There is no mystery about Julian Assange’s motives in releasing the avalanche of secret documents known as Wikileaks—he has declared he sought to deal a mortal blow to American power. In The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 6) Gordon Crovitz thows light on Assange’s bizarre weltanschauung. Crovitz writes that in 2006 Assange published two essays describing the U.S. as an “authoritarian conspiracy.” Such “conspiracies,” writes Assange “take information about the world in which they operate, pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result.”
Assange’s plan was to make the U.S. conspiracy less effective by taking away its power to obtain vital information. Without assurance of secrecy other parties would not share information—thus the flow of information among conspirators would cease. In Assange’s convoluted prose: “We can marginalize a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment…An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself.”
There is no doubt that this act of cyber warfare was abetted by the administration’s indifference to security that left an incredibly large trove of documents open to downloading by low level government employees.
This said, some good may yet come from the Wikileaks intelligence disaster. The avalanche of State Department documents especially can serve as a wake up call to the public that our political elites inhabit a world beyond-the-looking glass, in part ideologically driven, in part prisoners of fantasies that impede rational coping with mortal dangers.
In The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 1), former undersecretary of state Elliot Abrams distinguishes between the role of secrecy in democracies and autocracies. Democracies, says Abrams, have nothing to hide when it comes to diplomacy, telling their Parliaments what they tell us. In most cases, he says, cables are marked secret to protect autocracies where leaders can only be candid in private, to protect them both from their enemies and their subjects. On the first, Abrams offers the example of the king of Bahrain who avoids any public criticism of Iran while privately telling American officials the Iranian nuclear program “must be stopped.” On the second he cites the leaked cable where Yemen’s President Ali Saleh—fearful of his own people if he is seen as cooperating with a non-Muslim power—says: ”We’ll continue to say the bombs are ours, not yours.”
Unfortunately, the Wikileaks disclosures demonstrate that Abrams’ distinction is overdrawn, for secrecy turns out to hobble the United States as much as the autocracies who manipulate the publics they dare not educate. Instead of serving, as Assange believed it did—and as it should—to make U.S. policy more effective, secrecy permits the administration to act as if it did not have vital information it possesses. Cables may fly, but for all practical purposes the U.S. administration keeps the information secret, not only from the broader public, but from itself. Secrecy permits the government to remain bogged down in old mental frameworks and to pursue policies that make no sense in light of actual conditions, simply because it is wedded to them and changing course is challenging. Secrecy allows the government elites to keep the broader public in the dark, impeding the possibility of constructive pressures to change course.
Take the most important foreign policy challenge currently facing the Obama administration: how to halt Iran’s nuclear program. Privately, as the leaked cables make clear, Arab leaders are desperate to stop Iran. Arabia’s King Abdullah called on the U.S. “to cut off the head of the snake.” Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince warned the U.S. not to appease Iran for “Ahmadinejad is Hitler.” Another United Emirate official called for a ground invasion. Egyptian President Mubarak described Iran’s growing influence in the region as “a cancer.” King Hamad of Bahrain said “That program [the Iranian nuclear program] must be stopped. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.” None of them said a word about the need to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a prerequisite to supporting sanctions or military action against Iran.
But the secrecy allowed Obama to pretend otherwise, to portray solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict as the key to dealing with the Iranian threat. When Netanyahu told Obama halting Iran was a precondition for encouraging Arab moderation (never mind that if ever there was pursuit of a chimera, it’s chasing after Arab moderation on the question of “Palestine”), Obama publicly contradicted him. “If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians—between the Palestinians and the Israelis—then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.” Part of Obama’s leverage against Netanyahu—to whom the Iranian threat to Israel is overriding—was his insistence that the U.S. could only obtain support for acting against Iran if Israel gave sufficient ground to Abbas.
Given all those cables, some have said Obama was “knowingly lying.” It’s also possible he was so wedded to his preconceptions concerning the centrality of the Israel-Palestinian conflict—a notion encouraged for decades in public and private by Arab leaders as well as Western “experts” and his own ideological reference groups—that he was unprepared to give them up. Clearly, leaning on Israel was a lot easier to do than making the mullahs change their ways. In any event, since no one could provide clear evidence Obama was wrong, he was free to pursue a policy useless (even had it been achievable) in accomplishing the overriding task at hand: stopping Iran.
It is this sort of behavior that makes Daniel Greenfield describe the conflict between the Obama administration and the Wikileakers as one between those who want to use diplomacy to weaken American power and those “who are obstructing them because their sole purpose is to sabotage America—even when America is already sabotaging itself.”
The policies to nowhere impel others to make their own bad policies. Like secondary smoke, only much more serious, the Israeli government is forced to formulate strategy in this atmosphere of lies. Netanyahu took office rejecting a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria. Under Obama’s relentless pressure he has wound up repeatedly insisting his dedication to a two-state solution. At this point it is difficult to know what Netanyahu really thinks but people close to him have said he genuinely believes in “the two state solution,” i.e. has swallowed his own smoke.
