Monthly Archive for July, 2012

All of my previous posts on the Kurds have focused on their trials and triumphs in Iraq, since that is the only state in which they have managed to carve out a safe, self-governing federal region of their own. The only reason to bring up the other “little Kurdistans” in the region would be to lament once again about how marginalized, suppressed, and immiserated they are by their host governments.

Syria has long been one of the worst offenders, denying its 1.7 million Kurds (approximately 10% of the population and Syria’s largest minority group) a variety of Kurdish language, education, and cultural rights. There is a prohibition on Kurdish names for people and businesses, as well as on Kurdish-language books and schools. And until last year, hundreds of thousands of Syria’s Kurds were even denied basic citizenship, meaning that for a half century they were in effect stateless prisoners inside Syria, without access to government services and unable to leave due to no passports. Over the years there have been forced Kurdish population transfers, and ruthless suppression of all political dissent. It’s been bad.

Well, now here we have the ongoing disintegration of the Syrian state and the imminent downfall of the odious Assad regime. “Never let a good crisis go to waste” says Rahm Emanuel; and as their brethren in Iraq did twenty years ago, the Kurds of Syria are now trying to find ways to guarantee their rights and security in whatever post-Assad order emerges from the chaos.

So what do you need to know about the current state of things, in order to be a hit at all the big Kurd-centric dinner parties this summer? Here’s a primer:

1. Turkey is a key player, and as ever, a little dodgy:

Turkey never liked the idea of an autonomous Kurdish region right over their border with Iraq, because they saw it as a constant provocation for their own restive Kurdish population to aspire to something similar. That paranoia has ebbed quite a bit, mostly due to the tremendous economic opportunities that a safe, prospering Kurdistan can offer Turkey and the region as a whole. Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan now do over $6 billion of bilateral trade annually, and they continue to look for ways to expand economic ties.

But Turkey’s not about to just embrace a Kurdistan redux in Syria. This is because one of the two main Kurdish groups in Syria is the PYD (Democratic Union Party), which is the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, an armed guerilla group that has been waging war on the Turkish government for the last thirty years seeking an independent Kurdish state in Turkey. The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by the US, EU, and of course by Turkey.

Needless to say, Turkey is deeply troubled by the involvement of the PYD in the Syrian conflict. The PYD just signed an accord with the other major Syrian Kurdish group, the KNC (Kurdish National Council), to share power and civic responsibilities in the Kurdish dominated areas (more on this below). There’s no confirmed information, but there are reports that the Kurds now control significant territory in northeast Syria, having rooted out Assad’s security forces. It’s claimed that the KNC and the PYD are sharing administration of these areas 50/50.

Turkey is incensed that a PKK-affilliated group has been legitimized in this way. Ankara has vowed that it will simply not allow the PYD to have control of any territory near its border. This has raised the spectre of a Turkish military incursion into Syria. Scary stuff.

2. The Kurds in Syria are unified, sort of, maybe.

Since the beginning of the conflict, the Kurds have been mixed in their feelings about the rebel uprising. Sure, they hated the Assad regime, but if getting rid of him meant the emergence of a Sunni Arab-dominated Islamist state, that might not be any better for their interests. They had reason to worry about this because the main umbrella opposition group, the Syrian National Council (SNC), has refused to provide the Kurds with any assurances regarding their future political rights in a post-Assad Syria. The KNC continues to try to resolve its disputes with the SNC, but it refuses to go into a post-Assad Syria without hard guarantees about Kurdish rights of self-determination. The SNC seems to have  some troubling Arab chauvinist and Islamist elements that are not inclined to be accommodating to Kurdish national interests.

So, to distance themselves from both the Assad regime and the opposition SNC, the two main Kurdish groups in Syria (the KNC and the PYD) have recently signed a power-sharing accord in the Kurdish-dominated northeast region. Unity is a good thing, but as noted above, the PYD is a deeply problematic group, and its loyalties and motives are not altogether clear. Despite the accord, the KNC remains wary and untrustful of the PYD, and for good reason: The PYD has previously had ties to the Assad regime, and its militants have very recently attacked and threatened KNC members. Frankly it’s unlikely that this Kurdish accord will last very long.

