neocon with whom I disagree on probably everything), noted, ISIS has been working hand in hand with a government it decried as infidel.

The final contradictory fact about ISIS is its ethnic cleansing through terrorism. They are not interested in winning hearts and minds. They do not want people to convert. They want them gone.  There have been reports that they force Alewites, Shiites, Christians, Turkmen and any other opponents to flee the regions they control by executing a few representatives in a public and brutal fashion.

Interesting strategy for a group aiming to build a caliphate.

What is ISIS Doing?

Let's add up the facts.

No attacks on Syrian government troops. Check.

Attacking other Jihadis. Check.

Joining forces with Baathists, the secular and ruthless suppressor of Islamists and with Naqshibandis, a Sunni sect which did not exist in early Islam. Check.

Cooperating and collaborating with a government that admonished Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to accept secularism. Check.

Focus on solidifying power on occupied territories through ethnic cleansing. Check.

What ISIS is doing is to create a new reality on the ground, They are partitioning Iraq and Syria. Or to put it in historical terms, they are revisiting the Sykes Picot agreement. They are creating three ethnically defined regions, one with Kurds, a second with Sunnis and a third with Shiites (or Alewites in Syria).

What is strange is that this "nation building exercise" is undertaken by "foreigners." As noted above, Da'ash or ISIS is widely considered a foreign occupying force. Its soldiers are from different Arab countries, France, Britain, the US, Turkey, Chechnya, the Balkans, North Africa and various African countries. They have no roots in Iraq or Syria and they have no affinity with local allegiances. Consequently, they have zero chance to build and maintain a Sunni state in these regions.

You might think that they are ruthless and well armed, therefore they may be able to hold on to power but history already gave an answer to that proposition. If you remember, when General Petraeus was the supreme commander of coalition forces, Al Qaeda became a serious force in the Sunni areas of Iraq by exploiting sectarian rivalries and manipulating Sunni bitterness.

Petraeus' strategy was to give money and arms to local tribes for them to fight and get rid of Al Qaeda. It worked so well that AQI almost disappeared. The same strategy would work perfectly well with ISIS.

Most rebels and Syrians are prepared for a second war against ISIS, though they disagree whether to do so now or—assuming that happens—“when Assad goes.”

The fact that former Baathists and Naqshibandis were credited with ISIS' military victories in Iraq is a telltale sign of what the future reserves for ISIS.

A better question is this: Who benefited from the new reality on the ground?

Oil and Kurds

Before ISIS attempted to establish its glorious and largely bogus caliphate, Iraqi Kurds were in a bind. They were sitting on large deposits of oil, which they could not sell freely because of Baghdad's objections. Since bypassing Baghdad meant supporting the breakup of Iraq, the US had to officially side with the central government in that regard.

Barzani's solution was to involve Exxon Mobile and Chevron in the extraction of oil on the one hand and to have Turkey finance and build a pipeline with a 400,000 barrel/day capacity on the other.

The problem was that after the Turkish border the KRG pipeline has to be connected to the existing Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline as there is no other way to carry the crude to the port of Ceyhan. However, legally, all oil that arrives to Ceyhan through that pipeline belongs to Iraqi government.

You can see the problem. ISIS provided a multifaceted solution. Actually, the completion of that pipeline and the shipment of the first 1 million barrel and the Northern Iraqi offensive of ISIS are separated by a couple of weeks.

ISIS and its brutal tactics meant that the Kurds suddenly appeared as the only credible force that can stand up to these barbaric Hashishins. And they did. Moreover, when ISIS occupied Mosul, KRG cleverly responded by moving to Kirkuk. Previously, Kirkuk was in a legal limbo and its fate was going to be decided by a referendum. That referendum never took place. Now, with ISIS looming on the horizon, KRG simply and quietly made this oil-rich city part of its regional government.

And here is the clincher: as soon as the Kurds moved in to Kirkuk, they began building a link from their KRG pipeline to Kirkuk - Ceyhan pipeline.

And then they went to Washington to plead their case:

“We need support and help,” Fuad Hussein, Mr. Barzani’s chief of staff, said this week at an event in Washington hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We’re not receiving money from Baghdad anymore, so we need financial resources.”

Mr. Hussein said he thought the Obama administration was reconsidering its policy toward Kurdistan’s increasing demands for more autonomy, if not outright sovereignty. “We feel they are ready to listen,” he said.

So far, though, the administration has been steadfast about preventing Iraq from breaking up, though analysts say it might be open to increased autonomy.

With Kurdish oil flowing through the new pipeline to Turkey, though, some analysts fear the debate over independence is in danger of being decided by facts on the ground. (my emphasis)

My long term readers know that my working hypothesis is based on the desirability and the stabilizing effect of Kurdish and Palestinian statehood for the US. However, although I always maintained that both Syria and Iraq would cease to exist as they are now, I never knew how this was going to happen.

ISIS has just provided the answer.

I am not sure how they managed to "change the reality on the ground" so perfectly, but it almost makes me want to believe in outlandish theories.

Where Is Netanyahu Taking Israel? Part 2

In a previous post, I discussed how Netanyahu and conservative forces have been pushing Israel inexorably towards a one state solution and how this was causing a major change in the outlook and attitude of Jews in Diaspora.

Today, I want to focus on the substantive reasons behind this change.

One State or Two States?

As you might know, there is a debate about a one-state vs two-state solutions for the Palestinian statehood issue.

The former would require the establishment of a federal state on the current territories including Gaza and West Bank. It would mean that Israelis could no longer have a Jewish state and Palestinians would have to give up their aspiration to become independent and autonomous.

The latter, on the other hand, would entail, as the name implies, the creation of two states for two nations.

Lately, many international observers (and, I gather, quite a few Palestinians) are starting to favor the one state approach. I understand the intellectual appeal of the single state solution.

It would solve the major stumbling block of finding a contiguous territory on which to build a viable Palestinian state. The single state solution would also keep all parts of Jerusalem in the same country. And the Palestinian claims to their repossessed land could be handled through regular legal and compensatory means of a unitary state apparatus.

I am also aware that most of the "progressive" observers favor this solution.

You might say, "what's wrong with that idea? Why should "they" have a Jewish state, Wouldn't you object to a Muslim or Catholic or an ethnic state?"

I get the inference.

