TIMES EDITORIAL: WIKILEAKS, DIPLOMACY AND GEOPILOTICS
MANILA, DECEMBER 12, 2010 (MANILA TIMES) After WikiLeaks released the much-anticipated first wave of more than 250,000 US State Department diplomatic cables in November, and subsequently much more until today—and there will surely be more—the world continues go on its for some merry, for most sad and even tragic, ways of successes and failures.
The WikiLeaks have not yielded any surprises or completely unknown revelations. They simply confirm items that have been in the rumor mill in diplomatic circles. Journalist-authors of analyses have even written about them. Like the cables revealing that Saudi Arabia wants the USA to stop Iran not only from becoming a nuclear-armed power but also from continuing to grow its influence in the Middle East, everybody who had some knowledge of Middle-East geopolitics could guess that the Saudi rulers and most other entrenched families in the Arab world desire the humbling of Iran.
What the releases these past weeks, just like those released in July and October, cables and military documents about Afghanistan and Iraq, yielded no information that would change allegiances and alliances.
The WikiLeaked cables do not have the gravity of the Pentagon Papers that compromised American security and political alignments.
STRATFOR in an analysis titled, "WikiLeaks and American Diplomacy," offers this insight to the amateur:
"In war, secrecy is of paramount importance. But the value and sensitivity of a secret that is truly actionable is often of a very short-lived nature (as opposed to the continued classification of material that is merely embarrassing). The trick with intelligence in war is that you can never quite know what tidbit of information your adversary might make useful. But perhaps the single most important and unambiguous lesson of the WikiLeaks releases of Iraq and Afghan war documents has not so much been a security problem (though obviously there was a very important one) but of how overloaded the classification system has become with information of marginal and short-term sensitivity. So many were accessing so much mundane, day-to-day information that no one noticed when something important (in this case enormous quantities of low-level sensitivity) was being accessed and moved inappropriately: the WikiLeaks releases are a symptom of a classification system that is broken—and not just because someone managed to leak so much."
And STRATFOR rightly avers that "Nothing that WikiLeaks has released so far—about the Iraq and Afghan wars or American diplomacy—has changed geopolitics."
It continues: "Interestingly, few of the more than 250,000 diplomatic cables are actually classified—though they were never intended for public consumption. But the real significant difference is the game that is being played: a diplomatic rather than military one. In the practice of diplomacy, no one should be surprised that a country behaves one way and says another. When two leaders talk, their ability to speak in confidence is essential for moving beyond the pomp, circumstance and atmospherics that diplomacy has always entailed. Indeed, the very act of two leaders talking is the product of innumerable back-channel negotiations and confidential understandings. And even in supposedly more transparent democratic societies, the exigencies of foreign affairs dictate discretion and flexibility. Diplomacy not only requires compromise, but by its nature, it violates ideals and requires multiple layers of deception and manipulation."
"Everyone already knows this is how the game is played, and leaders in Washington and beyond have already demonstrated that countries with real problems to work on are not going to let a glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors interrupt important geopolitical relationships. With the release of these cables, everyone now knows what U.S. diplomats think of Moammar Gadhafi. It may impact U.S.-Libyan relations temporarily, but only if Libya was already in the market for an excuse to muck up the works. It would be far more problematic if the WikiLeaks revealed that the U.S. State Department was working with an unrealistic political assessment of what a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was going to be like than the fact that what everyone reads in the tabloids also made it into a diplomatic cable.
"What's more, the idea that WikiLeaks could hurt diplomatic relationships between the United States and the rest of the world also assumes that the rest of the world conducts diplomacy in a more 'honest' manner—it does not—or that it somehow does not fear that one day its own dispatches may be laid barren for all to see—it does. And given American intelligence capabilities, there's a good chance most countries do not want to gamble on whether the United States is already reading them."
So the games diplomats play and the more serious matter of geopolitics will go on.
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Chief News Editor: Sol Jose Vanzi
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