Where Is Netanyahu Taking Israel? Part 3

Just as I don't hold Netanyahu in high esteem, I don't have much respect for Mahmoud Abbas, the President of Palestinian Authority (or the State of Palestine). For one thing, his family got too rich for me to entertain any notion that he is an honorable politician. For another, his 1984 book, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism is essentially an effort to deny the Holocaust.

So, in case you are wondering, I have no illusions about him.

But I have to admit that, in the last three years, he earned my grudging admiration by outmaneuvering Netanyahu at almost every turn. Abu Mazen, as he is popularly known, proved that he was a wily adversary, crazy like a fox.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Reasonable Statesman

What Abbas did was to elevate the chess game to a new platform. Instead of dealing with a broken process and trying to govern an impoverished and desperate population, he took the fight to international institutions. What is even more remarkable, he did so not to win any concessions from the ruling conservative forces in Israel, as he knew they were immutable, but to isolate Israel internationally by branding it as a builder of an apartheid regime.

In their nationalistic folly, the conservative politicians of Israel helped him every step of the way.

The starting point, at least for this narrative, is the dark days after Hamas decided that Abbas was no longer the legitimate President of the unrecognized State of Palestine. The most realistic peace prospect pushed by Ehud Olmert had also fallen victim to the Hamas-Fatah split.

In 2011, Abbas first declared that the rejection of 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a mistake and he wanted to correct it. This was a clear recognition of a two-state solution and the right to exist for the state of Israel.

In November 2011, he surprised everyone (including this blogger) by applying for membership to UNESCO. Astonishingly, it got through. In and of itself UNESCO membership does not bring much to the Palestinian Authority. But it opens up the way to automatic membership to a dozen of other international organizations, among which were WIPO and IAEA. Since both the US and Israel were legally obligated to stop paying their dues to these agencies, it could have created a very difficult situation for them.

Curiously, Abbas refrained from applying.

For a full year, he baited Netanyahu with the prospect of membership application to the United Nations. While all Netanyahu could muster was more bluster, in November 2012, Abbas applied for it and Palestine was granted the "non-member observer state" status by the General Assembly.

Besides allowing Abbas to rebrand Palestinian Authority the State of Palestine, this status enables the Palestinians to apply to other UN agency and especially to the International Criminal Court (ICC). ICC is a permanent tribunal that handles acts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Although Israel (along with the US and Sudan) declared that they do not intend to become states party to the founding treaty, a Palestinian membership worries the Israeli government deeply.

Finally, on 1 April 2014 Abbas declared that he was applying to join 15 international treaties. 13 of which are UN treaties.

This one is an intriguing move. Abbas had promised not to apply to these treaties until 29 April. He said that he did it a month early because Israel failed to release a batch of Palestinian prisoners at the end of March, as agreed.

But he did not have to move right away: He knew that Naftali Bennett had just threatened to quit government if these prisoners were released and Netanyahu was in no position to do it. He could have waited till the end of the month and expose the Israeli government's inability to deliver on its promises. Instead, by moving immediately, he gave Netanyahu cover, allowing him to claim that if Abbas waited till the end of the month everything could have been fine. Even though, as everyone knew, it just wouldn't be.

It was as if he was asked by a very convincing third party (who feigned surprise later on) to provide cover to Netanyahu.

Is that possible? Well, think of it this way: the list of treaties and agencies Abbas applied to did not include the ICC. In that sense, it was a carefully crafted gesture: Large number of fairly obscure treaties registered his disappointment but not including the most feared agencies showed his reasonableness.

He was in a position for force a coalition crisis or start a new Netanyahu - Obama confrontation. And he simply did not do it.

There is more. What would you do if your interlocutor argues that in a two-state solution Israel's security might be permanently jeopardized? Why, you'd offer a demilitarized vision for the future State of Palestine with NATO forces patrolling the territory.

Six months into peace talks dominated by discussion about security, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has proposed to Secretary of State John Kerry that an American-led NATO force patrol a future Palestinian state indefinitely, with troops positioned throughout the territory, at all crossings, and within Jerusalem.

Moreover,

Mr. Abbas said in an interview with The New York Times at his headquarters here over the weekend that Israeli soldiers could remain in the West Bank for up to five years — not three, as he previously stated — and that Jewish settlements should be phased out of the new Palestinian state along a similar timetable. Palestine, he said, would not have its own army, only a police force, so the NATO mission would be responsible for preventing the weapons smuggling and terrorism that Israel fears.

When you add up all these moves, you become aware that Abbas has been astutely branding himself and his side as reasonable people, willing to do anything for a two-state solution.

The flip side of this skillfully constructed image is the portrait of an unreasonable man, using any pretext to make a two-state solution impossible. This is also a man who tarnishes Israel's image by forming unsavory regional alliances and by ignoring the growing international backlash against the Jewish state.