One important point about the accord: it was orchestrated by the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, in the Kurdistan capital, Erbil. This leads to the next point:

3. The Kurds of Iraq are trying to help their Syrian brethren.

President Barzani has confirmed that Iraqi Kurdistan has providing military training to Syrian Kurds who have fled the violence, in preparation for their return to help defend Kurdish areas in Syria. And by helping broker the Kurdish accord, Barzani is also doing all he can to avoid internecine bloodshed. Here the Kurds of Iraq can serve as a cautionary tale: they underwent their own years of division and civil war in the ’90s, and they know all too well how badly this tragic interlude set back their goals for self-government and economic development.

This is sort of Turkey’s nightmare scenario: the Kurdish mothership in Iraq providing succor and inspiration and material support to Kurds in an adjoining state, in order to help them secure a similar measure of territorial and political autonomy. And while government in Iraqi Kurdistan has been a very willing partner with Turkey in the latter’s fight against the PKK, Turkey can’t be happy that Barzani is facilitating power-sharing accords that include PKK associates.

4. Either way, some sort of “Syrian Kurdistan” seems inevitable in the new Syria.

Barzani’s brokering deals, a Syrian Kurdish security force is being trained, the Kurds hold territory in the northeast, and they’re holding out for rights guarantees in the new Syria: this is not your grandfather’s weak, diffuse Kurdish movement. They are proactive, strong, and have an assertive Kurdish patron in northern Iraq which is willing to use its diplomatic and military power to advance the cause. As Syria expert and fellow Kurdistan aficionado Michael Weiss notes,

The message could not be clearer: the Kurds are their own political and military power in a rapidly deteriorating Syria. If the world is interested, it can negotiate with them directly…. [E]ven if this agreement eventually breaks down, as an earlier one did, it’s hard to imagine the Kurds willingly ceding their new-found semi-independence to anything other than a federalist government like the one their brethren have in Iraq.

This is a long-awaited and deserved deliverance. It is all tenuous still, but very heartening. All that’s left is for Assad the butcher to be put in the dock, to answer for his years of oppression and depravity and murder. It will be a bitter irony for him that his dedication to mass murder ultimately helped usher in the birth of Syrian Kurdistan.

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf weighs in on the blogger stimulus program known as the Obama “You didn’t build that” gaffe. Of course the first point to make is that it wasn’t a gaffe at all. Here’s the full quote in question from the president’s speech:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

This is mostly a very banal and self-evident piece of liberal boilerplate; the main point seeming to be nothing more than “civilization yay!”, a sentiment that is shared by all but the most anarchic among us.

But it has opened up a fascinating blogosphere debate about the nature of wealth and privilege in this country: Do the wealthy have built-in advantages which they can leverage in order to further perpetuate their privilege, prosperity, and influence? If this is the case, which of these gains can be said to be truly “deserved” or “earned” by the individual, and which are somehow ill-gotten and therefore illegitimate? What should public policy do about it?

Conor—a very sharp conservative—describes what he sees as a few of these built-in advantages:

It is beyond dispute that there is a huge amount of rent-seeking in the American system, that lobbying yields truly stunning returns on investment, that the complexity of our tax code benefits very rich people who employ extremely intelligent tax attorneys to reduce their tax burden, and that certain policies (like the Wall Street bailout) redistributes toward moneyed interests.

So yes, some of the rich did get there illegitimately. […] These illegitimate gains mostly spring from the fact that wealth makes it easier for people to game the system.

These themes of privilege and meritocratic decay and “gaming the system” are also the subject of Chris Hayes’ new book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. I saw Hayes discuss his ideas in a book talk a few weeks ago. His thesis is that the spectacular failure of so many of our elite institutions over the last decade is a result of the complete breakdown of the mechanisms of socioeconomic mobility; and that over time the very meritocratic system we have erected to select and elevate our elites inevitably and inexorably becomes corrupted and broken. Hayes writes, “Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up.” This further exacerbates inequality and makes a mockery of the ideal of “equal opportunity.”

