Nothing important or new in released cables? What about this?

http://www.juancole.com/2010/11/wikileaks-gates-no-iranian-help-to-taliban.html

American official lying about connections of between "rogue, part of axis of evil state" and terrorist group. Hmmm, where have I seen this before? Oh yes, Iraq and Al-Qaeda and that went really well last time, we let such statements pass without scrutiny.

cue the utterly typical pundit cycle. pundit 1 says the leak is no big deal. pundit 2 says the leak is a big deal. repeat... for my part, drezner and others in the "nothing to see here folks, move on" camp miss several important aspects of the leak. first, even if there are no revelations of big lies, there are revelations of lots of little lies (or at least of dissimulations and red herrings). at some point the web of deceit, even if spun of slender strands, begins to look ugly. second, not everybody in the US (much less the rest of the world) reads/watches the IR news obsessively, so at the very least this brings back into consciousness a world of diplomatic warts that people otherwise gloss over. third--and i guess drezner and others of his ilk don't think that the rest of the world is literate, and thus don't care--some foreign populations might consider much of this to be revelatory (e.g. yemen, bahrain, or saudi arabia). maybe they won't have to explain to their populations why they asked the US to bomb Iran, but, if they do, it could be uncomfortable. fourth, again, even if there is nothing new in the leaks, they do CONFIRM a lot of what in other reporting is innuendo or rumor (often because the reporters outing the stories have to use confidential sources). as for foreign populations (especially allied populations), they will have (again) CONFIRMATION (directly from the donkey's mouth) that US foreign policy statements for public consumption are mostly BS. that probably won't help the US's image in a bunch of countries... i could go on, but that' enough for now.

I nevcer said there wasn't interesting information contained in the Wikileaks documents -- clearly there's much of interest.  My point, however, is that the issues of interest do not exactly conform to what the people at Wikileaks think they are.  

Hate to be nit-picky, but I noticed this from Richmason:

1) Few Americans follow "the IR news obsessively, so at the very least this brings back into consciousness a world of diplomatic warts that people otherwise gloss over."

2)"i guess drezner and others of his ilk don't think that the rest of the world is literate, and thus don't care--some foreign populations might consider much of this to be revelatory (e.g. yemen, bahrain, or saudi arabia). maybe they won't have to explain to their populations why they asked the US to bomb Iran, but, if they do, it could be uncomfortable."

Hmm, Americans don't pay attention except to the broad details, but citizens/subjects in Arab regimes will a) have access to this material and b) hold their leaders accountable with the specific information they have gained. It sounds like you are ultimately agreeing with Drezner: things might get "uncomfortable," but not really that much since most people either already suspected a lot of this information or they just don't follow international issues closely enough to get upset about anything but the ephemeral broad strokes.

you wrote:

"If this kind of official hypocrisy is really the good stuff, then there is no really good stuff. U.S. officials don't always perfectly advocate for human rights? Not even the most naive human rights activist would believe otherwise. American diplomats are advancing U.S. commercial interests? American officials have been doing that since the beginning of the Republic. American diplomats help out their friends? Yeah, that's called being human."

er, you give a list of head slapping, no-shit-sherlock obviousosities (US's human rights record is impure, US diplomats advance national interests, friends helping friends is human nature) that, in your opinion, are the substance of the revelations. and you start the paragraph with a disjunction hypothesizing that "there is no really good stuff." maybe i too am an illiterate on the arab street, but this certainly seems to smack of "nothing to see here folks, move on." yeah yeah yeah, in a few other spots you hedge that maybe there's some fire in all the smoke--but in that case it seems to me like you're talking out of both sides of your mouth...

btw, i really appreciate that you reply to comments. moreover, as a general rule i like what you write. i'm not wildly enthusiastic about this post, but, hey, one weak sister out of 20 ain't bad.

i live in a hotspot (very hot, hint hint) east asian country, and the press here has picked up the wikileak both in english and the local language. so, if my experience is representative, i think a lot of the relevant juicy bits will make their way into the consciousness of people all over the world (from the arab street to south america to asia). assange and co. intentionally passed the information on to non-american media in multiple languages (lemonde=hello francophone africa; el pais=hello south/central america; spiegel=hello... Cameroon, Namibia??). as for the mid-east, al jazeera and its competitors will disseminate the relevant content (in fact, i'm watching al jazeera english discuss it as i write this sentence, and btw Russia Today, another channel to which i occasionally flip has also reported extensively on the wikileak)... now, will the leaks make life difficult for the ruling class of authoritarian regimes? who knows, but it's not like the arab street isn't already pretty damn politicized....

