Wikileaks and America

Not all of Wikileaks is bad news. As Dana Milbank's column in today's Washington Post points out, many of our diplomats are veritable Graham Greenes able to pen poignant cables home. We also learn that Prince Andrews thinks the United States is back in the Great Game, which the American ambassador denied, having not received the talking points from the Bush-Cheney Administration. In my view, it was good news that our foreign service officers are conscious that all our erstwhile allies in the Middle East are corrupt, sleazy and double-dealing. We also learn that the Obama Administration has been adroit in isolating Iran in the world. Details of how the Obama Administration weened China away from Iran by getting the Saudis to guarantee its oil supply showed deft diplomacy.

There are the usual fun vignettes of world leaders like Qaddafhi with his buxom Romanian nurse, Sarkozy reveling in denying Tony Blair the Presidency of the EU, and Berlusconi's pride in setting a good table and his close relationship with Putin's less savory friends.

We can look forward to weeks more of Wikileaks. They promise more upcoming cables having to due with the Vatican, North Korea and Israel. Julian Assange told Forbes he will have a massive document dump on a major American bank, which will expose the international financial community.

But there exists the problem of "bad faith" by Wikileaks. For example, when they dumped over 250,000 cables into the internet, they also asked their supporters to download the "insurance files", which are heavily encoded. These files are supposed to guarantee the United States or other security services would not assassinate Assange or those who work for Wikileaks. But it seems to me that if you profess wanting transparency in "all global issues" then saving the crown jewels just to protect your person is not quite cricket.

The U.S. Government reacted with justified outrage over the latest Wikileaks, even more than the previous dump of Afghanistan and Iraq documents. The problem is that this administration has tried to recover America's fallen prestige in the world and this doesn't help matters. The Italian foreign minister characterized these actions by Wikileaks as the "9-11" of political diplomacy. Former CIA officer Bob Baer claims that the release of the cables will make it more problematic for the United States to launch drones inside Pakistan and to engage in some of its covert anti-terrorism work as in Yemen. Another practical problem is that the leak silences friends inside other countries from providing intelligence to American diplomats.

But one of the issues here is that over 2 million Americans had access to these cables. None of them were highly classified. And where was our vaunted counterintelligence officers? This seems to me to be the result of the Secret America the Washington Post revealed earlier this year. A myriad of new intelligence agencies have grown up since 9/11 and none of them have any adult supervision. If you really believe that the lone American military analyst is the source of these cables I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'll sell you. The Wikileaks phenomenon is just the start of a flood of classified materials washing across the internet. It doesn't have to be Wikileaks but competitors since our intelligence agencies are so porous.

One of the most disturbing aspect of the cables is that they reveal the United States under President Obama has not abandoned the "Long War" concept created by the Bush-Cheney years. Almost every cable is tinged with a fixation on terrorism and war fever. The cable of Bob Gates briefing the Italian foreign minister about how the world will be radically different if Iran obtains a nuclear device is one of hundreds of examples of this mentality. Luckily, our policy makers have refrained from taking the Sunni dictators' advice in bombing Tehran but the theme runs throughout the Middle Eastern cables. It's not clear who is the client state the United States or the small Sunni kleptocracies. The Saudi King waxes hot and cold over whether Iran should be bombed. When Mossad tries to blackmail the U.S. in 2005 to bomb Iran while there is still time, the Saudis weigh in to stop this. This year the Saudi King now wants Iran bombed. Every Middle Eastern state, including Israel, wants a war with Iran and naturally the United States must wage it and pay for it.

Reading these cables you have to conclude that America must rapidly adopt a national energy policy as soon as possible to withdraw from the region and realign our country with the hopes and aspirations with the region's peoples and not their corrupt rulers. While the Sunni potentates urge the United States to bomb Iran, Middle Eastern people in recent polls believe the greatest threat to their security is posed by Israel number one, then the United States second and Iran down in the mix. The cables make you believe we are being manipulated by local political forces rather than following our national interests.

If one recalls the days of anti-Americanism in Latin America, it was because we would install military dictators and did not encourage democracy and freedom after the years of the Alliance for Progress. In the atmosphere of the Cold war, center and center-left forces were considered suspect and our emphasis was on stability, which was temporarily purchased by widespread human rights abuses. Reading these cables, I fear we are descending into that mentality, which will create dangerous blowback. Our intelligence assets are in fact part of the political problem as witnessed by the honest cables from our ambassador to Pakistan.

Leftist critics of Iraq and Afghanistan wars claim we are in quagmires. But it actually becomes true when you consider our role in the whole Middle East. Just review the cables on Hamid Karzai and his brother. We are in bed with so many shady corrupt characters that it's hard to see how we can extract ourselves from them. And the problem is that the average person there will remember. Just as they remember when George H.W. Bush urged the Shi'ites to revolt against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War and the United States failed to come to their rescue.

The cables about Iran's nuclear program remind me of the E.U. ambassador, who said,"We're all negotiating over a nuclear weapon like an oriental rug. But the difference is that we don't know whether the rug exists or not." The most worrisome cables detail North Korea's shipment to Iran of ballistic missiles, something the Iranian ambassador to Moscow immediately denied the day after the cables appeared. It has been this missile capability, in my opinion, that is the actual security threat posed by Iran. As we have seen, the Iranian nuclear program has been sabotaged by cyber warfare and the assasination of nuclear scientists, which should push the program back years.

Emerging as the elephant in the room is North Korea. The cables are fascinating in that the United States and South Korea have gamed out a unified Korea and cables covering the Chinese indicate Beijing might not object to this. It's clear China is not happy with their clients as North Korea keeps going rogue. One only has to watch the recent events on the Korean peninsula to get some sense of their insanity. How much of this military action is to camouflage an on-going transfer of power?

The Right and the Left in the States have selectively picked cables to reinforce their own ideologies. The Left is making hay out of suggestions that somehow the United States encouraged the right-wing coup in Honduras, while there are counter cables indicating this might not be true. The Right is circulating cables printed in the Guardian that the Obama Administration was hoping that the moderates would triumph in the Iranian election. Not a bad hope. But the point of circulating these memos is to portray the Administration as naive, something the rest of the cables show they are not. In fact, the cables show that Obama's overture to Iran was done precisely to set up the situation for tougher sanctions, something the right didn't understand in the first place.

The American diplomatic corps comes across as professional, honest, educated and savvy to the local conditions. While these cables are not policy papers but just reports from the field, you have to give the men and women who serve our country credit for dealing with a hostile and threatening world. You also have to give them credit for ferreting out information from host countries. Unfortunately, something that might become more difficult with the release of these cables.

One item I found ironic was Harold Koh's statement condemning Wikileaks. Koh is the counselor for the State Department, whose appointment was challenged by conservatives who claimed--quite falsely--was an advocate of Sharia law.