Cables and gates

Wikileaks' latest document dump is over a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, some reaching all the way back to the 1970s. Needles to say, this has provoked some fierce debate and may actually have serious diplomatic consequences.

To be honest, I haven't found any of the revelations (so far) actually shocking. It's been clear for sometime that the U.S. is involved in low-level combat in Yemen. Trying to protect CIA operatives from arrest for wrongful kidnapping is sleazy and wrong, but bullshit like that's been going on since the Cold War. Yes, shockingly, aristocratic tyrants in the Middle East present one face to their people and another to their inner circle. Oh, and turns out U.S. diplomats severely over-estimated their ability to handle the 1979 Iranian revolution. Who knew?

Some of the cables are even reassuring. While wikileaks has successfully dubbed the release "cablegate," implying a whif of scandal, look at some of the initiatives uncovered: U.S. diplomats are trying to stem the flow of weapons to Hezbollah, empty Guantanamo, curb Afghani government corruption, convince Pakistan to scale back its nuclear arsenal and prevent Iran from going nuclear while simultaneously resisting Israeli and Arab leaders' calls for a calamitous war. How terrible.

Just judging from the reaction online and among those I know personally, many of whom are generally sympathetic to wikileaks, this particular volley has attracted probably the most ambivalent reaction yet. Wikileaks' previous dispatches had better justification: revealing attacks on journalists in warzones or exposing how an amok obsession with secrecy is used to obscure even basic details of military operations.

All the same, look at some of the more worthy diplomatic initiatives in the list above, especially those (like the negotiations with Pakistan), that are probably now DOA due to this document dump. For all that the government's botched over the years, I can't help but cringe a bit at endangering the work that's actually constructive. One can be an advocate of openness and still see the need for some information (say, sensitive diplomatic negotiations) to have some level of confidentiality, especially while a deal is still being negotiated.

I also can't help but getting the sense that the shotgun blast approach is less about a screaming need for this information to be public as much as it is a "fuck you" to the U.S. government. Wikileaks, like the nations recorded in these diplomatic cables, is out to protect its own turf and hit its enemies, perhaps more than it would like to admit. It's probably for the best that its next target will be banks, where the battle lines are a little more clear.

This is also where "cablegate" gets really interesting, in the Breaking Time sense. The content is nothing explosive by itself, but the implications certainly are. A major diplomatic bombshell was just caused by a loose, stateless network of hackers and informants. This is possible because the base of secret information grew so bloated, the technology so advanced and the culture so adversarily cynical that a freaking Army private had access to enough material for four serious breaches, along with whatever else Julian Assange has tucked away for insurance.

Secret diplomatic communiques between governments is a pillar of the current nation-state framework. A boring but big, really important pillar going back to the Treaty of F'ing Westphalia in 1648. It is as basic a plank as there is. 

If groups like wikileaks can shake that, repeatedly, then something big just broke, and it won't just damage the ability of states to strongarm others behind closed doors. The treaties and accords that many idealists look to for peaceful international improvement will also suffer a major blow if those negotiations can be breached. Explosions aren't surgical, and it's very possible for the useful and good to take as much damage as the oppressive and wrong.

I've written here before (after the last wikileaks dump) about how transparency is an ammo dump, but it's worth noting that it works best when that ammunition serves an overall purpose: to insure consequences for those who breach some sort of established trust. What's the purpose here? Wikileaks has certainly mastered the art of disrupting the current set-up, but they, nor anyone else, seem to really know what the new rules are.

P.S.- On the bright side, revealing the cables is incidentally a big blow to a conspirational view of world politics. The aggregated stories offer a compelling counterpoint, showing how competing interests, failure, grudges, and personal quirks form the mish-mash that is the international power structure.

Comments

[Kevin]

They certainly seem to be taking a PR hit from the more gossip-y aspects of this bath of releases. OTOH, there really are a few gems - the State Department's spying on the UN, for one.

Would it have violate their own ethos, though to remove things like Putin's bromance with Burlesconi?

It's not as universally important as the War logs, or as I hope, the upcoming banking drop, but the fact they did it speaks volumes in and of itself.