I worked as an editor at some major papers for nearly 30 years. I would say that about 9 times out of 10 when our correspondents, either in Washington or overseas, would get beat on a story -- by a wire service or reporters from other papers -- they would dismiss it in the same way: "Oh, that doesn't amount to anything. Nothing new here. I wrote this months ago!" Or some minor variation on those.

So Dan Drezner's comments are lamentably familiar. True, there's a lot of stuff in this latest Wikileaks batch, some of it unsurprising or only moderately interesting. But there's also some truly damning and exquisitely embarrassing stuff, just sitting there waiting for journalists to do their job, rather than whine (see above graf).

For one thing, we learn that the U.S. was hip deep in trying to corrupt legal procedures in Spain, an ally. This alone should get us tossed out of the community of civilized nations. It is utterly putrid behavior, the kind of thing some crappy little totalitarian backwater might try to pull, not the most powerful, self-congratulating and self-righteous nation on Earth. But, heck, I guess we're not supposed to notice this.

And there are other elements -- like the Maxwell Smart-like attempts to gather biodata at the UN -- that are just flat-out embarrassing. Look at it this way. You may say unflattering things about acquaintances behind their backs. But if you're caught or the comments are posted on YouTube, you're screwed. And rightly so.

Same here.

I'd click "like"

Just clarifying - I'd click "like" to Rich Mason's comments.

The Don Draper character rejects virtue in the Byronic tradition of the anti-hero with a post-modern dash; he lacks the convictions to consistently reject virtue. He is incapable of maintaining any beliefs beyond those required to maintain a shell of a persona. Which brings me back to this new round of wikileak-ed cables by offering this question: “Doesn’t Mr. Assange understand a bureaucracy, especially one the size of the US Gov’t, cannot feel shame, let alone the shame necessary for a hare-brained blackmail scheme?” If anything, these diplomatic cables expose a level of core competency I [incorrectly] assumed did not exist at Foggy Bottom. These documents show individual men and women actually doing their job, watching the frontier gates, keeping the Visigoths in the wilderness. But how does Mr. Assange expect a little truth-to-power, honesty-in-the-mirror, tough-love to transform US policy into a Swedish cuddle-fest he apparently admires. It is child-like magical thinking.

I think Assange is regretting any cuddle fests he may have had in Sweden..

Dan Draper is shown to be the consummate realist. He certainly comes off much better in that scene than the Assangian beatnicks who were trying to bait him...and who can't stomach the real world. Actually, not a bad image for a diplomat.

Nice post by Lazlo, by the way.

...maybe Sweden? The country that wants him for rape?

The alleged crimes of Mr. Assange have nothing to do with the matter at hand. We do not know whether he is guilty or innocent and therefore we should exclude that matter from the debate.

I did read the Wikileaks site, which was why I found their preamble so out of touch with the reality of the documents themselves.   

...or, rather, you're redirecting off the main point, which you refused to respond to: Big Lies would not be classified SECRET.

SECRET is something millions of people have access to, home and abroad. Soldiers in IRAQ have access to SIPRNET and stuff tagged SECRET (for why, read the cable about the 90 year old Iranian-American who smuggled himself out of Iran after they confiscated his passport to try and influence his brothers, who were supporting musicians the Iranian regime didn't like. One of his options was "get to Iraq, find a US soldier before any Iraqis do." An embassy knew he was trying, and sent out an alert about it.)

SIPDIS means the sender WANTS the information SHARED across all the embassies AND the entire intelligence community.

Wikileaks and most of the news agencies have all clearly pointed out that there won't be any and-the-earth-stops-spinning stories out of this (at least not directly) because stuff that would be....would be compartmentalized, classified to higher levels, and certainly not tagged SIPDIS. AND that only a portion of the cables are classified SECRET, and even fewer are classfied NOFORN (not to be shared with foreign governments.)

It is completely illogical to draw any conclusions about how clandestine the US is, or how much it "lies", based off an obviously filtered dataset. All we can do is draw partial conclusions about how competent US diplomatic and espionage staff have been about correctly classifying information.

lying, trashing and hypocracy? we hear it everyday in the hallowed confines of Congress whenever a Republican holds forth appealling to his basest of bases. Lies damned lies and duplimacy

Both AlexBC and Prof. Drezner are missing a simple and documented motivation for Julian Assange, and probably Wikileaks as a whole, to provide leaks in general and massive dumps of information in particular:

To make it harder for government organizations to operate.

In 2006, Assange wrote a series of small missives explaining his view of "authoritarian regimes" as essentially a network of individual actors connected by communication channels, and stating his mission to disrupt those communication channels. One of the documents is available here, along with its rough draft: http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

Under Assange's model, disrupting communication among individuals in a network makes it harder for the network to coordinate, to adapt, etc. Dumping large volumes of previously private communication means that, in the future, less information will probably go through those channels and have to move through more in-efficient channels or be abandoned altogether. This accomplishes Assange's goal of making it harder for the "authoritarian regimes" to operate.