But Jewish state means something different from, say, a religious source of legitimacy like the one provided by House of Wahhab or some racial notion as a political foundation. To assume this is to ignore Jewish history.

I am not Jewish. But I know their history quite well. Unlike your average gentile who thinks that "they" are good with money and "they" run the world, I know that Jews have always prioritized education over material possessions, they have maintained, by and large, a progressive political identity and they have usually sided with the oppressed groups in their societies.

I also know that they are unique among all minorities in that they have been relentlessly persecuted throughout recorded history.

To non-Jews, Israel is a nation state like any other. And I grant that, in many instances, it behaves like one.

But to Jews, Israel is not any nation state. It is a safe haven, a place they can go to if things turned nasty again, as they did so many times in the past. They may not like to live there right now (40 percent of Israelis are thinking of emigrating elsewhere and a million Jews left the country in the last two decades). They may fret about the growing influence of religious Jews and where it might take Israeli society. But the idea of a Jewish state out there is incredibly important to them.

This is why your Jewish friends wince and grow silent when you criticize Israel, even if they quietly agree with the points made. This is also why they ignore or tolerate Israel's very questionable actions and policies towards Palestinians, even though they would have opposed the same policies if they were implemented by any other nation state.

Within that context, it is not an exaggeration to claim that a one state solution might require Jews to give up the idea of a Jewish state because such a state would hardly conform to the Jewish identity as they know it.

I know it is a big claim. Let me explain it.

Consequences of Managing the "Other"

What I mean is something quite straightforward: Since a large majority of Israelis say that they would never give up the idea of a Jewish state, a de facto one state solution would necessitate Jews "to manage" a sizable minority, - one that would become a majority in a decade or so- i.e. to treat them as second class citizens and deprive them of their rights.

You might think the terminology of "managing" is loaded and misleading. Actually, it is not my word, it belongs to the current Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, as he talks about "managing" the problem without ever solving it. And you know what that means.

“There are those who mislead the people or part of the people when they say that peace can be achieved,” Ya’alon said, and explained at length why “this conflict cannot be resolved.” He also said that “there are problems that cannot be solved and shouldn’t be solved,” arguing that “until the Palestinians give up their narrative, there will be no peace here.” Since the Palestinian people are unlikely to give up their narrative, Ya’alon suggests we shake off ''the illusion of conflict resolution'' and make do with managing the conflict. “We don’t have a time problem,” concluded the senior minister. “Time works in favor of those who know how to put it to good use.”

You might wonder what that management specifically includes.

Domestically, it means an ever expanding settlement regime (while denying building permits to Palestinians). It also refers to a carefully designed system to maintain a segregated and unequal arrangement:

An editorial in Haaretz this month observed that Israel was really “two separate states, one Arab and one Jewish. … This is the gap between the Jewish state of Israel, which is a developed Western nation, and the Arab state of Israel, which is no more than a Third World country.” 

Segregation is enforced in all the main spheres of life: land allocation and housing, citizenship rights, education, and employment. 

None of this is accidental. It was intended this way to guarantee Israel’s future as a Jewish state. Legal groups have identified 57 laws that overtly discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens, with a dozen more heading towards the statute books.

If you need to see a detailed account of what occupation does to Israeli society, there is more here.

In any event, to put the issue in starker and more provocative terms, a combination of one state solution and a Jewish state would inevitably lead to a society where Israelis would have their very own "other," a group that would live amongst them, carrying their own invisible "star" on their nonexistent lapels.

If you think I am giving in to hyperbole, remember Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz's decades-old warning:

“A state ruling over a hostile population of one million people will necessarily become a Shin Bet state, with all that this implies for education, freedom of speech and thought and democracy. The corruption found in any colonial regime will affix itself to the State of Israel. The administration will have to suppress an uprising on the one hand and acquire Quislings, or Arab traitors, on the other.”

I once pointed to a distinction between the Jewish and Israeli perspectives (while discussing Shin Bet and Gatekeepers). If Israel continues to believe that the Palestinian populations can be "managed" within a one state structure, using similar policies, that distinction could become too sharp to be tenable.

And Jews in Diaspora know this. AIPAC change of heart reflects that new reality, something the Netanyahu government and conservative Israelis have not yet grasped.

At this point, you might wonder, what happens next. After all, if I claim that no one can evict settlers, that means the peace process is dead, right?

Maybe. Maybe not.

First I want to highlight the divergence of strategy between the Palestinian and Israeli sides, as they can prove instructive for the first time in a long time. And I will point to a lever to force a change in polarized countries like Israel and Turkey where the conservative forces seem immutable.

Stay tuned.

Where Is Netanyahu Taking Israel? Part 1

If you are a regular reader of this humble soapbox, you will know my obsession with the twin peace processes involving the Kurds and the Palestinians.

And my rarely shared conviction that the US has been pushing for Kurdish and Palestinian statehood to ensure regional stability. And my occasional despair that shortsighted leaders like Erdogan and Netanyahu doing all they can to stop this from happening.

But this shortsighted charge actually hides a much more complicated reality and an intriguingly similar political climate in Israel and Turkey.

You see, in both countries, conservative voters are on the rise and are forcing their choices on these deeply polarized societies. In recent years, conservative forces everywhere have developed a strong sense of martyrdom. They maintain that the whole world is against them. They claim that they are being stabbed in the back by their progressive countrymen. And as a result, they are in no mood to compromise and to work with their political adversaries. It is the universalization of the Tea Party mentality.

In both Turkey and Israel, after years of denial and lengthy speeches, the political left and the center finally came to the bitter realization that the right created such a strong reality on the ground that nothing they can do will be enough to reverse it. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to state that in Turkey the Islamist and in Israel the settlers and the extremists control the future and in both countries the left and center share the same deer-in-a-headlight frozen desperation.

I discussed Turkey's future in a recent post. This post is about what the future holds for Israel.

In Israel, no one believes that settlers can be removed from even some of the lands they occupied. There is no such force. Even the IDF is incapable of doing that. Perhaps consequently, a whopping 87 percent of Israelis believe that nothing will come out of the current peace talks.

It is true that the current coalition government is simply incapable of negotiating and concluding a peace deal. One of Netanyahu's larger partners, Naftali Bennett's HaBayit HaYehudi is dead set against any accord with the Palestinians. In fact, recently, the blustery conservative politician threatened to quit if Palestinian prisoners were freed.