Netanyahu's Shortsighted Alliances and Choices

While the hapless Turkish PM was completely out of his depth when he suggested that Israel was behind the coup in Egypt, there is no question that the Netanyahu government became uncontrollably giddy when the Egyptian army removed President Mursi from power.

The simple equation is that Mursi was supportive of Hamas and his quiet stance was making Israel nervous about dragging its feet at the negotiating table. Without Mursi as President, Netanyahu thought they would go back to status quo ante, that is, the passive aggressive silence of the Mubarak era.

The bonus, this time around, was the fact that the top military commander General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi hated Hamas with a passion and one of the first things he did was to destroy the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. So, what's not to like for Israel, you might ask.

There are quite a few things to dislike actually. Since the coup was more or less sponsored by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, Israel found itself aligned with the Kingdom, one of the most ruthless regimes in the world and one of Israel's most implacable enemies. And it was not an accidental or ad hoc situation. The New York Times reported that, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring:

Once viewed as a potential threat by Jerusalem, the government in Saudi Arabia is increasingly viewed as a guarantor of stability in a region in upheaval, as revolutionary fervor sweeps through the Middle East.

The idea of viewing the Saudis "as a guarantor of stability" tells me that there is a policy in place, however misguided such a thing might be. To support this assumption, I can cite a couple of interesting events.

There is the secret meeting that took place in Israel between senior intelligence officials.

Saudi Deputy Defense Minister Salman bin-Sultan and two other officers are said to have paid a “secret visit” to Israel, where they “met Israeli security leaders”, according to confidential sources of the Palestinian news agency, al-Manar and Israeli radio.

"The Saudi delegation," the sources said, "met Israeli security leaders and Bin-Sultan visited one of the military Israeli bases accompanied by a senior member of the Israeli staff board."

Salman is the brother of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence head, Prince Bandar bin-Sultan bin Abdulaziz.

This was also reported by the Sunday Times. According to the British paper, the collaboration between their respective intelligence agencies is much more extensive than previously known and in fact, the paper claimed that Saudis made it clear to their counterparts that Saudi Arabia would give airspace clearance to IDF planes attacking Iran.

As part of the growing co-operation, Riyadh is understood already to have given the go-ahead for Israeli planes to use its airspace in the event of an attack on Iran.

Both sides are now prepared to go much further. The Sunni kingdom is as alarmed as Israel by the nuclear ambitions of the Shi’ite-dominated Iran.

Uncharacteristically for intelligence matters, this was vehemently and categorically denied by the PMO.

Still, you can see a trend forming.

“Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is good, and we hope for more peaceful relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in December — a surprisingly strong statement given that the two countries do not have diplomatic ties. Such a public statement would have been unthinkable even weeks before.

In fact, as I noted in my previous post, these Sunni alliances got so cozy that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf Emirates now openly side with Israel in the latest Gaza conflict. In fact, it has been reported that Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been in daily contact during the Gaza war.

If you ask me, aligning Israel with the House of Saud and Wahhab and an assortment of autocratic Arab rulers is a very shortsighted approach. It pushes Israel along a militaristic path and further isolates the country internationally.

Indeed, the New York Times recently suggested that the response of the Israeli government to the challenges ahead was to adopt a castle mentality.

[T]hey have embraced a castle mentality, hoping the moat they have dug — in the form of high-tech border fences, intensified military deployments and sophisticated intelligence — is broad enough at least to buy time. 

Mr. Amidror, a former major general in military intelligence, summed up the strategy as “Wait, and keep the castle.”

Part of this strategy is to continue to cultivate their back channel dialog with the autocratic leaders in their neighborhood.

“Historically, Israel has preferred to have strong leaders, even if they’re hostile to Israel,” said Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, citing President Bashar al-Assad of Syria as an example. (..) 

 “Israel always likes to have an address. Assad we don’t like, but when something happens in Assad’s territory, we can bargain with him. 

In short, as Abbas is re-branding himself as a reasonable, peace seeking elder statesman, Netanyahu is trying to preserve the status quo through dubious alliances, to disrupt the Fatah - Hamas unity government and to avoid any negotiations towards a two-state solution.

I am of the opinion that his path is untenable. It is not possible to destroy Hamas through military means without in the process killing huge numbers of civilians. As I noted yesterday, since even those Palestinians who hate Hamas are willing to die to avoid going back to the pre-war situation, sooner or later Israel will be facing a huge international backlash and will be forced to relent.

So, what is next and will there be a peace process are the burning questions.

My answer is in the next and final installment of this series.

Contrarian Notes on the Gaza Debacle

I was getting ready to post the rest of my Netanyahu series when the latest Gaza episode began. As I was about to embark on a brief tour de France, I postponed all postings and left.

