I like to suss these things out over time.
Manning should be in jail, and is.
Assange, hmm, Assange……….Manning should be in jail.
The leaks seem to say (and I am not an avid reader of these) US diplomats think they are better than everyone and that they work to finely tweak relations to “play” the world and bend it to our will which turns out to be peaceful and not overly power hungry.
The cables I’ve read so far show our diplomats trying to make sense of a Bizarro World in which the United States tends to say what it means while almost every other nation is essentially allergic to candor or straight talk.
Arab potentates say exactly the same things the Israelis say about the Iranians and their intentions — but won’t say them out loud in public, nor lift a finger themselves. The Chinese whine about oil and Iran, and we help them with the Saudis.
Which is pretty much what we thought.
Concerning my big subject of last year, Honduras, Wikileaks has a HUGE diplomatic cable (not).
Essentially it says what the news said at the time. The US assumed that Honduras had a “coup”, when it did not.
Richard Cohen seems to think that the Wikileaks proves Bush an inept president and liar. How? Because it shows that the Arab world thinks that Iraq will just become a pawn of Iran if we oust Sadaam.
When, for instance, Bush attempts to justify the Iraq war by saying the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, Assange could reach into his bag of leaked U.S. government cables and cite Saudi King Abdullah’s private observation that the war had given Iraq to Iran as a “gift on a golden platter.”
I’m pretty certain that Bush knew this was a possibility and if Mr. Cohen could reach into his bag of lefty ideals BB (before Bush) he might note the left really being disgusted with US foreign policy that supported evil dictators in order to keep a “global order” that may or may not be the best be in the best interests of the globe.
And finally……Wikileaks seems to have found one of it’s first actual victims. Prof. Majid Shahriari died in Iran less than 12 hours after the leaks were out. He was heading the ‘combat Stuxnet’ team in Iran.
(ht Maggie’s Farm)
The attacks occurred at 7.45 a.m. Iranian time, less than 12 hours after the WikiLeaks organization uncovered US diplomatic cables attesting to a proposal by Mossad director Meir Dagan to overthrow the Islamic regime as one of the ways of terminating its nuclear program. He proposed enlisting oppressed Iranian minority groups for the task, like the Baluchis and their liberation movement, Jundallah.
Our intelligence sources note that this was the fifth attack in two years on Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran. None of the perpetrators were ever apprehended. Some sources suggest that the latest double hit may have been the work of Jundallah, which recently began targeting nuclear scientists serving the hated regime and which two months ago reported abducting a scientist employed at the Isfahan nuclear facility.
Tehran played down that incident claiming the kidnapped man was a driver. But last week he appeared on the Saudi TV station Al Arabiya and described his nuclear work.
I don’t think the tweets/cables/emails/letters to Wikileaks begging Assange not to release more will do much. However, if he starts going after the bankers, maybe we’ll see a real powerplay!
Then the “bankers control the world” paradigm will really take off.
UPDATE: This was a good post (ht Instapundit), again showing no surprise in the messages but disappointment that diplomacy will no longer be as honest/open – or perhaps it will be by telephone instead of writings in which case history is at a loss.
Anyway – Pejman Yousefzadeh gets “Quote of the Day” recognition:
The plural of “anecdote” is not “data,”
Love that!
Go read his column. It’s good.