If Netanyahu wants to remain PM, he has no real options to replace Bennett's party. There are a few Orthodox parties that would be happy to join the coalition but Netanyahu's largest partner, Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid used his veto against this move. And the Labour Party is in no mood to help Netanyahu climb out of the hole he dug himself into.

In that sense, Netanyahu is a lame duck PM who is left with stalling as his survival strategy.

Someone else in his position might have called early elections or use the American pressure to bargain with some of his current or prospective coalition partners. Not him. Instead, he opted to alienate and anger Israel's biggest and best ally, the US.

Goading the Obama Administration

First, he appointed Ron Dremer as Israel's ambassador. Ron who, you might ask. Well, he was the guy who arranged for Netanyahu to host a fund raising dinner in Jerusalem for Mitt Romney in July 2012.

This was like giving President Barack Obama the finger. Later, Dermer traveled to the United States to help the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson goad as many Jews as possible into voting for Romney. That didn't pan out. Adelson’s gamble, into which Netanyahu, Dermer and Israel were dragged almost against their will, proved to be a bust. Subsequently, the already problematic relations were further shaken up. It was then that Netanyahu decided to dispatch Dermer to Washington as his ambassador.

A few months ago, Minister of Defense Moshe Ya'alon tried to pull a Sharon and publicly ridiculed Kerry. (His "Messianic fervor" remark earned his government a strong rebuke from Washington and Israel had to apologize.)

When John Kerry realized that his shuttle diplomacy was going nowhere he expressed his displeasure rather bluntly. Instead of taking the American frustration seriously, Netanyahu upped the ante.

On April 13, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz ran a headline stating that the Obama administration was furious at Israel for not siding with the United States at the United Nations during one of the administration’s most important diplomatic initiatives on Russian interference in Ukraine. Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador, was absent from the vote. The official excuse was a strike at Israel’s Foreign Ministry. This wasn’t the only vote in which Israel did not participate during that time, but below the surface, the issue has become a bona fide crisis. Having enjoyed an automatic US veto for many years — a veto that occasionally gives Obama a serious ulcer and is cast (reluctantly) due to a commitment to historical relations — Israel could have, as a declarative statement, stood by the United States during this difficult time. Instead, it opted to sit on the bench and clutch on to a diplomatic strike as a pretext.

Moreover, when the Administration communicated their anger to the Israeli government, Maj. Gen Amos Gilad from the Ministery of Defense said this: "The US is involved in its own way, but our [Israel's] security interests should not be defined as identical to that of any one else, even the US."

As an Israeli commentator put it:

In other words, there are times when Israel is closer to the Russian side than to the US side — an utter folly that could prove to be a historic mistake.

You might speculate that Netanyahu chose to go after the Obama Administration because he knew that AIPAC and Israel's solid support in Congress would provide him cover. If this was true at some point, it is no longer valid.

AIPAC, once the unwavering supporter of everything-Likud, has been putting some distance between itself and the Netanyahu government. After losing two bruising battles in Congress upon Netanyahu's insistence (the appointment of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of State and the imposition of additional sanctions after Iran signed the nuclear deal), AIPAC decided to pull back.

Sen. Bob Corker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke about this with the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, telling The Daily Beast afterward, “AIPAC and Israel are in different places on this issue.”

As you can imagine, this is huge: First, AIPAC never loses a battle in Congress. Second, it never acknowledges any distance between itself and Israel.

In case you wonder if this is the work of a Democratic President and a his Senate majority, it goes beyond that. When Netanyahu tried to use AIPAC to lobby against the Iran nuclear deal, Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, a true hawk when it comes to Israel, simply stated that Israel would have to "choke down" the deal, meaning they had no choice but accept it.

The reason for this major shift in AIPAC and others is partly what one Israeli journalist called "Netanyahu's World Jewry Dilemma."

My heart goes out to Mark Halperin of New York, Brigitte Cohen of Marseilles and Frank Lipschitz of Berlin (all the names are fictional). The three, like other activists in their Jewish communities, are enthusiastic Israel supporters. All three believe that the two-state solution is the sole key to ensuring the Jewish and democratic nature of the State of Israel. What are they telling their congressman, the students in their class or the neighbor across the way when asked these days where Israel’s government is heading?

His answer is that:

There are few things that world Jewry despises more than the dilemma of loyalty to two homelands. Behind the thousands of enthusiastic activists who greet Israeli leaders at Jewish conferences hides a growing Jewish majority that prefers to stay home. When Israel’s interests contradict the essential interests of their countries of residence, and don’t fit in with their values, it gets harder and harder for Halperin, Cohen and Lipschitz to act according to the principle that has for years guided world Jewry: Right or wrong, we are always on Israel’s side.[my emphasis]

Why the Jews in Diaspora are upset with Netanyahu's foot dragging?

The answer is that they are aware that Netanyahu's actions are preventing a Two-State solution and they dislike what a de facto One-State solution would do to Israel and to Israeli society.

Let me explain what I mean in the second part of this post.

Municipal Elections in Turkey and the Future

I have been following the Turkish elections with renewed attention. Although they were for local administrations and municipalities, the recent corruption leaks about PM Erdogan turned them into a referendum of sorts.

They also showed Erdogan's unmatched political skills.

Remember how Karl Rove took a draft-dodger from an upper crust East Coast dynasty and turned him into a good-ol' boy from Texas with working class roots and tastes (and his war hero opponent into an effete Boston Brahmin)?

Well, Erdogan would have made him proud with these elections in Turkey.

When it became evident that he and his family were involved in a massive corruption scandal, just like Rove, he went into offensive and started accusing "the parallel structure" (referring to the Gulen movement) of plotting against him and his followers. He hijacked the agenda and effectively put the opposition on the defensive. They could barely catch up with him. Every day he fed the news cycle with new accusations and bombarded them with sound bites.

When Gulen movement responded with new embarrassing leaks, he countered by banning their rebroadcast and discussion in traditional media. Eventually, he even shut down Twitter and YouTube to ensure that only the technically savvy people (those using VPNs) could access the damaging material. There were many such people on the opposition side but very few within the AKP's constituency. And that was the point.

