Welcome to the ‘Kurdish Spring’

by Pepe Escobar

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come out all guns blazing after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad quietly concluded a deal that handed the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Party control of key areas in the northeast. This raises prospects for Ankara’s worst nightmare: A semi-autonomous region coalescing with Kurds in Iraq, which turns the Turkish maxim of “zero problems with our neighbors” on its head.

Voltaire Network | 31 July 2012 

Kurdish youth carrying the Kurdish flag on the streets of Amude in northeastern Syria.

Photo: Shabab Kurd

Turkish foreign policy, codified by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, used to be known in shorthand as “zero problems with our neighbors“. When Turkey started calling for regime change in Syria, it turned into “a major problem with one of our neighbors” (even tough Davutoglu himself admitted on the record the policy change failed).
Now, in yet another twist, it’s becoming “all sorts of problems with two of our neighbors“. Enter – inevitably – Ankara’s ultimate taboo; the Kurdish question.
Ankara used to routinely chase and bomb Kurdish PKK guerrillas crossing from Anatolia to Iraqi Kurdistan. Now it may be positioning itself to do the same in Syrian Kurdistan.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan came out all guns blazing on Turkish TV; “We will not allow a terrorist group to establish camps in northern Syria and threaten Turkey.”
He was referring to the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Party (PYD) – affiliated with the PKK; after a quiet deal with the Assad regime in Damascus, the PYD is now in control of key areas in northeast Syria.
So Ankara may provide logistics to tens of thousands of Syria’s NATO “rebels” – which include plenty of hardcore Sunni Arab “insurgents” formerly known as terrorists; but as long as Syrian Kurds – which are part of the Syrian opposition – demonstrate some independence, they immediately revert to being considered “terrorists“.
It’s all conditioned by Ankara’s immediate nightmare; the prospect of a semiautonomous Syrian Kurdistan very closely linked to Iraqi Kurdistan.

Follow the oil

This Swedish report [1] contains arguably the best breakdown of the hyper-fragmented Syrian opposition. The “rebels” are dominated by the exile-heavy Syrian National Council (SNC) and its Hydra-style militias, the over 100 gangs that compose the Not Exactly Free Syrian Army (FSA).
But there are many other parties as well, including socialists; Marxists; secular nationalists; Islamists; the Kurdish National Council (KNC) – an 11-party coalition very close to the Iraqi Kurdistan government; and the PYD.
The KNC and the PYD may bicker about everything else, but basically agree on the essential; the civil war in Syria shall not penetrate Syria Kurdistan; after all, when it comes to the nitty gritty, they are neither pro-Assad nor pro-opposition; they favor Kurdish interests. The agreement was sealed under the auspices of their cousins – the Iraqi Kurds. And it explains why they are now in full control of a de facto Kurdish enclave in northeast Syria.
As much as Turkish paranoia may apply, it’s a long and winding road from a semi-autonomous area to an independent Kurdistan agglutinating Kurds in both Syria and Iraq – not to mention, in the long run, Turkish Kurds. Yet half of a possible, future, independent Kurdistan would indeed be Turkish. Ankara’s nightmare in progress is that the closer Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan get, the merrier the agitation among Turkish Kurds in Anatolia.
Priorities though divert; the bottom line for Iraqi Kurds is independence from Baghdad. After all; they have loads of oil. On the other hand Syria Kurdistan has none. This means, crucially, no role in regional Pipelineistan.
This concerns above all two strategic oil and gas pipelines from Kirkuk to Ceyhan – a direct deal between Ankara and the Iraqi Kurds which in theory bypasses Baghdad.
Well, not really. As Baghdad has made it clear, there’s no way these pipelines will be operative without the central government having its sizeable cut; after all it pays for 95% of the budget of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Show me your terrorist ID

Iraqi Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani told al-Jazeera [2] that yes – they are training Syrian Kurds who defected from the Syrian Army to defend their de facto enclave. It was Barzani who supervised the key deal sealed in Irbil on July 11 that led to Assad forces retreating from Syrian Kurdistan.
What is being described as “liberated cities“ [3] is now being “jointly ruled” by the PYD and the KNC. They have formed what is known as a Supreme Kurdish Body.
One can never underestimate the Kurdish capacity to shoot themselves in the foot (and elsewhere). Yet one can also imagine all this cross-country Kurdish frenzy terrifying quite a few souls in Istanbul and Ankara. This [4] columnist for the daily newspaper Hurriyet got it right; “Arabs are fighting, Kurds are winning.” The Kurdish Spring is at hand. And it is already hitting Turkey’s borders.
Davutoglu must have seen it coming; when a formerly “zero problem” foreign policy evolves into housing the weaponized opposition to a neighboring government, you’re bound to be in trouble.
Especially when you start itching to kill “terrorists” living in your neighbor’s territory – even though your Western allies may view them as “freedom fighters“. Meanwhile you actively support Salafi-jihadis – “insurgents” formerly known as terrorists – back and forth across your borders.
An increasingly erratic Erdogan has invoked a “natural right“ [5] to fight “terrorists“. But first they must produce an ID; if they are Sunni Arab, they get away with it. If they are Kurdish, they eat lead.

