In the hunt through the cable dump for the smelliest turds, are we missing the big picture? From the New York Times today:
"When dysfunctional does not begin to describe our political system and institutions," Prof. Stephen Kotkin of Princeton concluded after sampling the cables last week, "something in the government is really working — the State Department — far better than anyone thought."
Remember the Nixon White House tapes, which revealed (among other things) that the president was a lying, criminal, vulgar and thoroughly disagreeable human being? Few officials or institutions can stand up to the scrutiny of having great swaths of their private conversations published. (Could you?) That's why it's so revealing that the Obama/Clinton State Department actually looks pretty competent in the light of this release.
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Remember when we had no foreign policy except "you're either with us or against us?" When our diplomacy was "bring it on?" and our U.N. ambassador was a U.N. hater? When our Secretary of State's job was to lie to the world about cooked intelligence (with charts), as a pretext to war?
While WikiLeaks made the trove available with the intention of exposing United States duplicity, what struck many readers was that American diplomacy looked rather impressive. The day-by-day record showed diplomats trying their hardest behind closed doors to defuse some of the world’s thorniest conflicts, but also assembling a Plan B.
The article is a good illustration of one paradoxical reason why I think WikiLeaks can do no harm, and often does good: sometimes what governments keep secret is their effectiveness, and disclosure (by others) should work to their advantage. A responsible government won't try to manipulate us by deliberate leaks, but it is often served by leaks it can't prevent, nonetheless.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should be grateful (and maybe they are, whatever their public posture).
We should all be huge fans of Julian Assange. WikiLeaks rocks, not least because he's targeting not just governments but corporations. Don't believe all the weird stuff being promoted about him. There is a huge campaign to smear this guy, and you know why. He's drawing blood, and he won't stop. Secrets are how the world is ruled. He's found a way to challenge that rule. I'd rate him the most successful internet entrepreneur of recent memory.
The theory that Assange is an unlikely ally of Obama's may seem strange -- after all, the Obama administration has been his largest victim, recently. But sometimes enemies are our best friends, are they not? I submit that these two men, working at vastly different levels and constrained by entirely different rules, are allies because they are working for essentially the same ends.
That's a leap of faith on my part. I see many around here don't trust Obama that way any more. We all have to make a character judgment drawn from their respective histories and ongoing actions. Both men are hard to read that way, as they ride the wave of recent history, subject to pressures and privy to secrets of a complexity we can scarcely take in even when they are revealed (always in part). They are mystery men, both of them. But to me they seem to be pushing in the same direction, from different points of leverage.
That's why I think we're all served by what they are trying to do, and should have their backs. That doesn't mean unquestioning support for every decision they make -- it allows for outrage and disagreement -- just as we can hardly expect them to agree with each other!
But consider: who would you rather have to trust, Obama and Assange, or Bush and the various News corporations?