In short, he successfully prevented a wider discussion of the corruption allegations: his supporters heard too little to feel ambivalent about him and his opponents could find no stable medium or convincing message to challenge him. When they tried, the AKP pundits shut them up with glee. It was like Rove making Bush's dismal service record disappear and keep the narrative on the superficiality of John Kerry's war wounds.

When he won 43-44 percent of the votes, his opponents were so disheartened that the only thing they could do was to lash out at the lemmings-like tendencies of the electorate.

I think that is a facile and somewhat elitist verdict.

Let me first explain why the AKP was victorious despite these serious allegations. I will then try to outline a likely roadmap for the rest of the year.

The AKP: A Unique Political Profile

The AKP is an interesting coalition which defies easy categorization, especially if you use some kind of Western political party affiliation framework.

The party has an Islamist constituency at its core but that core is far from being monolithic. There are moderate Islamists that you could compare to the supporters of Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe. There are also religious nationalists who hold their Turkish identity as dear as their Muslim identity (and that is something quite unique in the Islamic world). There are pious people who believe in the primacy of charitable works and who suspect that capitalism may be corrupting the souls of Muslims. If you have to, you could liken them to Social Catholics. There are regular corporate conservatives who give priority to deregulation and free markets. You know, your basic Mitt Romney folks without the Mormon outlook. And there are social conservatives who cherish a patriarchal society where everyone has a predetermined position within a traditional gender division of labor. A version of the Christian right in the US.

Erdogan's genius was to leverage these disparate forces to occupy the center left, the center and the center right of the political spectrum.

This is much harder than it sounds. In fact, the AKP might be the only conservative party in the world to initiate massive social assistance programs to help the poor and the marginal. Whereas most Western conservative parties currently try to cut down social assistance and feed the poor to the volcanoes, the AKP created massive domestic aid programs: there are close to 12 million people receiving social assistance in Turkey. And there were practically none before they came to power.

Besides social assistance, the party invested in hospitals, schools and universities. They improved municipal services wherever they came to power. More importantly, they made these services essentially free. They also reduced corruption for basic services to individuals and channeled the graft for large projects and permits to (Islamist) charitable works.

For instance, the Islamic precept to bury your dead before the next sunset, previously made the funeral procedures ripe for corruption. When the AKP took over local governments, they streamlined the process and eliminated bribes completely. Even now, they distribute basic staples like flour and dried legumes free of charge in many poor neighborhoods. Consequently, from the perspective of the poor and disaffected, they are directly responsible for a marked improvement in their standards of living and their daily life.

In that context, you could think of Erdogan as a right wing Chavez (but a much better operator than the late El Commandante).

At the same time, the party implemented large scale deregulation and privatization schemes and allowed private sector companies to take over many state-owned businesses like telecommunications. Under AKP rule, private sector prospered like never before. Besides dramatically expanding in the domestic market, Turkish companies became a major force in the Middle East, Russia and Southeast Asia.

Having covered the center-left and center-right economically, the AKP similarly positioned itself socially. On the one hand, it vigorously defended the yearning of its supporters to incorporate Islamic symbols and principles into daily life (the most prominent ones being lifting the headscarf ban and limiting the consumption of alcohol). And Erdogan used a rather polarizing discourse in the process. But his government never fully implemented concrete measures to enshrine these symbols into daily life. Headscarves came to be widely tolerated and there were some minor restrictions on alcohol consumption in public.

This way, for its supporters, the party became the guarantor of these symbols for as long as it was in power but it prevented the other side from claiming that they were turning Turkey into Saudi Arabia. It was a shrewd tactic.

However, there was one crucial problem with all that: this massive economic boom, which enabled Erdogan to maintain capitalist and social democratic policies simultaneously, was based on the twin pillars of construction and consumer spending. As we all know from the US experience (not to mention the GIIPS), such booms are bubbles waiting to burst.

When the economy began to slow down (just before the Occupy Istanbul incidents) Erdogan and his lieutenants quickly realized that they could no longer maintain their benevolence vis-a-vis the poor and their redistributive largess vis-a-vis the business classes.

At the time, I suggested that, at the heart of the Occupy Istanbul discontent was a conflict over the distribution of the existing pie and the only solution under the circumstances was to apply more authoritarian and polarizing approaches.

In that sense, it was an easy decision for Erdogan to go back to what Rove called 50-percent-plus-one strategy. Since then, he has been in every city in the country decrying the effete West Coast liberal and claiming to be the hero of the heartland. And after the corruption allegations, he also took over the mantle of martyrdom. As you might remember from US political scene, nothing is more effective than playing the victim card in limiting the discursive options of your opponents.

Not surprisingly, his message resonates with the poor masses who instinctively dislike those godless liberals and who credit him for the undeniable improvements in their daily lives.

But in the process, he made a fatal mistake: He listened to the advise of his spy chief, Hakan Fidan and, instead of trying to solve the Kurdish problem, as he should have, he exacerbated it by supplying arms to Jihadis in Syria and by harassing the PKK's Syrian offshoot, the PYD.

That turned the Syrian conflict into a long and protracted civil war with no clear winners and made the Kurdish issue much harder to solve.

More importantly, it really upset the Obama administration.

What Will Happen Next?

Erdogan has two elections ahead of him.

The first one is the presidential elections in August as the President will be elected by popular vote for the first time in the history of the Republic. The other is the general elections that will take place sometimes in mid-2015. The AKP's bylaws do not allow their members to stand elections for the same position for more than three times and the 2015 elections will be Erdogan's fourth as an MP (and Prime Minister as well).

For that reason, he expressed his desire to become President. It was assumed that the incumbent Abdullah Gul might withdraw from the race in Erdogan's favor. But right now, this does not look like a done deal.

As I outlined before, Gul has been rebranding himself and might have different plans about the Presidency. But a lot of those plans depend on what Erdogan will do next.

Erdogan has two options.

Option 1: Stay the Course and Pursue Domestic Polarization and Regional Isolation

Erdogan might persist with his defiant attitude and might try to control events through heavy-handed and authoritarian policies. This includes the intransigent Syria policy and its Kurdish component, the purge of state apparatus of Gulen sympathizers and the disastrous foreign policy in the Middle East.

Most Turkish pundits think this is the most likely choice.

If that happens, I predict that, electoral successes notwithstanding, he will be forced to retire from politics in the foreseeable future.