Pepe Escobar

       

Source: Asian Times on Line

[1] “Divided they stand: An Overview of Syria’s political opposition factions,” by Aron Lund,Foundation for European Progressive Studies / Olof Palme International Center.
[2] “Iraqi Kurds train their Syrian brethren,” Al-Jazeera, 23 Jul 2012.
[3] “Iraq’s Kurdistan Peshmerga forces will be called into Syria when needed, PYD Leader says,”Kurd Net, July 26, 2012.
[4] “The Arab Spring has transformed into the Kurdish Spring,” Hurriyet Daily News, July 27 2012.
[5] “PM declares Syria intervention a ‘natural right’“, Hurriyet Daily News, July 27 2012.

Correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News.

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Europe Already Has Draft Standard For Real-Time Government Snooping On Services Like Facebook And Gmail

Tech Dirt
Aug 4, 2012

As the old joke goes, standards are wonderful things, that’s why we have so many of them. But who would have thought that ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, has already produced a draft standard on how European governments can snoop on cloud-based services like Facebook and Gmail — even when encrypted connections are used?

ETSI DTR 101 567, to give it the full title, was pointed out to us by Erich Moechel, who has written an excellent exploration of its elements (original in German). Here’s the summary from the draft standard (Microsoft Word format):

The present document provides an overview on requests for handover and delivery of real-time information associated with cloud/virtual services. The report identifies Lawful Interception needs and requirements in the converged cloud/virtual service environment, the challenges and obstacles of complying with those requirements, what implementations can be achieved under existing ETSI LI [Lawful Interception] standards, and what new work may be required to achieve needed Lawful Interception capabilities. Cloud Services in whichever forms they take (Infrastructure, Software, Platform or combinations of these) are often trans border in nature and the information required to maintain Lawful Interception (LI) capability or sufficient coverage for LI support may vary in different countries, or within platforms of different security assurance levels. This work aims to ensure capabilities can be maintained while allowing business to utilise the advantages and innovations of Cloud Services and was undertaken cooperatively with relevant cloud security technical bodies.

As that makes clear, this is being presented as “maintaining” interception capabilities in a world where cloud computing makes previous approaches inapplicable. The new standard specifically mentions social networking, file sharing and video conferencing as new areas that need to be addressed.

Full article here
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Government Is Shrinking?

From The Daily Reckoning,  
By Jeffrey Tucker

08/03/12 In today’s political climate, the more implausible the claim, the more likely it is to stick. One that seems to be sticking now is that government today is small by historical standards and constantly shrinking.

Run that one by the man on the street — looted by the tax man, harassed by police, hounded by regulators — and he will scoff. Now comes the highbrow journalist with a nuanced view to correct him, citing all kinds of complex data.

The highbrow in this case is Catherine Rampell, writing in The New York Times. Her claim seems apodictically certain. “Government has been shrinking steadily for two years,” she says, “and compared to the size of the overall economy, government is actually slightly smaller today than it has been on average in the postwar era.”

Huh? Well, she provides data of “the percentage change in total government spending and investment” as compared with the change in the GDP. She shows GDP rises and government falls. Wow, amazing.

Not so fast. You can always know that when people claim that government is small, it will always appear small by comparison to the GDP, which is to say that anything looks small by comparison to anything (in the words of economist Roger Garrison).

Moreover, it is a peculiar presumption that government should always grow in proportion to the wealth of society (presuming that GDP does measure that). Why? If government is providing essential and minimal functions only, it should get smaller in proportion to economic growth. Should the thief keep coming back for more when his victim grows wealthier?

Also, shrinking by comparison to everything else doesn’t mean that it literally gets smaller. It should only constitute a smaller portion of the total.

But that’s only the beginning of Rampell’s statistical antics. If you compare federal government spending as a percentage of GDP, it comes in at 24.3%, which is the highest in postwar history. In fact, it is the same as 1942, the year American troops landed in Europe.

So what is she talking about? Is she just making stuff up? Not exactly. She carefully says that she is looking at “the percentage change in total government spending and investment.” More precisely, she is examining something called “government consumption expenditures and total investment,” one of the ways that you can slice and dice national income accounting. This is the figure among many options that best makes her case. Piles of data had to be thrown in the trash can to generate the result she wanted.

As AmosWEB points out, this figure is the only one that completely excludes transfer payments, which are defined (arbitrarily) as not investment and not consumption, and includes all those things that (arbitrarily) fall into a specific category.

It’s a bit like saying that a giraffe is a horse if you exclude the neck.

Rampell even took the manipulation one step further to look at quarterly change in the data, and not the actual figure. Therefore, if government spends a trillion on a stimulus now and that stimulus runs out next year, it would seem to show a crash in spending. Surprise, that’s exactly what happened!

Despite her rhetoric, then, we can see that she had to engage in three levels of distortion to come up with the claim that government is shrinking.

Let’s say that we look at what most normal people would consider government spending, by which I mean… the dollar figures on how much government actually spends. And let’s add a column on debt so we can see the total unfulfilled commitments in the year in question too. There is nothing fancy pants here, just the raw truth, year by year.

Now, I ask you: Does this look like steady shrinking to you?

In other words, the man of the street is exactly right. Think about these numbers when you hear pundits and politicians over the next months tell you how dramatically government is shrinking.

Of course, spending alone doesn’t measure government size. If your front door is being broken down by feds, if you are jailed for violating regulations, if you are prevented from starting a business or if you can’t hire new workers because of the high costs, government is effectively totalitarian from your point of view. In the last 10 years, this is the largest change we’ve seen, from big government to police state. In the end, this is a change that no data set can quite capture.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker,
for The Daily Reckoning

Jeffrey Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is the publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, and the author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo and It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes, among thousands of articles.

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