WikiLeaks: Little Cause for Indignation

Sound judgment and a healthy sense of reality: According to everything we’re learning from WikiLeaks, America’s diplomats don’t need to apologize for very much.

What does the recent WikiLeaks glut of information about America’s diplomats and American foreign policy tell us? That they’re dishonest? That they’re full of superpower hubris? That the U.S. is a country that doesn’t know its best days are over and done with?

One reads the dispatches. One reads and reads and finally arrives at the conclusion: “Not bad at all!” Yes, American diplomats represent — here’s the shocker — American interests, and they can be sometimes unpleasant about it. But they also supply situational reports that might have been written by Transparency International or Human Rights Watch. And many of them are damn good writers.

Anyone wanting to know, for example, why the Caucasus in general and Dagestan in particular are so difficult to pacify is urgently advised to read the excellently written dispatch emanating from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Aug. 31, 2006. The author attended a wedding celebration in Dagestan at which a rector of the Dagestan University Law School faculty stuck a revolver in his face.

And it’s reassuring, rather than outrageous, to learn that American diplomats — with remarkable accuracy — consider the Kenyan political elites corrupt, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe a megalomaniac, and that close connections exist between Russian politicians and Russian Mafiosi. And it shows a healthy dose of reality that American diplomats dig into the bizarre behavior of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi (a distinct aversion to flying, and a decided preference for Ukrainian nurses and flamenco dancing) and couple that with a warning that one shouldn’t consider him just a gray-haired old eccentric, but as a sophisticated power politician.

Other dispatches no doubt contain considerably more political dynamite. But that is due less to their content than it is to the fact that they’ve been made public. When it comes to Iran and Saudi Arabia, we’re actually happy to learn that the U.S. refuses to undertake a military strike in the region. And getting uranium out of Pakistan isn’t a bad idea, either. It’s only a bad idea to say so publicly. And it’s good that Chinese diplomats seek a climate of open dialog with their American colleagues — not least when the topic happens to be North Korea. The bad thing — for the diplomats involved as well — is that now the whole world knows about it.

Taken like that, one can really only shout out to those men and women in the State Department, “Hey, not bad! Not bad at all!” There really isn’t much in there that requires an apology.