The real American

embarrassment over
WikiLeaks—mediocrity
FROM the news agency, Associated Press, as published in The Standard
TODAY, comes a report that Malacañang is alarmed over the “release of
thousands of US State Department documents on the Internet, saying ‘the
public may fail to appreciate the information, especially when the
information is taken out of context.’”
This is needless alarm because, by the Palace’s own admission, the
WikiLeaks has thus far released nothing on the Philippines probably because
the subject, of late, is either too trivial or—in the case of the botched Luneta
hostage crisis—the embarrassing details are all out there already, along with
Mai Mislang’s “vintage” remarks on Vietnamese wine.
So certain was he of the inconsequentiality of any of the estimated
1,796 diplomatic cables concerning the Philippines that presidential
spokesman Edwin Lacierda said: “It certainly does not bother us if
information of such highly sensitive nature would be disclosed to the
public.” Lacierda meant to say, “It certainly WOULD not bother us if
information of [delete such] a highly sensitive nature is made public.”
Certainly. He was that sure there was nothing of the slightest sensitivity and
therefore interest that could be reported about the Philippines. President
Benigno Aquino III agreed that his administration had nothing to hide.
Critics say because it has had nothing to show.
AP reported that “[a] torrent of condemnation heaped on WikiLeaks
from around the globe did suggest a widespread sense—among the great and
the good, but also among the sometimes more jaded observer and analyst
class—that in releasing US diplomatic documents the group crossed a
dangerous line.”
But not, we say, in the case of the inconsequential Philippines—unless
we are shown a cable showing the US hand in the failed—and Supreme
Court-rejected—attempt of the Arroyo administration to buy peace in
Muslim Mindanao but giving it all away to extreme Muslim fundamentalists
who will be free to treat like dirt formerly constitutionally protected Filipino
women of Muslim faith. On the sole condition that the Muslim mysognists
are pro-American. The US gave all-out support to the women-stoning
Taliban when the latter were fighting the Soviets who were bringing
education and equality to Afghan women. Sure, it was limited education:
like nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, the other hard but never
the political sciences as anyone visiting Iran and talking to the open-faced,
never veiled women students there will tell you, though they must wear a
head scarf showing no more than their bangs.
Among those who should worry about the WikiLeaks, though, is the
Israeli prime minister, the commercially shady Benjamin Netanyahu, who
rose to prominence on the death of his brave younger brother in the Entebbe
Rescue.
“It will be more difficult for talented American diplomats to put into
cables and reports things they once would have,” he said.
That assumes there are talented American diplomats out there—of the
calibre, say, of Charles Bohlen, who was US ambassador to the Philippines
when the Philippines was the Western Front in the Free World’s fight
against World Communism (West Germany was the Eastern Front).
Or George Kennan, whose Long Telegram in the aftermath of World
War II set out in sharp, spare—no adjectives or adverbs—and superb prose
the direction of Soviet ambition based not on Stalin’s sex life but his official
orders to the Supreme Soviet and recommended containment and sharp
military responses whenever and wherever the Soviet hydra reared its head.
Kennan’s Long Telegram is a model no diplomats in the world in
history have ever come close to emulating; its influence has never been
equaled. It proved that to be a good diplomat you have to write fine prose,
which is possible only if you are capable of making sure observations that
only strong minds can make. None of the diplomatic cables released by
WikiLeaks shows intellectual or literary quality anything remotely in the
vicinity of Kennan’s model.
Thus, The New York Times reported in its Sunday edition that one
WikiLeaked cable revealed King Hamad of Bahrain as urging the US to end
the so-called Iranian nuclear program (from all the evidence for peaceful
purposes in anticipation of the oil running out) by any means including air
strikes.
But this only shows that the Arab sheiks are that worried about a
Persian not to mention Shia demonstration of the practicability of nuclear
energy for economic development, and extending the life of Arab oil fields.
It will show that a country as industrially though not intellectually
challenged as US-embargoed Iran can do it. So, what’s so cleverly revealing
about that cable and what was so astute about its writer? All it revealed is
that the Arab sheiks can read what is written on American foreheads: Bomb
Iran regardless.
Nothing. It is a pedestrian report. Hamad was just letting the
Americans hear what they want to hear so they will stick around to protect
Arab royalty from Islamic fundamentalist mobs that despise royal hedonism
and prodigality.
