Truth and Treason

In recent days the world has been given an opportunity to weigh for itself some of the statements made behind closed doors in the halls of power, in those places where the diplomats dwell. Thanks to yet another technological advance, and a few committed souls taking it upon themselves to disinfect foreign policy discourse with what they call sunshine, the good people at Wikileaks have dropped into our laps an unprecedented chance to take a considered look at what not only American power means abroad, but its reach, scope and implications for us all in a world that is quite nuclear and very close to the brink of war in more hot spots than we would care to think too deeply about.

Much of the current discussion in the media (mainstream and alternative) centers on the salacious details of palace intrigue – which one is a sex fiend, who is a lush, how big is this one’s ego or the other one’s paranoia – and all of that is perfectly good fodder for late night monologues. But there is a bigger picture here, one that may or may not be brought into more stark relief by the release of a quarter million discrete pieces of diplomatic backchannel chatter and that is: the people running the big show on the big stage are simply people with petty, human failings and peevishness, no matter how lofty the title or perch.

Everyone’s got an ass to cover, in plain terms, and the latest Wikileaks debacle just goes to show it’s the mass of humanity whose ass is really on the line when we let vain, cruel, backstabbing, catty, vicious little men and women make decisions in boardrooms that play themselves out in trenches and on desert sands or the waters of the Pacific.

Think what you want about the right or wrong of the document dump now available in the morning newspaper, the larger question is whether now that some honest talk is on the table our leaders can get to the heart of the matters of war and peace and will they (as our proxies, elected or designated) choose peace. In the Middle East, the Saudis are publicly suing for peace with a soon-to-be nuclear Iran while secretly calling Crazy Mahmoud and his ayatollahs the serpent that needs a hoe taken to its head simply to save face on the Arab street. In the meantime, the U.S. will be the best candidate to take up the damn near inevitable fight, since we already have forward operating bases all over the region, as a result of the last Administration’s headlong and immoral rush into a destabilizing, debilitating, bankrupting series of conflicts that had no legal or logical justification in the first place. On top of that, in China we have our de facto bankers and creditors wishing to topple their former puppets in North Korea and no credible missile defense below the 38th parallel or for the rest of our allies in the region. And who benefits? The Chinese, it would seem, as they gain new markets and a foothold on swaying the tide of economic cycles toward their side of the hemisphere while we unload the arsenal of democracy on their behalf.

The treason committed here in the current Wikileaks release by Americans and others in the name of truth-telling is almost unimaginable and cannot be compared with the noble disclosures that helped wake up America and the world to the injustice of Vietnam when the Pentagon Papers came out. The two aren’t comparable because in the case of Vietnam, American presidents and European leaders had been deceiving their countries for years about the “dangers” of Southeast Asian nations falling like dominoes to Communism (a result that was unlikely in the best case and one that could have been mitigated by the fact of mutually assured destruction on the superpower level in the worst). The situation the developed world faces now is much more fractured with threats so diffuse and wide-ranging that to release backchannel documents that raise suspicion of American motives on every front has the real-time effect of overturning every diplomatic applecart we’re pushing around the world.

Perhaps in the end we’ll all look back on this episode as a turning point in the way foreign policy is conducted and we’ll start demanding more basic openness in confronting what we as nations really think of each other. At this moment, however, it’s hard to believe that an Administration that can’t keep Army privates from throwing open a trove of secrets to the world has the credibility to lead the way toward lasting peace, economic security and a future with more than ten minutes to midnight left. The truth is an absolute good and in most cases, the sooner we learn it the better, but this may be one time where propping up what passes for trust in the modern world of realpolitik is in fact a greater good for all concerned.

End. Rev3. 29 November 2010, 11.39 p.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer