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Home Front: WoT
Why Wikileaks Is Bad for Progressive Foreign Policy
2010-12-01
From TNR. When a progressive analyst sees the problem much the same way I do, it's either one day shy of the Apocalypse or sweet reason. I'm listening for the sound of hooves, myself ...
by Heather Hurlburt

Will the latest Wikileaks dump really matter that much?

It's true, as both Laura Rozen and Kevin Drum have observed, that many of the secret messages don't seem to reveal big secrets. As Rozen wrote yesterday:

one is struck overall that the classified diplomatic discussions on Iran revealed in the cables are not all that different from what one would expect from following the public comments senior U.S. officials have made on the Iran issue the last several months.

But, with all due respect to my friends in the blogosphere, diplomacy was never about stating the obvious. Here are three ways the leaks could have a lasting impact on American foreign policy. None of them will be good news for those of us who value transparency and who believe diplomacy, not force, should enjoy primacy in the U.S. approach to the rest of the world.
Heather proceeds to get the first two reasons exactly right:
Making the Hardest Diplomatic Work Harder

I spent almost a decade working at the State Department and overseas. After reading through these files, I cannot stop imagining just how hard it will be for Foreign Service Officers to do their jobs. One former Officer, Alex Grossman, summed it up for me nicely: "fear of publication will only prevent people from voicing frank and honest opinions, assessments and recommendations."

And it's not just that U.S. officials will have to be careful about what they say or write. It's that they'll be dealing with foreign officials living with the same fear of exposure. In the Middle East, as Marc Lynch notes, Arab leaders may already be dealing with blowback in their own countries, for offering the US frank assessments of one other. Russian leaders are likely to get skittish about continuing the depth of intelligence-sharing they've moved to under the current Administration, as Sam Charap of the Center for American Progress noted:

the ramifications for US-Russia relations are difficult to overstate. So much rests on trust between individuals in a relationship like that where baggage of mutual suspicion extends decades back. When they see the details of their assessment of Iran's ballistic missile program posted online, which they provided to US interlocutors in confidence, they will think more than twice before ever telling us something sensitive again.

Not being a mind-reader nor possessed of the right stripe of nationalist paranoia, I have no idea how the leadership factions in North Korea will make sense of the revelations regarding their missile programs and sales, much less U.S.-South Korean discussion of a post-North Korean order. But this can't make dealing with them easier.

Slowing the Movement Toward DeClassification and Openness in National Security

In the last few years, there has been some progress toward classifying fewer documents and using the more rarefied classifications less frequently. This series of leaks will almost surely reverse that progress. A top-secret classification would have kept any of these documents off the shared network from which they were allegedly downloaded by a very junior soldier.
I'm no security expert, but it's clear that we classify too many documents inappropriately and for the wrong reasons -- usually political embarrassment. Since 9/11, the intel community has tried to share more information (appropriately so), but that means giving more people access to more information. It takes only one Manning to cause real damage. A better system would allow us to declassify a lot a garbage while keeping the real secrets safer.
You can bet that the intelligence community will make that point--not only to justify stronger classification of new documents but also to slow the declassification of old ones. Civilian administrations at least since Clinton's have been trying to speed up those efforts. Now they will go even more slowly, making it harder to learn the whole story of how our government analyzed an issue, treated an individual, or reacted to a crisis.

And make no mistake: You can't get the comprehensive history of a diplomatic episode from Wikileaks any more than someone could learn the comprehensive truth about you by downloading the top 20 e-mails from your inbox right now.

Historians and other champions of truth should not be pleased.

