The Theatre of Wikileaks

As of this writing, Wikileaks’ Cablegate has published only a small fraction of its huge stockpile of diplomatic cables numbering more than 250,000, about 118,000 of which are classified either as secret or confidential correspondences between several US embassies around the world and the US State Department in Washington. These memos are yet to inflict a felt impact on the countries involved, however, that many of the cables revealed an assortment of long unheard-of ironies and absurdities in international politics makes it inevitable for statesmen and world leaders to either exercise caution or become more defiant in the light of the Cablegate revelations.

But it seems that Wikileaks is yet to post the real bombshell of an expose comparable to its 2007 leakage of a video of an American helicopter firing at civilians in a Baghdad neighborhood thereby killing two Reuters journalists, or it has published only selected memos which it deems are able to create quite a stir but don’t yet bring a major shocker that will rock monopolizing governments (has it saved the best ones for last?) For now Cablegate seems to focus mostly on being an anthology of embarrassing politics, aimed at the US government the fall guy of which (Hilary Clinton) is trying hard to let hackers understand that Cablegate is putting national and individual security at huge risk. Wikileaks’ soft-spoken founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange has told TIME’s Richard Stengel via Skype that in its four years of publishing history the whistle-blower website has never caused any individual “to come to any sort of physical harm or to be wrongly imprisoned.”

According to the website’s statistical graph, 1, 796 of the memos came from the US Embassy in Manila. This wikidump, which is the largest in Southeast Asia, dates from January 2005 to February 2010 and consists of 982 unclassified, 749 classified and 65 secret memos to Washington. While Wikileaks is yet to publish any of these memos, the Philippine media is anxiously standing by as any of its disclosures would prove instrumental in revealing the US’s perceptions and position on various issues and controversies confronting, or rather hounding, the Arroyo administration at the time. Isn't it interesting to know what transpired during the close-door meetings held between President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Hilary Clinton during the latter’s state visit in November 2009, as well as during the lightning visit of CIA Chief Leon Panetta in Manila October of the same year?

But right now, what have the published cables really accomplished? Or, as Newsweek puts it, are these revelations worth the amount of ink spilled about them?

Perhaps the disclosures are a good treasure trove for information-deprived journalists, who at present are still having funfare at the cables through Wikileaks’ various mirror sites (the original website has since been taken down by its main server in the US, avoiding the perils of bearing government pressure). I think the published ones, though nevertheless surprising, will not polarize world governments into paranoid and non-paranoid blocs much like in the Cold War days, though some relationships can be affected and surreptitious transactions by Mafiosi governments will all be taken back “for review” by their respective leaders. Most of all, the cables must have become a lesson to the US not only in keeping “secrets” but also in making and categorizing them.

What’s more, the disclosures put a burning sword into the backs of leading state leaders and politicians who should be reminded that they are dealing with domineering governments who use realpolitik as the universal currency hidden in their pockets.

The contents of the diplomatic cables range from disturbing to amusing. From Clinton’s orders to obtain sensitive personal data about Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and other key UN officials to some unflattering opinions about Afghan President Hamid Karzai (whom a dispatch from Kabul portrays as a paranoid crackpot) and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi (whom US Charge d’Affaires in Rome Elizabeth Dibble calls “feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader”), there is a long stream of backstage jeering and lambasting that exactly defines how politics in entangled alliances works.

One cable taunts French President Nicholas Sarkozy as “an emperor with no clothes.” A Chinese official writes that North Korea is behaving like a “spoiled child,” and a US diplomat even called its leader Kim Jong Il a “flabby old chap” when the tyrant suffered a stroke in 2008.

Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi is reported never to go anywhere in the world without his Ukrainian nurse whom he admires as a “voluptuous blonde.” It is also told that he has an “intense dislike or fear of staying on upper floors” because of a vertigo that is so extreme that he cannot climb any more than 35 steps. Another revealed that during the nuclear stand-off in Libya Gadhafi expressed his preparedness to leave a dangerous storehouse of highly-enriched uranium to its fate at a Tripoli airport “to teach the UN a lesson” just because of an unkind brushoff during a recent US nuclear summit.

Another cable refers to Russia’s Vladimir Putin as “alpha-dog” and likens his relationship with former protégé and now Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to that of Batman (Putin) and Robin (Medvedev). Germany’s Angela Merkel, which is labeled in one cable as “risk averse” is given a pet name by US diplomats – Teflon. Speaking of Merkel, one unique cable from the embassy in Berlin tells wryly why the German chancellor nominated Guenther Oettinger as EU Energy Commissioner:

“Chancellor Angela Merkel nominated Baden-Wuerttemberg (BW) Minister President Guenther Oettinger as EU Energy Commissioner primarily to remove an unloved lame duck from an important [Christian Democratic Union] bastion. The move was not the promotion of a valued colleague as Merkel's allies sought to portray it. Rather, Oettinger's increasing loss of party support in BW compelled Merkel to push Oettinger out to protect her support base there. Oettinger is noted for a lackluster public speaking style, and some commentators have asserted that Merkel, who has often stood out at EU meetings, wanted to appoint a German Commissioner who would not outshine her.”

The deputy chief of mission in Germany who wrote the report describes the act tongue-in-cheek as Germany’s “time-honored tradition of sending unwanted politicians to the EU Commission,” noting further that Oettinger is “a poor public speaker” who “has a tendency to put his foot in his mouth,” providing an example when Oettinger tried to defend former BW Minister President Hans Filbinger during the latter’s eulogy, referring to the deceased as an opponent of the Nazi regime when in fact Filbinger had a documented “pro-Nazi” war record. The deputy chief entitled his report “Lame Duck German Governor Kicked Upstairs as New Energy Commissioner in Brussels.”

Meanwhile, a 1979 memo from the American Embassy in Tehran sounds like something straight out of a cynic’s doctoral dissertation:

¶3. PERHAPS THE SINGLE DOMINANT ASPECT OF THE PERSIAN PSYCHE IS AN OVERRIDING EGOISM. ITS ANTECEDENTS LIE IN THE LONG IRANIAN HISTORY OF INSTABILITY AND INSECURITY WHICH PUT A PREMIUM ON SELF-PRESERVATION. THE PRACTICAL EFFECT OF IT IS AN ALMOST TOTAL PERSIAN PREOCCUPATION WITH SELF AND LEAVES LITTLE ROOM FOR UNDERSTANDING POINTS OF VIEW OTHER THAN ONE'S OWN. THUS, FOR EXAMPLE, IT IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO AN IRANIAN THAT U.S. IMMIGRATION LAW MAY PROHIBIT ISSUING HIM A TOURIST VISA WHEN HE HAS DETERMINED THAT HE WANTS TO LIVE IN CALIFORNIA. SIMILARLY, THE IRANIAN CENTRAL BANK SEES NO INCONSISTENCY IN CLAIMING FORCE MAJEURE TO AVOID PENALTIES FOR LATE PAYMENT OF INTEREST DUE ON OUTSTANDING LOANS WHILE THE GOVERNMENT OF WHICH IT IS A PART IS DENYING THE VAILIDITY OF THE VERY GROUNDS UPON WHICH THE CLAIM IS MADE WHEN CONFRONTED BY SIMILAR CLAIMS FROM FOREIGN FIRMS FORCED TO CEASE OPERATIONS DURING THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION.

¶4. THE REVERSE OF THIS PARTICULAR PSYCHOLOGICAL COIN, AND HAVING THE SAME HISTORICAL ROOTS AS PERSIAN EGOISM, IS A PERVASIVE UNEASE ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE WORLD IN WHICH ONE LIVES. THE PERSIAN EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN THAT NOTHING IS PERMANENT AND IT IS COMMONLY PERCEIVED THAT HOSTILE FORCES ABOUND. IN SUCH AN ENVIRONMENT EACH INDIVIDUAL MUST BE CONSTANTLY ALERT FOR OPPORTUNITIES TO PROTECT HIMSELF AGAINST THE MALEVOLENT FORCES THAT WOULD OTHERWISE BE HIS UNDOING. HE IS OBVIOUSLY JUSTIFIED IN USING ALMOST ANY MEANS AVAILABLE TO EXPLOIT SUCH OPPORTUNITIES. THIS APPROACH UNDERLIES THE SOCALLED "BAZAAR MENTALITY" SO COMMON AMONG PERSIANS, A
MIND-SET THAT OFTEN IGNORES LONGER TERM INTERESTS IN FAVOR OF IMMEDIATELY OBTAINABLE ADVANTAGES AND COUNTENANCES PRACTICES THAT ARE REGARDED AS UNETHICAL BY OTHER NORMS. AN EXAMPLE IS THE SEEMINGLY SHORTSIGHTED AND HARASSING TACTICS EMPLOYED BY THE PGOI IN ITS NEGOTIATIONS WITH GTE…

Somehow there are diplomats who are just un-diplomatically rude. In 2008 when businessmen guests chorused before UK’s Prince Andrew, Duke of York during a brunch in Bishkek that doing business in Kyrgyzstan is “like doing business in the Yukon” in the nineteenth century (“only those willing to participate in local corrupt practices are able to make any money”), a cable says that the Prince just laughed boisterously and said, “All of this sounds exactly like France.” When a British businessman describes American and British investments in Kyrgyzstan as comparable despite his observation that US’s economy is paramount over that of UK, the prince just snaps: “No surprise there. The Americans don’t understand geography. Never have. In the UK, we have the best geography teachers in the world!”

What Wikileaks shows us is a great theatre of political comedy, while at the same time it provides a good ground for studying the US diplomatic behavior which, even though sometimes rough, has nevertheless been sensitive and accurate enough to record the minutest of the minute, even sometimes giving weighty significance to the seemingly-insignificant. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, writing in TIME, says that Wikileaks in fact shows the skills of American diplomats, not their failings. If there is someone who must be culpable, he says, it must be “Washington’s absurd data-sharing policy that made this possible.”

But in the first place, if these “secrets” haven’t been secrets since then, the shock and awe wouldn’t be so much, and governments would have been more circumspect a lot. Perhaps, things might have been different.