Homeopathy in action

EU integration is the last thing we need

No matter how crisis-ridden and corrupt the EU becomes, the elites’ solution is always: ‘More EU!’

by Jason Walsh

Announcing plans for greater European political integration, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy promised late last month that they would defend the Euro. Their plans include appointing a Eurozone president to oversee financial governance for the entire Eurozone group; all 17 member states writing guarantees of ‘balanced budgets’ into their constitutions; and introducing a tax on financial transactions.

The announcement came hot on the heels of just another ordinary week in the Eurozone: markets in turmoil, bank shares plummeting and demands for ever-greater austerity. In August, the share price of French bank Société Générale, stuffed full of delicious Greek debt, took a precipitous 15 per cent tumble, very nearly taking much of the rest of France’s banking system down with it, while the EU was forced to gobble up €22 billion worth of Italian and Spanish government bonds – a bizarre spectacle that saw Italy, the eighth-largest economy in the world, in danger of joining the bailout club.

There’s no doubt about it: the EU is in panic mode. While the urgency of the crisis is rather new, the fact remains that the whole European project lost its sheen quite some time ago. This fact is borne out by the message sent by voters to the EU on the few occasions they have been allowed to express an opinion in a meaningful poll.

The past few years haven’t exactly been kind to those who seek closer European integration. On top of the markets’ lack of faith in the EU, there have been clear signs that the various European publics have had enough of the EU project. First there was the rejection of the European constitution by the French and Dutch electorates. Then came the Irish people’s rejection, followed by grudging acceptance, of the Lisbon Treaty. Vast amounts of money were later sunk into propping up the Greek, Irish and Portuguese economies (and, ultimately, French and German banks) and then there have been a couple of years of on-and-off rioting in Greece.

And yet, every time the crisis deepens, two things happen: the EU and its defenders tighten the austerity screw into people’s heads and make blustering calls for ‘more Europe’.

A good example was a recent piece in the Guardian by Nicholas Berggruen, the founder of a private investment company, and Nouriel Roubini, an economist and member of the Council on the Future of Europe think tank. They bluntly stated: ‘More European integration, not less, is the only solution.’ According to this pair, nationalist demons stalk the continent. In fairness, they also admit that there is a ‘democratic deficit’ at the heart of the EU, but their idea that the European Parliament needs to be ‘empowered’ is misguided. This may make the EU, as a bloc, more democratic, but at the price of weakening national parliaments. The authors, like many others, fall into the trap of seeing the EU’s problems as a mere technical matter that can be magicked away by, you guessed it, more Europe.

In whose interests does the EU actually work? One needn’t descend to the level of the fevered conspiratorial fantasies or banal complaints about the EU being a ‘club for bosses’ to have some doubts about its composition and mission.

Since its foundation, the EU has been decried by Eurosceptics as a vehicle for the creation of a single European superstate, but aside from a few kite-flyers no one has seriously suggested a United States of Europe. Yes, the EU constantly pushes for greater integration, but this is also coupled with denial that it is in fact doing so. Even the father of the EU, Jean Monnet, eventually accepted that his dream of a united Europe was an unlikely one. The powers that the EU has are, as often as not, granted to it by national parliaments willingly ceding them in a desperate bid to dodge political responsibility.

The EU has a remarkable propensity for funding propaganda programmes and awarding study grants to those who seek to write complimentary things about it. What it does not do is openly argue that a single European political entity would be beneficial for the people of Europe.

The EU’s subterranean drive for integration has come to a head since the European Central Bank (ECB) decided to engage in a series of bailouts to Greece (whose exit from the Euro now looks inevitable), as well as to Ireland and Portugal. Ostensibly designed to stop the ‘contagion’ spreading to larger countries, the bailouts are in fact fund transfers to France and Germany. They take money out of the bruised economies in the hope, ultimately, of propping-up the larger ones that lent to them.

Now, ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet has called for the creation of a single Eurozone finance ministry. The implications of any such move would be staggering: a vast chunk of national sovereignty would be gone in one fell swoop, with countries’ forced to implement EU diktat, not only in general terms as is the case now, but actually in minute detail.