Under that scenario, one of the first things that will happen is a massive capital exodus. Turkey has a significantly large current account deficit and is very vulnerable to such a move. Erdogan does not have many alternatives to fix that problem. His volatile and incompetent foreign policy in the last couple of years alienated the Saudis and the Gulf countries. So, he cannot not expect any influx of capital from them. Western hedge funds and institutional investors stay away from Turkey because of the instability caused by Erdogan's polarizing rhetoric and authoritarian policies. Russia might have helped, as it did in the past, but because of the Crimean crisis, Putin is in an economic bind himself and cannot afford such gestures.

In short, under that scenario, I expect a very severe economic crisis.

There is very little doubt that if the economy takes a nosedive, his support will quickly vanish. For instance, in 2009, right after the 2008 crisis, when the economy slowed down, the 47 percent the AKP received in the 2007 elections was reduced to 38 percent according to contemporary opinion polls. And if the crisis continued, the AKP would have shrunk to its core Islamist constituency, which is estimated to be around 20 to 25 percent (including the ultra-conservative Muslims of the Felicity Party and the Gulenist).

If and when that happens, the AKP coalition will unravel and a serious intra-party power struggle will ensue.

Secondly, most observers believe that there are a lot more damaging recordings that were not made public before the elections. If Erdogan maintains his current course of action, these tapes are likely to become public in dizzying succession. Sooner or later, the allegations will start creating doubts in the mind of his supporters. Especially, if they take place in an adverse economic climate.

Some observers assume that he can actually manage additional allegations as he now controls most media outlets, the judiciary and the police. But there is one component of the graft scandal over which he has no say.

The $4.5 million found in shoe boxes on December 17 belonged to the CEO of a state controlled bank called Halkbank. Halkbank was involved in a gold-for-gas scheme with Iran to circumvent US imposed sanctions. They used an Azeri-Iranian businessman by the name of Reza Zarrab (who was naturalized under the name of Riza Sarraf). It is alleged that Zarrab moved over $13 billion in gold through individuals to ensure compliance with the sanctions. The setup was pretty complicated:

A system was hatched to bypass SWIFT queries by setting up front companies in China. Then, money was transferred from Iran with falsified documents to bank accounts opened in the names of those companies in the guise of reimbursements for imports from China. The money was immediately transferred to the accounts of real or front companies in Turkey as payment for exports, and used to purchase gold. The gold was then sent via couriers to Iran, or to Dubai to be forwarded to Iran.

So far so good.

Right after the raids in Turkey, in late December, President Rouhani ordered that the investigation of former Vice-President and top Ahmadinejad aid Reza Rahimi be fast-tracked. Reza Rahimi has shady dealings with Iranian tycoon Babak Zanjani.

Zanjani’s name also emerged in Turkey’s graft probe as the alleged partner of Iranian-origin Iran in exchange for money via state-run Halkbank.
businessman and gold dealer Reza Zarrab, the key suspect in the case, who is accused of illegal transfers of gold to

 The Turkish connection is the most sensitive part of the investigation for Erdogan:

The English-language Turkish Daily News quoted an Iranian parliamentarian as saying that an Iranian judicial team would travel to Turkey to try to uncover secret assets of Zanjani and his alleged business partner, Reza Zarrab, who is a suspect in a high-level graft probe in Turkey.

This is critically important for Rouhani. Ahmadinejad had appointed the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (known as Sepāh-e Pāsdārān-e Enqelāb-e Eslāmi or Sepah for short) Brig-Gen Rostam Ghasemi as the oil minister. The alleged corruption would weaken both Sepah and Ahmadinejad. And the
conservative Mullahs who supported them.

Which means that Rouhani is unlikely to give this up. In the Rouhani-Ahmadinejad power struggle, Zanjani could make a deal to avoid prosecution and provide damning evidence against Zarrab. And by extension senior AKP politicians.

That is not something Erdogan can control.

For these reasons, I suspect that we will witness a major shift in attitude and policy.

Option 2: Adopt a Conciliatory Foreign Policy Along While Maintaining the Authoritarian Domestic Approach

That major policy shift I find likely will be in the foreign policy area.

Erdogan and his top aid know that they can no longer continue to help the Jihadis in Syria. Besides alienating the US, they are beginning to realize that these hardened radicals are not easy to control and they might create all sorts of problems in Turkey.

Erdogan also needs Kurdish votes if he stands for election for the position of President. Without their support, the opposition parties could easily get a single candidate elected to the Presidency. Even if Erdogan decides not to run for president, he still needs Kurdish votes to shore up his waning support.

All of these variables mean that Erdogan and his team will have to start dealing with the PKK and its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan.

In the coming months, I expect Erdogan to relaunch the peace initiative with Ocalan and perhaps even provide some indirect support to PYD in Syria (depending on the evolution of the talks).

This could dramatically alter the course of the war of attrition in Syria. As I claimed from the beginning, Kurds are the key to the Syrian conflict.

The second olive branch will be towards Iran. There are already burgeoning efforts in that respect and Erdogan himself visited Tehran in January. He rightly fears the Reza Zarrab investigation could engulf his administration and he will try to find a way to placate Rouhani. He does not have many carrots he can offer him but he has no other options. Rouhani, for his part, is happy to be the rising star in the region and he just announced that he will be visiting Turkey shortly.

The third (and not as certain) component of a conciliatory foreign policy would be to start normalizing relations with Israel. Although I maintained that the initial kerfuffle was a kabuki theater, in the last year or so, Erdogan seems to have gone off the deep end. His top aids are likely to try to pull him back. Such a move would ease the US anger, might bolster investor confidence and might even help Turkey reclaim the "honest broker" role it once tried to play n regional politics.

Finally, Turkey might try to persuade Saudi Arabia to give up its policy to undermine Iran and its slow burning feud with Qatar. It is about the only country in the region with sufficient economic power and military might to convince the Saudis that they cannot achieve their goals with their current policies.

If these measures work, Turkey might regain some of its regional stature and might find its economic footing to avert the looming economic and social disaster.

In short, I expect a very busy diplomatic season for FM Davutoglu and probably for Erdogan himself.

As for the domestic scene, some observers said that Erdogan might surprise everyone by adopting a unifying rhetoric and more liberal attitude.

