Why Wikileaks Is Bad for Progressive Foreign Policy

[rayofreason]

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.


http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/79483/wikileaks-round-iii-will-it-matter-much?utm_source=Editors+and+Bloggers&utm_campaign=b68ae6152a-Edit_and_Blogs&utm_medium=email

[gsosbee]

1. usa-the assassins' nation

usa-the assassins' nation
------------------------
usa- the assassins' nation seeks to divide & conquer all nations and all peoples.

Regarding the leaks,

Well, USA-if you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear from the
T R U T H.
Be Set Free by admitting to ongoing & insufferable crimes against
H U M A N I T Y .

http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/part4-worldinabo.html

questions!
GERAL SOSBEE(956)536-3103

[jpgray]

2. Absent the leaks, would foreign policy be more progressive?

Or would it be moving in the same direction, with the major difference being less is publicly known about it? I'm unconvinced Wikileaks will spawn a major change in policy, for good or for ill.

[JackRiddler]

3. More spin and bullshit based on 1/1000th of the cables

First of all, I wish people would stop saying the cables have been released to the public.

It is true that prior to this "leak," they were available to somewhere between 600,000 and 3 million government employees, including Private Manning, so you can be pretty sure all the major foreign intel agencies got access to this data base long ago. So did the national security and military castes, to whom we the people willingly handed over most of our sovereignty decades ago.

These cables were classified only to the public: The 99 percent of people who often think they have a democracy, even though they're not allowed to know what the actual secret policies of their government are, so how are they supposed to vote on anything? Their government (like most of the rest of them, as these cables are revealing, and it's no excuse) say one thing to the public and often do the opposite thing in secret.

But even now, the cables have NOT been released to the public. Fewer than 300 of 251,000 were available while wikileaks.org was still up, and the site has been down all day.

The rest of this story so far is almost all spoon-fed spin from the big news organs who got a first crack at the full store of cables, and who have cherrypicked whatever stories suited them. The NY Times said they planned to publish all of 100 cables!

What isn't spoon-fed spin is just bullshit, like the OP article, an opinion based on no source except the spoon-fed material. These aren't the first "progressives" who even after watching the state wage aggressive wars still want to apologize for it and put their faith in its foreign policy. Fuck'em.

There is no changing this system from within. There's no changing it with violence, either: under present conditions that only strengthens the state. The only question is whether a non-violent way to transform it will be found, or whether it will continue business as usual until, like all empires, it falls off a cliff of its own making.

[Better Believe It]

4. Do you consider the foreign policy in Iraq/Pakistan/Afghanistan to be progressive?

How so?

[JackRiddler]

5. Serfs like us just need to wait for the adults to work out all solutions by diplomacy.

Please don't pretend you have a right to know or could ever understand the terribly complex issues of being the Emperor of the World.