Whether or not this is the case, Isi Leibler is certainly right that Netanyahu’s effusive statements praising the impotent and duplicitous Abbas as a man of peace only confuse Israel’s public and Israel’s friends. Consider Netanyahu’s recent (Nov. 29) speech welcoming German President Christian Wulff to Israel. It was an opportunity to set forth Israel’s case briefly but forthrightly. Instead Netanyahu said this: “Despite all the setbacks and difficulties, we will continue to pursue peace. We hope that we have in the Palestinian Authority a partner that is willing to forge an historic compromise between our two peoples.” All such foolish rhetoric achieves is to heighten the pressure on Israel, even by well-wishers, to make the peace Israel itself says is within reach.
Wikileaks reveal that the policy debacle is by no means confined to Israel. A host of diplomatic telegrams portray Turkish leaders as radical Islamists and emphasize that Turkey is not a credible ally. Yet as Caroline Glick observes, ignoring all that it learns, the U.S. has agreed to sell Turkey a hundred F-35s and continues to support Turkish membership in the EU and embrace it as a NATO ally. The administration’s response to Wikileaks was to send Secretary of State Clinton to Turkey for the first leg of what the New York Times called an “international contrition tour.” There, writes Glick, “she sucked up to the likes of Turkish Foreign minister and Islamist ideologue Ahmet Davutoglu, who was kind enough to agree with Clinton’s assertion that the publication of the State Department cables was the 9/11 of diplomacy.” (Unsurprisingly, Davutoglu has asserted Israel is an illegitimate state destined to disappear.)
Wikileaks demonstrates that the administration has systematically concealed the extent and scope of the Iranian threat. North Korea, it turns out, has supplied Iran with at least 19 ballistic missiles with a 2000 mile range—with nuclear warheads they will enable Iran to intimidate (even without using them) Europe as well as other Middle Eastern countries. Iran is steadily expanding its outreach to far left countries in Latin America, especially Venezuela, which can offer safe havens for Hezbollah and other terror networks to stage attacks on the U.S. The leaked documents reveal the extent to which Iran has been sending paramilitary forces to advance the Iraqi insurgency and to kill our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither on this or the mischief Iran is wreaking in Lebanon has this administration (or indeed the Bush administration before it) been forthright.
In Latin America, Wikileaks reveals a feckless policy based on making brownie points with the hard left, notably Hugo Chavez. Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes in The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 20) that cables show that U.S. ambassador to Honduras Charles Ford warned that Zelaya’s “pursuit of immunity from the numerous activities of organized crime carried out in his administration will cause him to threaten the rule of law.” Nonetheless the Obama tried to force Zelaya down the throat of Honduras.
And then there’s the fraud, waste and worse. In the leaked cables, as Diana West observes, “nations from Pakistan to Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia are regularly discussed as black holes of infinite corruption into which American money gushes, either through foreign aid or oil revenue, and unstaunched and unstaunchable sources of terror and terror-financing.” She notes that a running theme is that the administration consistently obscures the identity of the nation’s foes, depicting, for example, the hostile peoples of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states as “allies.”
Secrecy is often necessary (obviously when the lives of informants are at risk) but Wikileaks demonstrates how it can be misused to deform policy. The Obama administration has devoted massive efforts to pushing Israel into a diplomatic corner. Yet were Obama serious about stopping Iran, Israel, with a strong military and the most at stake, should have been cultivated as our chief ally in the region for halting Iran’s drive to become a nuclear power.
Not that one needs secret information to know that ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict is fool’s gold. The fifth convention of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, just concluded in Ramallah, ruled out any compromises with Israel. Palestinian Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh points out it was no to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state; no to the idea of a land swap between Israel and the Palestinians; no to supplying Israel with U.S. weapons; no to recognizing the Western Wall’s significance to Jews—among many other nos.
Toameh observes that the Fatah communiqué sounded more like a battle cry than a political statement ending with the cry: “Revolution until victory, victory, victory!” Moreover, Abbas endorsed the statement, vowing he would compromise on not a single Palestinian right. Mind you, this is Fatah, which the West insists on calling “moderate.” Hamas took the occasion of its 23rd anniversary to issue a statement affirming once again that Palestine from the sea to the river is the land of the Palestinians and that it will never recognize the Israel occupation state but resist until all Palestine is liberated.
So while Assange was right in saying that restricting the flow of information among officials makes government less effective, he did not anticipate that the information would be ignored. In the words of journalist Lee Smith: “Members of the Washington policy establishment should be considerably less worried about how the foreign ministries of allied countries respond to the leaks than how the American electorate does. Even in a democracy, we accept that a key part of our diplomacy depends on concealing the truth, or even lying, in order to advance the interests of one’s own country. But it is hard to see how the public, mendacious, face of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, serves American interests. By systematically misleading the American people, our policymakers have undermined the basis of our democracy, which is premised on the existence of a public that is capable of making informed decisions about a world that is only becoming more dangerous.”