When Prof. Drezner points out that these leaks will lead to less information sharing among different government entities, that's exactly what Assange wants. AlexBC's rant is embarrassing not for its tone (well, not primarily) but because it displays little comprehension of what its target may be trying to do.

Prof. Drezner has consistently mocked Wikileaks' stated motivations as if that's all they are trying to accomplish. It's entirely possible that Wikileaks' actual goals are not outlined in their mission statement; certainly, an organization which has shown as much technical and media nimbleness as Wikileaks would not shoot itself in the foot by openly declaring their intentions to disrupt US government operations as their primary goal.

Whether making it harder for the government to operate is the goal of other members of Wikileaks besides Assange is anyone's guess, although it's hard to see why anyone would work for a man whose stated goals match so well with Wikileaks' current strategy if one disagreed with those goals.

I responded partially in the other comment below, but still: understanding whether WikiLeaks is actually fulfilling its explicit goal of gumming up the works of "authoritarian regimes" has nothing to do with evaluating the sensibility or morality of said goal. WikiLeaks' preamble to their documents are remarkably tone-deaf to the content that follows: the rants are, as Prof. Drezner points out, adherent to a brand of utopian politics that the leaks themselves do not bear out. The first paragraph that Drezner excerpts from WikiLeaks is absurd:

"The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states"; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them."

It displays an almost childlike sense of betrayal at the shock that countries, have spies, engage in corruption, and promote business interests. A mere Google search or scan of a daily newspaper could tell you all of that. If the basic thrust of this information already so inundates media coverage, then why does WikiLeaks go to such lengths to act as if it a trailblazer in this regard? It comes off more as grandstanding than whistle-blowing.

And then paragraph two:

"This document release reveals the contradictions between the US's public persona and what it says behind closed doors -- and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what's going on behind the scenes."

The cables confirm, among other things, the US's repeatedly stated position on Iran. If their is such a huge contradiction between public and private personae, the documents following the preamble do little work to elucidate it. Furthermore, the labeling of the US as a "democracy" here clashes with your explication about WikiLeaks' approach to "authoritarians." The fact that these documents are so accessible, and that they fail to demonstrate said dramatic "contradictions," demolishes any potential critique of the US as a fundamentally authoritarian regime; if WikiLeaks is indeed motivated by its desire to make the governments of authoritarian regimes inoperable, it could have chosen a much riper target.

The last paragraph

"Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington "the country's first President" could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today's document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments -- even the most corrupt -- around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures."

is as embarrassing as you allege my "rant" is for me. The mention of "even the most corrupt" is particularly embarrassing, since it highlights WikiLeaks' own reluctance to go after said governments, in favor of tackling a transparent democracy. The US response is hardly as panicked as WikiLeaks makes it out to be; compare it, for example, to China's reaction to the Nobel, or Russia's reaction to any journalist who opposes the state.

The common analysis of WikiLeaks is that there is more to it than meets the eye, whether in regard to its motives or what it actually leaks; but there may actually be less.

I agree with both you and Prof. Drezner that the excerpted statements from the Wikileaks website are facile. (I would go further and say that the George Washington comment is worse than anything you wrote in this regard). The statements reflect poorly thought-out goals for what Wikileaks is trying to do.

However, this is irrelevant if they do not reflect Wikileaks' actual goals.

Prof. Drezner criticized the Wikileaks statements as Utopian goals. You criticized the statements for having a child-like sense of betrayal, and for hyping small differences between public and private differences into huge contradictions. These things are true. They would be relevant if Wikileaks were trying to achieve those Utopian goals, trying to instill a sense of betrayal in others, or getting people to believe the huge contradictions.

If, however, Wikileaks' primary goal is to disrupt the normal functioning of the US government, then the statements on their website are misguided attempts at PR, or distractions, or something else equally mundane. Criticizing Wikileaks for the statements, then, is not criticizing their core mission as you and Prof. Drezner believe but criticizing them for, at worst, bad PR.

I respond to additional points you bring up in the post below.

I think you have outlined Wikileaks amazing hubris and its inevitable complete failure quite well. Wikileaks will never make 'authoritarian' governments more open, for the simple reason that the only country Wikileaks has an agenda with is the US, an open society by anyone's standard. Inevitably, Wikileaks will result in an open society becoming less so, as diplomats and intelligence gathers become more circumspect and secretive, in order to ensure that important materials aren't exposed to 20-year old non-commissioned misfits who might leak them for a fee. So an open society becomes a bit more closed. That result could not have been achieved more efficiently had that been Assange's original intention (although, it gives Assange a little to much credit to ascribe a philosophy to what he does - he is simply a purile attention seeker, which is why even mildly anti-American types are already tiring of his act).