Another WikiLeaked cable said that the brother of Afghan faux
president Hamid Karzai (accused of massive cheating in the last elections),
Ahmed Wali, talked on and on and on for two hours to his American
handlers, and said that he liked to talk out of both sides of his mouth, talking
truthfully out of one side while lying out of the other but he would never
reveal which side was doing what at the moment.
The cable writer analyzed such candor as showing that Ahmed was
unaware he was being eavesdropped upon by US intelligence. What the
heck, he was talking to his American handlers for God’s sake. On the
contrary, Ahmed’s remarks showed that he was well aware of being “spied
upon”—if you can call American diplomats taking notes in front of him
“spying.” Actually he was just being kind to his brother’s US protectors by
warning them that half of what he was being overheard to say, by US
diplomats, were fictions on which they would be wise not to act.
Another WikiLeaked US cable couldn’t even confirm whether the
sartorially challenged Libyan strongman Gaddafi—I saw that he still wears
polyester NikNik shirts, a pop fashion of the early 70s—traveled sometimes
with and sometimes without his blond Ukrainian masseuse to which he has
largely confined his needs in that department. He has otherwise dropped his
all-female security detail. Well, what does that tell you? What everyone with
fingers to count knows: time has passed for Gaddafi, as for all men, and with
time their ability to go for more than one, once, if at all, and that sometimes
a backrub has to be just that.
The rest of the information WikiLeaked about the Libyan strongman
is known to everyone who has eyes to see: he likes watching horse races and
flamenco dancing, which is important only if Gaddafi himself dances. Now
that would be something, though not much.
Muammar also hates to fly over water. The TV detective Monk hates
to fly, period. Anyone with any sense at all will never fly Aeroflot two
inches off the ground or Garuda over anything.
Another WikiLeaked cable “intuits” that the French prime minister,
Sarkozy, is pro-American. For God’s sake, he keeps saying he is.
But what he does with his gorgeous wife when we are not looking and
how often—now that would be interesting but only from one angle and it
isn’t the one that Hayden Kho kept showing us bobbing up and down. And it
isn’t a geopolitical perspective.
Finally another US cable said that Gadzhi Makhachev, a bandit in the
Russian Caucasus, is partial to boiled meats in huge quantities, dumping
entire cows and sheep in huge vats of boiling water. Lately he lost a Syrian-
born singer who was shot en route to one of his parties where he danced with
a pistol stuck in his jeans. So? What would be the geopolitical implication of
any of that except to the bovine species?
Where in all this is the acuity, the philosophical depth, the historical
breadth and diamantine prose of a George Kennan, who, by himself, decided
one morning in Moscow to get up and write one Long Telegram that
established not just the assumption but down to the details not just of US
policy for the next half century but the military and economic weapons to
carry it out? A policy that ended in the victory of the United States over the
Soviet Union without turning the earth to nuclear ash.
Meanwhile, AP reported that “Netanyahu argued that the ability to
communicate under a cloak of secrecy was critical to Israel’s ability to reach
a peace deal with Egypt in 1979. Had the Israeli public known that Prime
Minister Menachem Begin was preparing to cede the entire Sinai desert,
captured in 1967, the foment—“foment?—might have scuttled the emerging
agreement, Netanyahu suggested. ‘Transparency is fundamental to our
society, and it’s usually essential, but there are a few areas, including
diplomacy, where it isn’t essential,’ he said.”
Churchill, who could write, said it all already: “Sometimes it is
necessary to shield the truth with a bodyguard of lies.”
And what did that Israeli cession achieve?
For the Israelis, everything. They got a permanent peace with Egypt
whose armed forces, sure, ultimately lost to the Israeli Defense Force in the
Yom Kippur War but it was, to borrow the words of the Duke of Wellington
after Waterloo, “a close-run thing.” The Egyptian assault bloodied the Israeli
army before being turned back.
The Palestinian people lost everything; today even the sliver of Gaza,
as the Arab world looks on in helpless rage. If details of that cession had
been prematurely revealed, Begin would have been cheered by the Israelis
for his astuteness and Sadat assassinated sooner by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Meanwhile, the AP report continues: “As world reaction poured in,
the condemnation was nearly universal. Canadian Foreign Minister
Lawrence Cannon said ‘the perpetrators of these leaks may threaten our
national security.’ Canadian national security? Against what threat? Polar
bears or ennui?
