Turkish twit

David Cameron was once famously dismissive of the outreach possibilities of Twitter, quoted in a live radio interview and podcast rhetorically asking "how many tweets make a twat."  Popular enough to survive such broadcasting of an offensive word, he was later converted to its potential, launching a No. 10 Downing Street account.  In 2009, following the mass protests against the voting fraud in Iran's presidential election, the White House leaned on Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance work so as to allow the Green Movement to try and outflank the brutal crackdown of the authorities.  Despite this, the clerical authorities won but only temporarily, as in 2013, the compromise candidate and relative moderate Hassan Rouhani became president.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, might have been drawing lessons from his country's neighbour from 2009 rather than 2013.  Hie neo-Ottoman foreign policy is in tatters, no matter how many Syrian warplanes his military shoot down and he and his family are involved in serious charges of corruption, spread by the medium of Twitter containing audiofiles of leaked tapes.  Unlike Francis Urquhart, his opponents are at once both too prominent and too numerous to bump off and so Erdogan's house of cards, if not tumbling, are facing a breeze that could cause slippage.  This would explain his quixotic attempt to ban Twitter in Turkey.
Inevitably, it failed, not least because outraged Twitter users urged on Facebook and YouTube others to join Twitter.  This led to a rise of 138% in Twitter use in the 24 hours after he announced the ban.  Facebook and YouTube are now on Erdogan's hit list too.  Popular president, Abdullah Gul, from the same AKP party as Erdogan, bitingly used Twitter to denounce the ban.
Erdogan blames his former mentor and svengali Fethullah Gulen for the firestorm that has engulfed the prime minister.  Gulen's network has significant influence in the police and judiciary (helping to bring the armed forces under proper civilian control) and the Sunni cleric has split the AKP's conservative base.  Falling foul of svengalis is always dangerous.  Ichiro Ozawa jumped ship from the Liberal Democratic Party that had ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955 and, as the Democratic Party of Japan's secretary-general masterminded the latter's assent to power.  However, once in office, the leadership found his meddling infuriating and attempts to sideline Ozawa prompted another domestic tug-of-war, that did nothing for the prospects of the DPJ or the Empire of Nippon in general.
It should be remembered that for all the repression in Vladimir Putin's Russia, Turkey has more journalists in jail.  The Kurdish issue refuses to go away.  And it seems that three consecutive terms have dulled Erdogan's judgement (as it did with Margaret Thatcher).  He seems to conflate Turkey with himself - referring to the downing of the Syrian plane, he thundered  'if you violate my airspace, our slap after this will be hard'.  Talk of 'my nation's security' (the favourite fallback of tyrants and spooks), as if he had personal ownership of Turkey, is not a massive leap to say 'my security'.  Power has corrupted him, fulfilling Lord Acton's warning of its tendency (if not absolutely for he does not have absolute power).  Whether Erdogan matches Acton's corollary that 'great men are almost always bad men' remains to be seen.  Dismissing accusations of intolerance by western and domestic critics by saying "I don't care who it is. I'm not listening," is not promising.