When I returned, the Gaza situation had become too catastrophic to allow me to continue with the posts I had prepared earlier. So I decided to register my views on what is happening in Gaza before I return to my regularly scheduled programming.

In a nutshell, I think the responsibility of the grotesque humanitarian disaster falls in equal measure on all the regional players, namely, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Israel and Turkey. If you have pro-Israeli views, you might wish to add Hamas to that list but I did not for reasons I will discuss in a minute.

First, let me explain why several Arab countries are topping my list.

With Friends Like These

At the core of the Gaza problem is a massive economic and social deprivation. Even before the 2007 Israeli siege, Gaza had always had a very high unemployment rate. In May 2014, it reached a five-year high of 41 percent. A month ago it rose to over 45 percent. If you remember Machiavelli's advice to the Prince about the dangers of depriving people of their livelihood ("because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony"), this is a situation that creates a lot of desperate, nothing-to-lose Palestinians.

You might argue that Israel and its suffocating blockade is the main culprit. While I am not denying Israel's large responsibility in all this (as I will outline shortly), I believe that its measures would not be nearly as crippling if its policies were not aided and abetted by the Arab states in the region.

To begin with, the siege is not just Israel's, it is also actively reinforced by Egypt's new rulers. General al-Sisi closed the tunnels and the Rafah port as soon as he toppled the Mursi government. If he wanted it, he could pretty much render the Israeli embargo ineffective.

Moreover, my argument goes beyond the negative effects of the Israeli and Egyptian embargo.

I read someplace that Walid bin Talal, one of the richest men in the world, made roughly $5 billion by simply buying Citi Bank shares at a deep discount after the 2008 financial meltdown.

That windfall is about the size of the Gaza strip's entire economy. In other words, if those oil-rich Arab countries really wanted to help Palestinians, they could simply provide them with generous economic assistance. It is pocket change for them. In fact, just one person, with the money he made from this one deal, could singlehandedly transform Gaza from being the land of the wretched to a prosperous and happy place.

Instead, Arab states are doing what they have always done since the creation of Israel. They keep Palestinians impoverished, desperate and angry and refuse to help them in any meaningful way. For decades they kept them in makeshift refugee camps and quietly worked to transform them from a highly educated liberal community into radical Islamists.

And now, in their all-consuming hatred of Iran and the Shia, they simply formed a silent alliance with Israel to make Palestinians suffer more. If you think this is an exaggerated statement take a look at a recent piece in the New York Times:

After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.

In short, the reason Arab states are at the top of my "guilty list" is because, they refrain from helping Palestinians, preferring to maintain the status quo as a way to whip up antisemitic sentiments and rile up Muslim masses.

What About Israel?

Having said that, I am not letting Israel off the hook. I believe that what they have been doing to punish the population of Gaza is simply unconscionable. Just to take a few recent examples, they knocked down Gaza's only power plant, making an already miserable life unbearable. They attacked a UN-run school housing refugees killing scores of women and children. And they dropped a mortar on a crowded market killing 17 civilians and wounding hundreds.

If you look at the statistics, almost all Israeli casualties are military personnel and a very large percentage of Palestinian casualties are civilians.

Since Israel began its offensive in Gaza on 8 July, 1,422 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, according to Gaza's health ministry. 

Fifty-six Israeli soldiers and two civilians have also died.

And in case you wonder, I am not a lone radical voice claiming all of that. Israel's closest ally has just made the same point.

Moreover, as we know from the dubious practice of "roof knocking," IDF is capable of pinpoint bombing. Consequently, these "oops" instances seems to have been deliberately set up to terrorize and demoralize the civilian population.

But I am not a moralist and, acknowledging the human suffering aside, to me, condemning a nation state for using violence is a little like criticizing a heavy metal band for being loud. That's who they are and what they do.

What is more enlightening from my perspective is the intricate and complex relationship between Hamas and the conservative forces in Israel. And how they continuously make each other possible.

Let's begin with a fact that everybody would like to forget. Israel helped spawn Hamas. I wrote this before and it shocked my friends. Israel did it to weaken the Fatah movement. Hamas was supposed to ingratiate themselves to Palestinians by providing humanitarian assistance. And they were to simultaneously attack Arafat's secular nationalism from an Islamist position.

It was kind of like the brilliant American idea of supporting political Islam to weaken the Soviet empire. And we all know how well these plans turned out.

More importantly, it is not just a question of miscalculated origins. Israel has no interest in getting rid of Hamas. As an Israeli journalist recently noted:

Paradoxically enough, Israel has no interest today in toppling Hamas. It knows that the vacuum that will be created will turn into a magnet for a more radical organization. And that's why, as a high-ranking Israeli diplomatic official told me this week, Israel pounds Hamas with one hand while helping it with the other. It continues to supply electricity, water, vital products, food, cash and medicine to Gaza.