Personally, I don't see him taking this possibility too seriously. In the upcoming period of economic and social turmoil, a liberal approach would not help him much. It would not appease his opponents and it would not please his supporters.

My take is that he will maintain his strident rhetoric and attacks on the opposition, he will continue the purge of Gulen supporters in the judiciary and the security apparatus and he will try to control social media as much as he can.

In the process, he will have to deal with corruption allegations, as more direct and convincing evidences of corruption will surface in the coming months. He will either have to try to block their investigation or let friendly prosecutors perform a perfunctory inquest.

This brings me to the question whether he will try to become President or change his party's bylaws to remain Prime Minister.

If my predictions are valid, Erdogan will need a lot of administrative and political leverage to perform these tasks. The President of the Republic is more than a symbolic figurehead but his powers are dwarfed by the powers of the Prime Minister. After all, it is a Cabinet-centric parliamentary system. Erdogan would be better off if he stayed Prime Minister.

This has two additional advantages for him.

One, he would not have to ask his former fellow Islamist warrior Abdullah Gul to give up his own candidacy. Gul relishes his role as President of the Republic and he is a lot more popular among the opposition than Erdogan and his top lieutenants. There is also the possibility of Gul refusing to step down and to become Erdogan's rival for the presidency.

Secondly, partly as a result of Erdogan's polarizing rhetoric, the opposition hates him with such passion that they might simply unify behind a single candidate and defeat him for the presidential elections. This is a much more likely outcome than it was six months ago. It is hard to predict whether the opposition could stay unified long enough but after the defeat in recent local elections they might have no other option if they want to get rid of Erdogan.

If he loses the presidential elections, it would be a lot harder for him to change the bylaws of his party to stand for the general elections in 2015. He would look desperate and petty.

For all these reasons, I think Erdogan will simply ask his party's general congress to change the bylaws to become a candidate for the fourth time. He will pretend that he detests such overtures but he will eventually let them convince him that he cannot abandon the country at such a critical juncture.

Especially, he will add, when the opposition is so obviously incapable of handling these problems. And reluctantly, he will accept the party's invitation to stand for more terms as Prime Minister.

Some people suspect that he might call early elections to combine them with the presidential ballot. I am not convinced. But if does that this would be another indication that he is eyeing his current post rather than the presidency.

Arunachalam Muruganantham Is My Hero

And he should be yours too.

Aruna who, you might ask.

The short answer is, he is one of the most amazing human beings of our time.

Bar none.

The long answer is like this.

Muruganantham is an Indian man who lives with his widowed mother and his beloved wife Shanthi. His remarkable story begins when one day he notices his wife trying to hide some dirty rags from him. He asks her what they are and she reluctantly confesses that they are bits of fabric she uses as sanitary pad.

"I will be honest," says Muruganantham. "I would not even use it to clean my scooter." When he asked her why she didn't use sanitary pads, she pointed out that if she bought them for the women in the family, she wouldn't be able to afford to buy milk or run the household.

As her Prince Valiant,  he goes out and buys her some pads, only to realize how exorbitantly priced these were. A bulb goes up above his head, cartoon-style, and he decides that he can do better than the commercial pads.

He does a little checking up and discovers that only 12 percent of Indian women use sanitary pads and in rural areas they use all kinds of unhygienic substitutes like sand, sawdust, leaves and ash.

So, he creates a cotton pad and gives it to Shanthi for a test ride.

She said he'd have to wait for some time - only then did he realise that periods were monthly. "I can't wait a month for each feedback, it'll take two decades!"

Being a forceful person, he asks around. Everyone, including his sisters, refuses.

Undeterred, he goes to the nearby medical college and asks some female students to test his designs. If you know a little bit about India (or the subcontinent in general) you will appreciate how audacious a scheme this is. It simply is not done. Yet, miraculously, he convinces 20 students to try his designs out.

Muruganantham, the barely educated school drop out, designs a questionnaire for his volunteers to collect their feedback to improve his designs. But one day, he discovers that these medical students simply asked a couple of their colleagues to fill out his questionnaire and realizes that the data he has been collecting was useless.

What would you do if you were in his shoes?

I know I would have quit.

Not Muruganantham.

It was then that he decided to test the products on himself. "I became the man who wore a sanitary pad," he says. 

He created a "uterus" from a football bladder by punching a couple of holes in it, and filling it with goat's blood. A former classmate, a butcher, would ring his bicycle bell outside the house whenever he was going to kill a goat. Muruganantham would collect the blood and mix in an additive he got from another friend at a blood bank to prevent it clotting too quickly - but it didn't stop the smell.

He walked, cycled and ran with the football bladder under his traditional clothes, constantly pumping blood out to test his sanitary pad's absorption rates.

Think about this for a minute. Picture his daily routine in your mind. And imagine how it would look in a traditional setting like his village.

Not unexpectedly, everyone assumes that he has lost his mind. In fact, the whispering, daily avoidance and rumors get so bad that, the woman for whom he started this crazy effort, his wife, decides to leave him. Perhaps understandably, the terrifying ostracism of the villagers becomes just too much for her.

Muruganantham accepts the hand that was dealt to him with equanimity. As he has not much to lose at that point, he decides to press on.

His next insight is to examine the existing pads to determine why they are more absorbent than his cotton designs. But that is not easy to ascertain.

This idea posed an even greater risk in such a superstitious community. "Even if I ask for a hair from a lady, she would suspect I am doing some black magic on her to mesmerise her," he says.

Once again, he convinces his medical students to let him examine their pads. But he runs into another big problem.

 He laid his haul out in the back yard to study, only for his mother to stumble across the grisly scene one afternoon. It was the final straw. She cried, put her sari on the ground, put her belongings into it, and left. 

First his wife, now his mother. That's it, right? Well, not quite.There was more in store for him.

The villagers became convinced he was possessed by evil spirits, and were about to chain him upside down to a tree to be "healed" by the local soothsayer. He only narrowly avoided this treatment by agreeing to leave the village. It was a terrible price to pay. "My wife gone, my mum gone, ostracised by my village" he says. "I was left all alone in life."

What would you have done if you were in his shoes?

I know I would have quit.

Not Muruganantham.