Bailout countries already have the parameters of their budgets defined by the so-called troika of the EU, ECB and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Few have stopped to notice that the IMF, long the bogeyman of transnational organisations, is asking for significantly less in the way of pain than the supposedly cuddly, we’re-all-in-it-together EU. It is also striking that there hasn’t been any serious attempt in any of the bailout countries to implement policies that would lead to growth. Investment is out; higher taxes and swingeing cuts are in. This inevitably leads to further depression in consumer demand and, ultimately, deepening of the recession.

Plans now being mooted would further centralise economic and fiscal policy in the hands of the EU elite, away from the national parliaments and, ultimately, electorates. It is hard to interpret the Franco-German plans for a common corporate-taxation rate as anything other than a precursor for full tax-harmonisation within the Eurozone. Such moves, and the imposition of direct EU taxes, would diminish the right of national governments to set fiscal policy and it would further strengthen the EU as a political entity.

Other ideas rejected - so far - by Merkel and Sarkozy are no less interfering. For example, the proposed beefing-up of the bailout scheme, currently known as the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), into a full-blown European Monetary Fund (EMF) is contingent on handing Brussels direct oversight of national budgets. Even the more popular idea of ECB-issued Eurobonds (proposed by Italy’s finance minister Giulio Tremonti and supported by none other than billionaire financier George Soros) to replace the current ad-hoc system is only workable if the EU’s largest economy, Germany, is willing to swallow it. That will only be possible if Germany gets to set fiscal policy in other countries via EU proxy.

When it comes to the Eurozone crisis, the proposed cure is at least as bad as the disease. But in demanding more power the EU is appealing to a trend for removing control of national bodies from politicians and, ultimately, national electorates. Last month, Ireland created the Fiscal Advisory Council, an EU-mandated ‘independent body’ that will oversee Ireland’s budget-making process. Soon after it came to power, Britain’s Lib-Con coalition handed fiscal power over to the unelected Office for Budget Responsibility without the need for diktat from the EU.

Of course, magical solutions to the Eurozone crisis don’t exist. Living in Ireland, I don’t much relish the collapse of, or an Irish exit from, the Euro. It’s one thing to argue we should never have joined; it’s entirely another thing to say we should walk away now. As the experience of Iceland shows, with the massive devaluation akin to that of its currency after the banking crisis, the consequences would be to drive up the cost of imports and drive down living standards.

A currency worth slightly more than a handful of gravel may encourage tourism and, eventually, exports (bearing in mind that manufacturing plants are not built overnight). But, rather more immediately, it would also render purchasing anything other than life’s most basic necessities – not to mention repaying Euro-denominated personal loans and mortgages – a Sisyphean task.

Nevertheless, if we accept that it was the basic divergence of Eurozone economies that laid the foundation for the Euro crisis, why on Earth would we assume that the answer is to do anything and everything we can to keep the Euro together? Tying together fiscal policy across the Eurozone would come at a huge political cost and does not guarantee an end to the slump.

Bizarre radicalism

Allotments: a plot against modern society?

 The fad for growing your own food is not radical – it’s a retreat from the attempt to change the world.

by Rob Lyons

About nine years ago, my partner applied for a plot at our local allotments in south-east London. Given the fact that demand for local-authority allotments seems to be greatly outstripping supply, she was told she might have to wait three years. Instead, she got a call just a few months later. There had been a crackdown on untended plots by the allotment committee and a half-sized plot had become free.

So, one damp Sunday in February 2003, the two of us plus two friends went down to have a bash at turning the soil over. First, the soil was very obviously soaking wet and therefore heavy. Secondly, it seemed to be about 90 per cent clay. We would have had more joy taking up pottery with that soil than growing food. After a couple of hours of backbreaking toil, we’d managed to roughly turn over about a quarter of it. Clearly, this grow-your-own malarkey was hard work, especially when you’re completely clueless about what you’re doing.

Eventually, thanks to the generosity of our fellow allotment holders, we had a couple of rows of spuds in and a couple of rows of broad beans. Progress was slow, but the weather improved, as did the soil thanks to digging a lot of manure and compost into it.

Then the council had to repair some water pipes at the cemetery next door, which also supplied water to the allotments. They just forgot to switch on the water to the allotments afterwards, so we had three weeks with next-to-no water and blazing sunshine. While my working hours were pretty flexible, which meant I could get up to the allotments most days to water the plants, my partner’s job meant she couldn’t take her turn very often.