What to do about this seeming inequity? Well there are two possible responses. You can take back some of the ill-gotten gains (along with some legitimate gains) in the form of higher marginal tax rates and then redistribute them in some welfare-enhancing manner. Or, you can try and root out and stop the ways in which the wealthy are able to game the system in the first place. Conor is for the latter method: “Progressives like Barack Obama would better serve the country’s interests if they focused on preventing ill-gotten gains from being got,” he writes.

I think the problem with this path is, how broadly do you to define “ill-gotten gains” and can you really target them effectively with policy? As examples of ill-gotten, Conor references rent-seeking, corporate welfare, influence-peddling; all easy cases for us to condemn. And certainly there are policy mechanisms that could mitigate these. Conor suggests meatier financial and lobbying regulations, for instance.

On the gaming of the tax system, Conor blames the president and policymakers in general for maintaining the dizzying complexity and loopholes of the tax code, which the wealthy are able to exploit. True enough.

But, importantly, Conor also blames rich people themselves for using their wealth to hire expensive attorneys to find ways to reduce their tax burden. He cites the tax issue as an example of an illegitimate gain which “mostly spring[s] from the fact that wealth makes it easier for people to game the system.”

I think if he expects policy to remove the ways in which “wealth makes it easier for people to game the system”, he is asking for an impossibility. Remember none of this behavior is illegal. Rich people will always have access to wealth-and privilege-enhancing services and opportunities not available to the rest of us. Even if you design a tax system that is air-tight and impossible for a tax lawyer to game, a wealthy person could still, say, hire a top equity manager who will give him access to investment opportunities the rest of us do not enjoy. How can you possibly remedy this?

Here’s my problem with Conor’s bottom-up approach of rooting out and closing off the sources of undue privilege, and why I think it’s more realistic to just expropriate the eventual gains from that privilege and redistribute it:

Arguably the largest source of societal inequality and embedded inequity is the privilege derived from accidents of birth and parentage.

Forget being able to shield your money from taxation once you’re already a millionaire. Forget being able to buy cheap into that IPO after you’re already rich and have Jamie Dimon on speed-dial. That’s small change.

How about being born to affluent parents who ensure enriching development in early childhood? How about access to private tutors and test prep and application prep to help you climb the meritocratic ladder with ease? How about being born to a few generation’s worth of college graduates and professionals and property owners, imbuing you with a set of expectations, ambitions, examples, talents; defining for you an expansive, limitless sense of the possible?

Maybe some of that is considered unfair and maybe not. Except for the most egregious cases of nepotism or trust-fundism, I don’t think we consider these sorts of advantages as illegitimate. Yet how consequential they are!

But in my experience the most pervasive and amorphous source of privilege for the meritocratic elite is simply social capital: one’s informal network of friends, extended family, colleagues, classmates, mentors, friends-of-the-family, along with the formal networks of alumni associations and professional organizations—all accumulated during the gentle slope up the ladder. This is how real opportunity and privilege get passed along and perpetuated throughout one’s life and down the generations.

Even more important, these social capital networks represent a sort of permanent insurance policy on your bad luck; they ensure you can only fall so far in this world. Such a floor can embolden one to take professional or personal risks (which will retroactively be ascribed to courage); to invest in one’s skills and human capital (which may or may not involve the incurrence of debt); to change careers, to not be unduly anxious over a layoff, or a divorce.

Of course none of this is illegitimate or gaming the system. That’s the point. It’s all really just another way of saying “civilization yay!” as the president did. But can it really be said that one has “earned” or “deserves” all the gains derived from such entrenched lifelong advantages? It’s an agonizing question. If you are not born into, or matriculate into, these sorts of privileges, your sense of the possible looks very different, and you likely have a very different view of words like “ill-gotten” and “entitlement”.

It is commendable that serious conservatives like Conor are addressing even a small sliver of the issue. But I think it’s woefully not up to the task to say that we ought to start addressing things at the point when this lifetime of accrued advantage shows up in the form of creative tax returns or outsized political donations. At the same time I don’t know where else to start either.

Nobody really has a great answer for this. I think it’s a tremendous social challenge which most people don’t even recognize as a challenge. Truly reckoning with it would have profound consequences for how we manage and direct public resources.