Hamas is also important in providing Israeli government the strategic pretexts to stay away from the negotiating table. It can be used in many creative ways.

When Hamas took control of Gaza, leaving Fatah the West Bank and dividing the Palestinian Authority in half, Israel stated that it cannot negotiate with only one half of Palestinians since the other half might not agree to the resulting settlement. Conversely, when, in recent months, a reconciliation deal was worked out between Hamas and Fatah, Netanyahu said to Mahmoud Abbas that his government cannot negotiate with Palestinians if Hamas is part of the equation. Because, as we all know, Hamas is a terrorist organization.

Hamas

That, in turn, strengthened the hand of Hamas' military wing. Most of its militants had agreed reluctantly to a national unity government because at the time, they assumed that they had no choice.

While Hamas' decision to join was driven by its isolation, it also indicated Hamas' readiness to consider a political path out of the impasse. 

With Hamas' consent, the national unity government upheld the three conditions the international community had set for engagement with Hamas: recognition of Israel, abidance by previous diplomatic agreements, and renunciation of violence. 

But Israel changed all that by first refusing to negotiate with Hamas despite these very significant concessions and then by collectively punishing the Gaza strip for the kidnapping and murder of three teenagers (which turned out to be unrelated to Hamas).

Hamas' military wing and the militants amongst its political leadership had serious misgivings about the national unity government and dissenting voices were evident.
But the fact that Hamas had formally agreed meant that there was enough support to make a start. 

Against this backdrop, Israel's and Fatah's clampdown on Hamas, so soon after the establishment of the national unity government, signalled the futility of a political route at this stage, thus strengthening those favouring a military response. 

That is what I mean by Hamas and the conservative forces in Israel are making each other possible. In that sense, Hamas represents the best hope of the settler movement in Israel. And that is why Netanyahu government wants to preserve the status quo whereby Gaza strip is barely surviving with just enough aid and supplies and money making it in, all fully controlled by Israel.

The problem is that, it is no longer possible to maintain that situation.

Netanyahu: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

This is what Netanyahu underestimated when he thought that some pinpoint bombing could demoralize the population and motivate them put pressure on Hamas. The previous conditions were so bad that, it seems, people in Gaza prefer to die in droves rather than going back to status quo ante.

While we do not know what levels of popular support Hamas has for continuing its fight, anecdotally, people seem to be resigned to more suffering because the status quo has become intolerable. 

As a reputable source wrote in a recent email from Gaza, "people are suffering in Gaza. People are very, very tired. But even those who hate Hamas do not want to return to the situation before the war. People want to change the situation."

This is why Hamas insists on the end of blockade as the sine qua non clause of any ceasefire agreement. They know that it is very popular with the people of Gaza.

In that context, Netanyahu is in a very serious bind.

While the latest Gaza war is highly popular at home, every passing day, images of civilian carnage and wounded children are creating a serious anti-Israeli sentiment in the world.

The UN and even the US are no longer mincing their words. Sooner or later the cost will become too steep for Israel.

In that sense, a prolonged ground war works for Hamas, especially if the civilian population in Gaza is willing to continue to die in large numbers. And apparently, they are.

Secondly, the threshold for death and suffering seems much higher among Palestinians. Whereas it is much lower in Israel, which is a reasonably affluent society with much higher and diverse expectations from life than its immediate neighbors. Fighting Hamas in a tight urban setting with thousands of tunnels and booby traps all over the place is likely to lead to a higher number of casualties. And at some point, they may become too much for the Israeli society. I get that this not Vietnam for them. But if there is no accompanying sense of winning the war, people will eventually balk.

A corollary to that is the importance of not leaving behind any soldiers for Israel. Remember Gilad Shalit? He became a huge issue that dogged successive Israeli Cabinets. And finally to free him, Netanyahu had to release 1000 Palestinians.

Early in the conflict, Hamas claimed that they captured a soldier and even though it turned out to be false, it highlighted Israel's vulnerability in that respect. And now Hamas has just announced that it captured another soldier, Hadar Goldin.

If it turns out to be accurate, Netanyahu will be in a very, very tough spot.

Thirdly, the Gaza operation signaled a major weakness in Israeli military strategies.

Because Netanyahu and his cabinet were so obsessed with Iran and the bogus nuclear threat it represented, they seemed to have failed to keep an eye on what Hamas was doing with its tunnels. They only realized the threat when 13 Hamas soldiers pop out of a tunnel near Kibbutz Sufa.

This is a huge blunder and Netanyahu must know that when things quiet down, there will be many questions and damning answers.

But this also means that he now has every reason to go all in.

Especially if Hadar Goldin is actually taken.

Both sides with nothing to lose, this is not going to end well.

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.