So I was spending a chunk of my time every day watering plants on an allotment that I didn’t ask for, then spending more time at the weekends (when we weren’t away) digging up more clay and watching black fly eat the green beans despite our best efforts.

All this effort produced about a pound and a half of small potatoes and some bean-shaped food for flies. Admittedly, they were really very nice potatoes, because there is something unique about eating something that’s just been ripped from the ground. Sadly, or maybe not so sadly, that was it for allotments and me as we then moved out of London for a while and had to give the plot up.

In those few months when I worked that allotment I learned a few things.

Firstly, I learned that growing your own food is a lot harder than buying it from a supermarket. I feel very confident that even if we had stuck with it and developed the skills and experience to make the plot more productive, it would be far less time-consuming to work extra hours at the job I knew well and pay for my food from the supermarket than to spend it with a fork in my hand on that plot. There’s only one situation in which growing your own makes economic sense in the UK, as far as I can see, and that’s when you’re retired or unemployed and you don’t or can’t get a wage for your labour. Then growing your own might make more sense, though you’d still need to fork out (as it were) for tools, seeds, compost and so on.

Secondly, eating your own produce is very satisfying. You’ve managed to master nature, to bend it to your will or at least exploit its workings in a creative fashion, after which you can delude yourself that you’ve obtained a ‘free’ dinner.

Thirdly, the allotment was a pretty decent community, with people willing to help each other out, especially the newbies like us. I really hadn’t thought about allotments very much before I had one, but there are clearly an awful lot of people who enjoy gardening and growing their own food.

Fourthly, the social anthropology of the allotment was fascinating. There seemed to be basically two tribes. On the one hand, there were the Arthur Fowlers (after the old EastEnders character), the middle-aged working-class people who’d been there for a long time. The Arthur Fowlers were by no means all male or white, but they did it as a hobby, as a way of relaxing and getting out of the house. Running an allotment for them wasn’t remotely political.

On the other hand, there were the Greenies, who were mostly female and were growing their own as part of an ethical, eco-friendly lifestyle. They’d be composting every scrap of kitchen waste they had and they would kick up merry hell if anyone else tried to use a chemical weedkiller on the site or use a rotavator to dig up the soil (even though, with that clay soil, we really, really could have done with someone doing that for us).

As a result, there were a few tensions between the Arthur Fowlers and the Greenies about how things should be done.

I have to agree with the Arthur Fowlers: I don’t think there’s anything radical about growing your own food. It might be fun, if you like that kind of thing, but I think that to the extent that there has been a turn towards growing your own, it’s a conservative trend. For all its many failings, capitalist society has created a vast division of labour that has made producing many things, including food, very much more efficient than it was in the past. That has freed up millions of people to do other kinds of work while giving us cheaper food with greater security of supply. In the 1930s, people in the UK spent about 30 per cent of their income on food; now it’s about 10 per cent, while food shortages are pretty much unheard of. Why would we want to go back to subsistence farming?

As it happens, growing your own is no more than a gesture. The reality is that people who grow their own are still dependent on the market for much, if not most, of what they eat. It also feels like a retreat, a response to the apparent impossibility of political change and a sense that the world is going pear-shaped. To grow your own is to hunker down in a manner that says I don’t need the rest of you. I’ll grow my own food, make my own clothes, and so on. There may have been a TV comedy, The Good Life, inspired by self-sufficiency, but it seems more like a fantasy, a piece of shit-shovelling role play rather than a serious alternative way of life.

More positively, and perhaps in slight contradiction to what I’ve just said, growing your own also becomes a way of being part of a community. In that, it is not alone. Many people are rightly dissatisfied when the only basis on which they interact with other people is through work, a quick hello to the neighbours and chatting at the school gate if you’ve got kids. Hence the rise of all sorts of weird and wonderful social clubs, from knitting circles to book clubs. The things that would have created a sense of community in the past, like the church, the Women’s Institute, the trade union or the local Labour or Conservative club, are nothing like the force they used to be in society.

Tending an allotment can be an enjoyable pastime, a creative challenge. But pretending that it represents some kind of basis for radical political change or that there is something particularly rewarding about communing with nature seems bizarre.

The strange slow death of Euro

"Orderly default" in Greece? Good luck.

By Nin-Hai Tseng

The opportunity for debt-troubled Europe to avoid a disaster is shrinking. Fast. Over the weekend, Greek leaders struggled to agree to a set of radical budget cuts as the country approaches an October deadline to qualify for $11 billion in aid without which it will certainly default on its growing debt.