You are using "authoritarian regime" as a scholar in IR would use it: as designating a regime with certain agreed-upon characteristics, such as suppression of rights, lack of popular input into governance, etc.

If you had read the link I provided, you would have seen that Assange uses "authoritarian regime" in a different manner. This is why I placed the term in quotes in my original post. Assange uses it to designate governments which engage in "bad governance", which he defines as committing "unjust acts". So, in Assange's terminology, a "state committing unjust acts" is the same as a "state engaging in bad governance" is the same as an "authoritarian regime". This does not imply that the state is run by a cabal or sinister group, only that the policy outcomes of the state result in unjust acts.

You may think that the US is not an "authoritarian regime" in the sense that Assange uses the term. Assange clearly does. He has made repeated statements calling US actions unjust. Wikileaks' most famous release is a video titled "Collateral Murder", a title he chose. Etc.

Why does Wikileaks focus on the US? Only Assange and other Wikileaks employees can answer, but there are several obvious guesses. He and Wikileaks may have made a decision that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars outweigh other concerns and have chosen to
spend finite resources trying to slow the government that is responsible for them.

Whatever the reason, it's obvious that Assange, at least, considers the US an "authoritarian regime" under his definition of the term, that he considers it important to impede the action of such regimes, and that Wikileaks policy will probably have the effect
of impeding US action as Prof. Drezner has pointed out.

This is why it seems important to bring up Assange's stated motivations. Most commentary I've seen has not taken them into account. If the Wikileaks organization is to be properly analyzed, determining its primary motivation is important.

That was my motivation in commenting on Prof. Drezner's and your comments. Neither seemed to take into account Assange's stated motivations. In your original post, only the sentences "In typical punk rock fashion, in fact, WikiLeaks has professed its desire to 'crush bastards.' Odd, then, how all 'bastards' reside in Washington, D.C. and/or are employees of the US government." can be construed to be saying that Wikileaks' true goal may be disrupting the US government's operations, and if that's what you meant it's not stated very forcefully. The rest of your original post assumes different goals for Wikileaks, then mocks them or says they are not being met. "Its strategy won't lead to greater transparency", "Do we really need millions of these documents? Many of them contribute nothing other than distracting us from reading the "better" specimens; how is that productive?", "Do you need a "leaked" document to tell you that the US is not an unconditional ally of human rights?", etc.

Alex I disagree with you that Wikileaks is focused on "garden variety anti-americanism." Its certainly part of the equation, but I'd actually consider it a secondary consideration.

What's missing from a large part of the commentary is a discussion of Assange's technical background: he's an activist programmer. Now, I don't really claim to have an private insight into Assange, but I work in foreign affairs and moonlight in a major open source program during the evenings. I'd like to share my insight into the divide between "the two cultures," so to speak.

In reality, open source programming is not a culture that many people have daily contact with, so I'm not surprised that few people have picked up on how it might have influenced Assange views. In my view he is a prototypical of open information culture that has emerged in programming circles. Its related to the original "hacking culture," when it possessed a deep social element and not maliciousness that it has been associated with since.

The people in the open source programming are some of the technically brilliant people you'll meet, and I get the sense that Assange is in that category. However many view the world in a shockingly simplistic manner, in which there is no nuance or flexibility. They see it based on a small set of preconceptions or rules, which they apply to all situations. Thus the complex dynamics of the international relations or even social relations are difficult to comprehend. They don't easily understand why people have different views or motivations, its all black and white to them.

Many are of these activists are fixated on a narrowly defined concept of legality or justice... however its often a very poor or skewed understanding of law itself. And most importantly, there is an almost unshakable belief that if the world became more "free and open," its evils would disappear. They believe they have the one answer for all that ills. I'd argue it is a pure marxist construction (that its almost libertarian), but I'm not familiar enough with its past to say that there is a direct influence or it was assimilation by osmosis. Its has a major normative aspect to it.

Going back to my above point about "right and wrong" they can't understand why the government needs to keep secrets. Instead they believe its a way for the crooks and liars to keep themselves in power. Anti-Americanism and a dash of conspiracy theory permeates through this culture, but its quite unique from other groups with these views in how it affects individuals world view and behavior.

I get the sense that Assange represents many of these views taken to their ultimate and extreme ends. He is an individual who is a true believer in the "free information society," and has the tools (the leaked documents) to carry it out. What alot of people have labeled arrogance is in my mind just a reflection of his unshakable belief in his cause.

I know that I've provided a bit of a caricature of these activists, and in reality most are far more reasonable and flexible. However Assange to me is really is the prototypical individual of this culture, which makes it worthwhile to identify its major cultural features.