By then he figures out that his cotton pads are not as absorbent as the commercial stuff. There is something missing and he is unable to find what that is. He decides -against all odds- to ask those big multinationals, like P&G, what is different about their designs. As he puts it:

"It's like knocking on the door of Coke and saying, 'Can I ask you how your cola is manufactured?' 

Muruganantham wrote to the big manufacturing companies with the help of a college professor, whom he repaid by doing domestic work - he didn't speak much English at the time. He also spent almost 7,000 rupees (£70) on telephone calls - money he didn't have.

He tells them that he is a mill owner who needs to test their products. They send hims some samples and he realizes that the missing ingredient is cellulose. That is essentially tree bark and requires expensive machinery to break down.

End of the road, right?

I know I would have quit.

Not Muruganantham.

He decides that he can design a machine that can break down the cellulose and create a sanitary pad.

He gets to work.

Four-and-a-half years later, he succeeded in creating a low-cost method for the production of sanitary towels. The process involves four simple steps. First, a machine similar to a kitchen grinder breaks down the hard cellulose into fluffy material, which is packed into rectangular cakes with another machine. 

The cakes are then wrapped in non-woven cloth and disinfected in an ultraviolet treatment unit. The whole process can be learned in an hour.

The machine is simple and skeletal. His design goal is to make it easy for rural women to use, maintain and fix.

He takes it to Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). They like it so much that, unbeknownst to him, they enter his creation to a national innovation award. Out of 943 entries, his design wins and the President of India is there to give him the prize.

Suddenly he was in the limelight

"It was instant glory, media flashing in my face, everything" he says. "The irony is, after five-and-a-half years I get a call on my mobile - the voice huskily says: Remember me? 

It was his wife, Shanthi.

The happy ending is all around as his mother came back too and his villagers acknowledged that he was not a crazy person possessed by evil spirits.

What would you have done at that point if you were in his shoes?

I know I would have tried to make a few bucks after such an arduous journey.

Not Muruganantham.

"Imagine, I got patent rights to the only machine in the world to make low-cost sanitary napkins - a hot-cake product," he says. "Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty - everything happens because of ignorance."

His business model is to get women to work the machines, to create the product and to sell it to other women in the village. He wants them empowered and employed instead of Muruganantham living in a hideous 27-storey high-rise overlooking Mumbai slums.

Most of Muruganantham's clients are NGOs and women's self-help groups. A manual machine costs around 75,000 Indian rupees (£723) - a semi-automated machine costs more. Each machine converts 3,000 women to pad usage, and provides employment for 10. They can produce 200-250 pads a day which sell for an average of about 2.5 rupees (£0.025) each. 

Women choose their own brand-name for their range of sanitary pads, so there is no over-arching brand - it is "by the women, for the women, and to the women".

In an age where every Silicon Valley whiz-kid, who comes up with an extraordinarily brilliant iOS or Android app like getting you to rent your bathroom to drunken strangers during some Mardi Gras-type events, believes that they deserve to be a billionaire and to become an icon, Arunachalam Muruganantham is more than a breath of fresh air.

Muruganantham now lives with his family in a modest apartment. He owns a jeep, "a rugged car that will take me to hillsides, jungles, forest", but has no desire to accumulate possessions. "I have accumulated no money but I accumulate a lot of happiness," he says. "If you get rich, you have an apartment with an extra bedroom - and then you die."

This is a man who nearly lost everything in life in pursuit of a solution for billions of poor and rural women. And he never thought that he should be handsomely compensated for his travails. He still travels long distances to install his machines and to train rural women to use it.

But perhaps more importantly than that, you know what is is his proudest achievement?

He was once asked whether receiving the award from the Indian president was the happiest moment of his life. He said no - his proudest moment came after he installed a machine in a remote village in Uttarakhand, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where for many generations nobody had earned enough to allow children to go to school. 

A year later, he received a call from a woman in the village to say that her daughter had started school. "Where Nehru failed," he says, "one machine succeeded."

Let me repeat once again: Her daughter was the first child to attend school from that village thanks to his machine and his business model.

This is why he is my hero.

Next time some wild-eyed twenty-something lectures you about the importance of protecting and valuing Intellectual Property (IP), lest we forgo important innovation, simply ask him if he knows the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham.

What's Next in Turkey?

In late December, I posed this fateful question regarding the embattled Turkish Prime Minister: "is this the end for Erdogan?" At the time, I predicted that damaging information about Erdogan and his family members will almost certainly be leaked before the municipal elections in March 2014.

And I suggested that while Abdullah Gul (the President) would be on the rise (along with Deputy PM Ali Babacan), Erdogan would find it very hard to cling on to power and he might be forced to quit sometime this year.

In fact, it is widely rumored in Turkey that more dossiers are being readied and some of them will implicate Erdogan and his family members. One of the ministers who had to resigned openly called for the PM's resignation and said that all of the large construction projects were approved personally by the PM.

As you know, this has now happened.

Last week, an audio tape containing five separate conversations between the PM and his son hit the Internet. (An English language transcript can be found here.) During these conversations, you hear Erdogan instruct his son to give large piles of cash to several business associates for safekeeping. At some point, the son hesitantly tells his father that he almost got rid of everything and there is only 30 millions euros left to move. Only.

A second tape was leaked a couple of days later, in which Erdogan's son informs him of a businessman's offer to pay them only $10 million, a sum apparently much less than what was agreed upon, and Erdogan tells him not to accept the lesser figure.

I am not a moralist and by itself, a garden variety (albeit involving massive sums) grifter story would not be of interest to me. But this case is relevant because it contains telling clues about a coherent plan to unseat Erdogan.

The Original Scandal

The details are here.

I only want to make the following point: It is nearly impossible to conduct an investigation for two years involving senior members of the Cabinet without any leaks. This could only be done if the investigators were members of a tight group, none of whom interested in career rewards that some judicious whistleblowing might bring.

As I wrote at the time, this is why I rejected corruption vs a plot against the government dichotomy: it was both.

In other words, the corruption allegations were correct but the agents who brought them forward were doing it to unseat Erdogan.

Give Him Enough Rope

The aftermath of the initial blow was intriguing. Apart from giving his first ever interview to a foreign journalist, and denying the accusations, Gulen remained silent for the most part. He let Erdogan to be the sole actor on stage.