As the bailout of Greece spirals into a costly mess, officials have raised the idea of an "orderly default." Germany's economy minister Philipp Roesler publicly introduced the concept and, needless to say, the mere mention of bankruptcy was anything but calming for global investors.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stepped in, telling BBC News that the euro zone must stick together and that there aren't any procedures underway to ease Greece into a default that promises a softer landing. Merkel may have been trying to allay investors' fears, but most now see it for what it is: Greece is already preparing for what it hopes will be an orderly default, even though the country has not yet technically declared bankruptcy.

An orderly default is equivalent to restructuring debt -- whereby creditors accept a loss while debtors agree to pay most of its debts. In July, European Union leaders agreed to a rescue plan for Greece worth more than $150 billion, which would help it cover its financing needs for the next several years. One of the key elements of the plan, which is awaiting final approval, is a bond swap deal in which Greece's debt burden is reduced, while the country's private-sector creditors agree to accept new bonds worth less than their original holdings.

In the past, other nations have pulled off orderly defaults successfully. Could Greece, Ireland, Italy and other troubled nations in the euro zone do the same? Judging by the general surge in bond yields of the peripheral countries, it looks less likely.

What happens after a Greek default

Developing nations have completed orderly defaults before. For instance, the Brady bonds in the late 1980s and early 1990s arose from an effort to reduce debt held by mostly Latin American countries that were frequently defaulting on loans.

The Ukraine and Pakistan have also defaulted in orderly fashion. So did Uruguay in 2003. The country successfully did a voluntary bond swap in which the government offered to exchange bonds coming due in a few years for similar ones that matured later. The move was enough to convince investors that its problems were temporary and that with time, Uruguay would be better off since its growth prospects were strong.

But for Greece, economists believe austerity measures attached to its rescue package will slow economic growth and weaken the country's competitiveness for years to come. What's more, orderly defaults in industrialized nations are essentially unprecedented, which partly explains why investors are so spooked by what's happening in the euro zone.

"One of the founding pillars is this concept that the debt of industrialized countries is risk free," says Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Markets are asking if it turns out there's risk in Greece maybe there are other countries in the industrialized world that face the same issues."

Hope for a soft landing

One of the big hopes, if the euro zone's debt crisis worsens, is that it would force a larger rescue fund, such as dramatic expansion of the European Financial Stability Facility. Italy is one of the euroz one's biggest debtors and its heavy debts have raised questions about the health of European banks, which have bought bundles of Italian bonds. The problem is that Europe's emergency bailout resources are far from enough to support anything more than smaller countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland.

One of the glaring weaknesses that the debt crisis has exposed is the lack of a common treasury in the construction of the euro, financier and businessman George Soros has said. While the EFSF is tasked with providing a safety net for the eurozone as a whole, the fund merely has the ability to raise money, leaving governments of member countries with authority over how to spend it.

"This renders the EFSF useless in responding to a crisis; it has to await instruction from the member countries," Soros wrote earlier this month in The New York Review of Books.

To be sure, euro zone leaders did widen the EFSF some but refused other bigger expansions during a summit in July. Committing much more money would likely have helped convince global markets that the fund is big enough to can handle just about anything -- even Italy. Several key governments, including France and Berlin, oppose strengthening the fund. And understandably so, since agreeing to pledging ever-growing sums of money to weak European states could strain the finances of some governments while causing political havoc for those dealing with disgruntled voters.

Nevertheless, the International Monetary Fund has urged euro zone leaders that a much bigger fund is needed. It remains to be seen how much influence the global lender has, but perhaps the possibility that the organization might share some of the financial burden in resolving the crisis could bring more support for a much grander EFSF.

A default -- however orderly or disorderly -- hasn't been able to calm markets. Spooked investors might likely find calm in an expanded EFSF

Advocating liberty

Democracy Versus Liberty

By W. Williams

It is truly disgusting for me to hear politicians, national and international talking heads and pseudo-academics praising the Middle East stirrings as democracy movements. We also hear democracy as the description of our own political system. Like the founders of our nation, I find democracy and majority rule a contemptible form of government.

You say, "Whoa, Williams, you really have to explain yourself this time!"