 In Switzerland, which has plenty to worry about if those same world
leaders are secretly depositing their ill-gotten gains from US foreign aid in
Swiss banks, the Basler Zeitung newspaper called it a ‘diplomatic disaster.’
The Bulgarian—Bulgarian?!?—“Foreign Ministry called it illegal and
harmful.” To whom, its wrestlers?
“Indeed,” the AP report continued, “it was remarkable how absent
was the halo that tends to accompany WikiLeaks—that sense among pockets
in the public that the exposure, while perhaps illegal and indiscreet, while
damaging to certain interests to be sure, served the greater purpose of casting
light on an important truth. Instead, there was a sense that a time-honored
way of doing things was being challenged for the sake of the challenge
itself.”
Time-honored way of doing things? Using the World Wide Web to
communicate secretly?
The New York Times’ Arthur S. Brisbane, had another take in his
column, The Public Editor. He wrote that all told these are things better
known by the general public than held secret by a handful. “What if the New
York Times in 1964 had possessed a document showing that L.B.J.’s intent
to strike against North Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident was based
on false information? Should it have published the material? What if the
Times had possessed documentary evidence showing that the Bush
administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass
destruction were unfounded? Should it have published the material?”
But even Brisbane missed the point.
No recent US diplomatic cables would have revealed any of those
fateful facts because no US diplomat would have written them without
showing his hand, not just to the CIA and the White House, but to the World
Wide Web—and without being destroyed as Valerie Plame and her husband
were. Watch the Naomi Watts and Sean Penn movie, a masterpiece!
Still, AP editorialized that the art of diplomacy, often seen as a force
for good in the world, for avoiding war and resolving conflict, was under
attack. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica lamented that “the history of
diplomacy ... must start over on a new basis, knowing that there can always
be a pair of electronic eyes looking over the shoulders of the person who is
writing.”
Only if La Repubblica means that diplomats need to go back to pen,
lemon juice for ink, paper, sealed envelopes, and clandestine drops instead
of just clicking SEND on the computer screen.
Indeed, none of these leaks could have happened in the past unless US
diplomats made copies of their hand or typewritten secret cables and leaked
copies to media, which no US diplomat would have done out of patriotism
and out of fear of certain detection since all paper and type have been
traceable to the user since World War II.
It is not a matter of technology but of duty.
That duty remains unchanged: to write. Clearly? Crystal. To the point.
No chitchat. No trivialities. No ambiguity. With the single analysis:
capability equals intent.
If they can do it they will, so stop them by any means that will do just
that.
And everything set down only on paper, papyrus, or rote memory as
has been done since Sumer.
In the CIA you had a half sheet of ruled yellow pad, a pencil and a
box of matches to make your report and destroy it. Everything was in there:
the facts, which spoke for themselves and needed no other expression, and
the decision the facts pointed to. Closure then meant closing the casket. The
gun, small bore, .22 short, between the eyes, no exit wound, bullet bounced
around but never leaving the skull, minimal bleeding. Un dead comunista.
Therein lies the problem. US diplomats no longer use pen and paper,
let alone think things out as you must if you have to move your fingers and
not just plunk down before a computer linked to the World Wide Web to
patter out “stream of consciousness” reports of whatever they think they
overheard, though a common sense should alert that if some was overheard
it was meant to be told.
What stands out in the WikiLeaks is the complete lack of analytical
talent not to mention competent prose in the cables, and a markedly
embarrassing partiality to trivia or gossip.
If WikiLeaks reveals fateful words from the US President or the new
Russian czar or the current Chinese emperor—personalities who can with
the turn of a key and the push of a red button extinguish life on earth—well,
that would be something. But the massage preferences of an Arab who
insists on living in a tent in Midtown Manhattan—think of the sewage
problem—well…
As for the alleged damage to US diplomats, that comes about not
because of the information leaked but because of the poor quality of the
mind thereby revealed by the useless information passed on to Washington
where they are not even read.
The only worrisome thing the WikiLeaks revealed is that, in a real
world crisis, the US has no one on board the government of the caliber of
those who were Present at the Creation of the American Empire of Liberty
—in the words of the preeminent one among them, Dean Acheson. The
universality of American mediocrity is the greatest and most fearful
revelation of WikiLeaks. #