This calculation paid off nicely. Erdogan's huge overreaction and the autocratic steps he has taken were much more damaging that anything Gulen or his supporters might have said.

He started with a massive purge in the executive branch and dismissed or moved thousands of police officers and state prosecutors. Even to those who knew that Gulen supporters were occupying key positions in state institutions, this undertaking looked more like a cover up than a genuine desire to reform the system.

Erdogan then proceeded with several highly questionable laws. One scrapped the independence of the judiciary and attached the body that appoints judges and prosecutors to the Ministry of Justice. Another law strengthened government control over the Internet and social media by requiring all ISPs to maintain logs for two years and make them available to the authorities. It also allowed the blocking of Websites without court ruling.  

Finally, because Erdogan firmly believes that the only state apparatus uninfected by the Gulen virus is the Turkish Intelligence Agency (MIT), he pushed a law that removed all Parliamentary oversight of MIT's activities. The law also provides the Agency with much wider eavesdropping powers, including unfettered access to corporate IT systems. It accords immunity to its officers (and collaborators) and makes it a crime to report or leak its activities.

The overreaction and overreach was simply mindboggling.

Predictably, President Gul, a presumed sympathizer of the Gulen movement, signed these texts into law. Since he has no real veto power (he can only send them back for review and has to sign them the second time) he used these opportunities to raise his concerns. Once again, Gul was positioning himself as the statesman, while emphasizing Erdogan's dictatorial choices.

Once it looked like Erdogan won the power struggle and he was feeling invincible, those infamous recordings showed up on YouTube.

Are the Recordings Genuine?

Erdogan's predictable reaction to these serious allegations was vociferous indignation over what he claimed to be doctored tapes.

As you can imagine, I have no way of knowing one way or the other. But I can suggest a couple of pointers.

If these were collages, i.e., dialogues created with separate words taken from different speeches, it would be impossible to end up with a convincing exchange since the human ear is very sensitive to pitch changes such a method would necessarily entail.

It is also not possible to have impersonators to produce such recordings since every voice has a unique frequency imprint and it would be very easy to verify the authenticity of the speakers.

On the other hand, you could slightly edit actual conversations and rearrange some sentences in those conversations to create a much clearer causality. Here is a discussion of these points in English and here is the original research in Turkish.

If I were to venture a guess, I would opt, like I did previously, for both. That is to say, I believe that it is highly likely that the gist of the conversations is accurate but some editing might have taken place to sharpen their direction and content.

Who Could Eavesdrop on Encrypted Phones?

The day after the tapes hit YouTube, Erdogan inadvertently blurted out that "they are listening to government's encrypted phones."

In the tapes, you hear his son mentioning a secret number and Erdogan talks about encrypted phones, so we can safely presume that these conversations took place on a secure line using encrypted phones, like the one you see on the right.

The question is this: Assuming, as I do, that the bulk of the conversations is authentic (even if edited), how did they eavesdrop on encrypted phones? People who simply maintain that the Gulen supporters might have done it are missing an important point.

Unless you are the NSA, the only way you can listen in on these conversation is to get hold of the encryption key. In Turkey, encrypted phones sold to private citizens can be monitored with a court order as their encryption keys have to be made available to the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK).

But the encrypted phones used by ministers are exempted from this practice and they use 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), which is impossible to crack through blunt computing force.

In short, unless you have backdoor access or have the actual encryption key, there is no way you can monitor such conversations. That leaves two institutions, one is the NSA, the other is MIT. While I am sure the NSA listens in on all world leaders, I seriously doubt that they would willingly leak anything.

That leaves MIT, the executive branch institution most trusted by the Prime Minister.

Will People Care?

In Turkey, bribe accepting politicians are the equivalent of cheating presidents in France: they are part of a natural order of things. And indeed, opinion polls show that there is barely a move in Erdogan's popularity.

But this could change rapidly.

Let's look at this logically: If there was a plan to unseat Erdogan what do you think the next steps would be?

If I were implementing such a plan, I would continue what I have been doing, that is to say, leak allegations, give him space for his shadow boxing, let him deny the whole thing aggressively. And when he starts to feel like he is gaining the upper hand, hit him with video recordings of these alleged incidents. Does it not make sense?

Even Erdogan's staunchest supporters would desert him if they saw his family stuffing money bags into the trunk of several S-Class sedans.

I actually don't know if they have the appropriate visuals for these events but if something like that shows up on the Internet in the coming days, you can bet your last Lira that this whole things was a plan to get rid of Erdogan.

Why and Who?

The "why" is fairly easy.

In the last year, Erdogan made huge blunders in the region. He sided with Jihadis in Syria just to gain leverage against Kurds, he failed to start a peace process with Turkey's Kurds. He alienated all the Sunni powers in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt (there is no Turkish diplomatic representation in Egypt and the last ambassador was declared persona non grata). And he stood by as Iran rose to prominence and Turkey lost most of its leverage.

In short, he disappointed his most important ally in a big way.

Domestically, since May, Turkish economy is in a free fall. The lira is down, the current account deficit is huge, unemployment is high and there is a net capital outflow. Not surprisingly, Middle East funds are now shunning Turkey.

I will let you guess the "who" using my black hole analogy.

What's Next?

I stand by my prediction in December.

What they want -let's call them the markets- is for Erdogan to leave and Ali Babacan to replace him as the Prime Minister. In that post, I also emphasized Abdullah Gul's impressive re-branding and his bright future.

I still think that they would be the dream team, Gul, the newly branded centrist statesman as President and Babacan, the brilliant technocrat, as Prime Minister.

Incidentally, this is what the Economist said this week:

Still, the conventional wisdom is that, unless voters feel the economic pinch, few will be bothered by their rulers’ sleaze. Should this prove wrong (and several people now expect AK to lose Ankara), Mr Erdogan’s fellow AK party members may at last decide it is time to replace him. 

Mr Gul is still touted as one possible successor. Another is Ali Babacan, the deputy prime minister, who has a spotless reputation.

If that happens, that is, if Erdogan leaves, Gul remains President and Babacan becomes the Prime Minister, expect smooth sailing in the region.

The American plan will be back on track, peace with Kurds will have a genuine shot, the Syrian conflict will finally have a reasonable framework and the Saudi-Sunni silliness will be in check.

If Erdogan refuses to go, dark clouds will get darker for Turkey and the region.