I'll begin by quoting our founders on democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, "there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual." At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph said, "... that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy." John Adams said, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." Alexander Hamilton said, "We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real Liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship."

The word "democracy" appears nowhere in the two most fundamental documents of our nation — the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Our Constitution's Article IV, Section 4, guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." If you don't want to bother reading our founding documents, just ask yourself: Does our pledge of allegiance to the flag say to "the democracy for which it stands," or to "the Republic for which it stands"? Or, did Julia Ward Howe make a mistake in titling her Civil War song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"? Should she have titled it "The Battle Hymn of the Democracy"?

What's the difference between republican and democratic forms of government? John Adams captured the essence when he said, "You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe." That means Congress does not grant us rights; their job is to protect our natural or God-given rights.

For example, the Constitution's First Amendment doesn't say Congress shall grant us freedom of speech, the press and religion. It says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."

Contrast the framers' vision of a republic with that of a democracy. Webster defines a democracy as "government by the people; especially: rule of the majority." In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. As in a monarchy, the law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws do not represent reason. They represent force. The restraint is upon the individual instead of government. Unlike that envisioned under a republican form of government, rights are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government.

To highlight the offensiveness to liberty that democracy and majority rule is, just ask yourself how many decisions in your life would you like to be made democratically. How about what car you drive, where you live, whom you marry, whether you have turkey or ham for Thanksgiving dinner? If those decisions were made through a democratic process, the average person would see it as tyranny and not personal liberty. Is it no less tyranny for the democratic process to determine whether you purchase health insurance or set aside money for retirement? Both for ourselves, and our fellow man around the globe, we should be advocating liberty, not the democracy that we've become where a roguish Congress does anything upon which they can muster a majority vote.

The plot thickens

The Land of Gas and Honey

 Israel's giant new natural gas find will transform the Middle East -- and add more fuel to an already combustible region.

BY ROBIN M. MILLS

Mother Nature's distribution of oil and gas resources around the world suggests she has a mischievous sense of humor. In the Persian Gulf, South China Sea, and Caspian Sea, large fields lie in disputed zones between unfriendly neighbors.

Now we must add another hot spot to that list. New, giant, natural gas finds promise to transform the energy security and economy of Israel and, perhaps, its neighbors. But these treasures could hardly have been better placed to stir up trouble, complicating three of the world's most intractable conflicts: between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and Lebanon, and Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The recent sharp deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations makes disputes over gas even more fraught with danger.

Golda Meir, the feisty, cantankerous, and quotable fourth Israeli prime minister, used to complain that Moses led the Israelites through the desert for 40 years to bring them to the only place in the Middle East without oil. In 2000, after Britain's BG had discovered significant volumes of gas at Gaza Marine, she was proved at least half-wrong when U.S. exploration company Noble Energy found a similar-sized field, Mari-B, in Israeli waters.

In 2009, though, Noble put these efforts completely into the shade. Some bold and creative geological thinking led it to find 8.5 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas in deep water at Tamar, the world's largest discovery that year. In late 2010, Noble uncovered an even larger field, aptly named Leviathan, containing 16 Tcf. These fields alone could meet U.S. gas demand for an entire year.

The Levant Basin, the geological area containing Tamar and Leviathan, spans not only Israel's offshore but also that of Lebanon, Cyprus, and Syria. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates it could contain 120 Tcf of gas, equivalent to almost half of U.S. reserves. Given that Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories between them have a population of less than 17 million, that's potentially a huge windfall.

The gas, therefore, suddenly eliminates one of Israel's key strategic and economic weaknesses: its lack of indigenous energy resources. Tamar alone could supply all of Israel's power plants for more than 20 years. And the discoveries are very timely, because Mari-B will be depleted by 2013 and because of the sudden insecurity of Egyptian gas imports.

Israel receives about 40 percent of its gas consumption from Egypt, though the deal is deeply unpopular there, with ex-president Hosni Mubarak and his cronies accused of underpricing the gas and profiting corruptly from sales. The pipeline through the volatile Sinai has been attacked five times this year, cutting supplies and forcing Israel to raise electricity prices by almost 10 percent in August to cover the increased costs of burning oil.

Replicating Israel's success would likewise transform the prospects of energy-poor Lebanon and Cyprus. Cyprus is still reeling from the accidental destruction of its main power station, blown up in July by confiscated Iranian munitions stored with remarkable carelessness next to it.