Undermining Progressive Policies and Frameworks

In my day job this week, I'm thinking tactically about the leaks' effects on the issues of immediate concern to me: ratifying the START Treaty and promoting effective diplomacy to deal with Iran, while inching our way toward lasting peace in the Middle East and away from an endless military quagmire in Afghanistan.
Here of course is where progressives and conservatives part company: we understand that NEW START is a stinker of a treaty, that diplomacy with Iran has been tried and found wanting, and that there is no such thing as lasting peace in the Middle East. Though we'll agree that Afghanistan has always been a quagmire right back to the days of Alexander the Great.
But underlying all those discrete policy positions is a common set of assumptions and values: that we live in a complex world where posturing, rigid ideology, and indiscriminate use of force will not get us, as a society or a global commons, to where we need to go; that quiet talk is much more effective than loud threats; that, in the long run, America's national interests will be best served if we see and act on them as inextricably linked with the interests of others.
These could be restated as conservative principles, of course, but let's let Heather take the bit in her teeth ...
I've called them progressive, because they are. They're also, with a bit less emphasis on the global good, realist. Or you might simply say they are sane and reasonable. But if we can't conduct quiet diplomacy and have it stay quiet, it's a lot harder to make this approach work. Could Sadat and Begin have gotten to Camp David without months of quiet preparation? Could Nixon have gone to China?

And back here within the U.S., you can count upon the opponents of progressive policies to use the Wikileaks dumps to advance their agenda. They'll take items out of context and use them to justify ideas like bombing Iran,
We don't need Wikileaks to justify bombing Iran, if bombing Iran is the right thing to do. Diplomacy has failed with the Mad Mullahs™; if sanctions fail there's one option left.
rejecting the START treaty,
NEW START is a terrible treaty. The number of warheads held by the US and Russia aren't an issue anymore -- whether it is 2,000 each or 1,000 each, it doesn't matter in a practical sense, as each side could reduce the other to rubble. The bad part of NEW START is the ancillary measures that limit ballistic missile defense, and that's why the treaty will never be ratified.
and god-knows-what to North Korea.
Diplomacy has failed in Nork-land -- not our fault, either. Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama have all tried and failed for the simple reason that North Korea is not amenable to the traditional diplomacy we've tried. The progressive left won't acknowledge that North Korea is China's lap dog: it does nothing except what China wants it to do. To fix North Korea you have to make it painful for China which we, for a variety of reasons, won't do. Therefore there is no fix.
The Wikileakers claim to promote the politics of peace and moderation. But this latest dump could very easily have the opposite effect, by giving the absolutists a chance to spread their stereotypes and illusions of a black and white world.
Well yes, the progressive absolutists could do just that.
Heather Hurlburt is the executive director of the National Security Network.
Posted by:Steve White

#7  The only bad, evil people are Rethuglicans. Ev'ryone knows that ...
Posted by: Steve White   2010-12-01 15:58  

#6  M. Murcek (#4) excellent point. The left denies this condition to a pathological extent as it just cannot fit their model. One has to look at how the Iranian regime laughs at O's overtures to see the extent. It would be funny if it were not so dangerous.
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2010-12-01 14:57  

#5  fear of publication will only prevent people from voicing frank and honest opinions, assessments and recommendations

You mean the Soddy king will have to think twice before asking us to do his fighting for him?
Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305   2010-12-01 14:23  

#4  The acknowledgement that there are bad people with evil designs (who are not Americans) is a dagger to the heart of the leftist outlook of geopolitics.
Posted by: M. Murcek   2010-12-01 10:48  

#3  The so-called Progressive pipe dream does not match the reality. It is a nasty world out there, with nasty people and governments. that is the reality. Even without wikileaks, the world can see how weak, valueless, and indecisive the O admin is. The truth, like a bubble in linoleum patiently wants to get out, and eventually will.
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2010-12-01 10:35  

#2  I think Hurlburt is trying to fool herself.

The wikileaks make a 'progressive' foreign policy difficult because they reveal the truth, e.g., Iran sending aid to terrorists outside the country, Arab leaders desperate to have Iran nuked, that the Turkish Islamist Prez is actually into Islamic supremacy.

All these facts undermine the entire premise of the Obama (progressive) foreign policy.
Posted by: Lord Garth   2010-12-01 10:24  

#1  So, the ruling elite is upset because what's exposed is how the general opinions held by the unwashed masses were usually correct in assessment, just inconvenient in playing games because they let others set the tone by which its all done. Cause in the end, it's all about face not fact, show not reality, for their esteem and self worth.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2010-12-01 10:19  

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