Noble has been given the green light by the U.S. Embassy in Nicosia to go ahead with drilling in Cypriot waters adjacent to Leviathan. In contrast, Lebanon and Syria have been painfully slow to realize their opportunity. Major oil companies had looked at the area as early as 2001, yet Lebanon's fractious parliament only passed an oil law in 2010 after enviously eyeing Israel's success. Syria had planned to award exploration blocks this year, but this seems unlikely as long as the uprising against the Assad regime continues.

Meanwhile, the unfortunate people of Gaza, whose field arguably started the whole rush, suffer from daily power cuts. Long negotiations to develop their gas predictably went nowhere because the Israelis had no intention of giving the Palestinian Authority an additional source of revenue, especially after Hamas's 2007 takeover of the strip.

The Israelis now have an abundance of riches. They could export gas to Jordan, whose economy is struggling under the burden of expensive oil. The Jordanians, though, might play them off against Iraq, a more politically palatable supplier that will also have excess gas to sell within a few years.

Other than that, without any friends in the region, the Israelis will have to look west for markets. They could have built a pipeline through Cyprus and on to Turkey and mainland Europe. But, with impeccable timing, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has escalated a war of rhetoric against Turkey, as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman reportedly threatened with his characteristic finesse to arm the Kurdish PKK group.

Instead, Israel will probably require more costly and complicated liquefaction facilities in order to ship the gas by tanker to customers in Southern Europe.

The other problem is the region's territorial disputes. Israel and the Republic of Cyprus -- that's the Greek one -- have delineated their maritime border and have shared economic interests. But the maritime border between Israel and Lebanon is not demarcated, and Lebanon has weakened its position with diplomatic missteps while each side has submitted its own claims. These will be hard to resolve: International courts and arbitration do not apply while the two states have no diplomatic relations, and Israel has not signed the 1994 Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The actual overlapping claims area is surprisingly small, and it seems clear that Tamar and Leviathan lie in Israeli waters. Yet Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah hasvowed to retaliate against Israel's gas installations for any attempt to "steal" Lebanese natural resources. It appears that underwater gas could become another Shebaa Farms issue, a minor territorial claim exploited to perpetuate the Lebanese-Israeli conflict.

The Israelis are probably well capable of defending offshore installations against Lebanese or Palestinian threats, particularly as the wells will be on the seabed beneath 1,600 meters of water. Turkey is an entirely different matter. Turkey, of course, recognizes neither EU member Cyprus, having backed the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus since the 1974 war and partition of the island, nor the Cyprus-Israel accord.

Turkish Cypriot President Dervis Eroglu said in early August that Cyprus's gas (not a molecule of which has yet been discovered) belonged not only to Greek Cypriots but to Turkish Cypriots and Turkey too.

Turkish pressure is likely to push Cyprus deeper into Israel's willing embrace. Solon Kassinis, head of Cyprus's Energy Service, fired back at the Turks, "I expected Turkey to bark, but I don't think they will do anything ... if they want to be considered a country that respects international law." Greece, which has been wooed by Israel following its rupture with the Turks, vowed to defend Greek Cypriot sovereignty.

The most explosive issue, however, is the rupture of Turkish-Israeli relations. Although Turkey has no maritime border with Israel, nor much prospect of sharing in the offshore gas bounty, the Cyprus and Lebanon disputes give it an excellent opening to retaliate for Israeli intransigence over the Gaza-bound flotilla raid and other areas of dispute.

Interviewed by Al Jazeera, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared on Sept. 8, "Turkey will not allow Israel exclusive use of the resources of the Mediterranean Sea" and said he planned to dispatch three frigates to confront Israeli warships. Israeli Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau responded, "Israel can support and secure the rigs that we are going to have in the Mediterranean." But in the current political climate, neither Turkey nor Lebanon wants to give Israel an easy path to riches.

The United States has urged Turkey and Israel to ease tensions, while saying that it viewed the gas discoveries overall as positive. In a few years, if all goes well, some brave soul in Congress might question the irony of a major gas exporter's being the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.

But in the short term, the lure of riches makes conflict resolution more difficult and gives hard-liners on all sides another casus belli. Tamar and Leviathan are unfortunately not the catalyst for regional peace and prosperity, but, rather, more fuel in an already combustible mix.