Daily Beast's Les Gelb on WikiLeaks

Coffee, Tea or Me, Mr. Assange?

Les Gelb takes me back in the very early '80s, when I was an FSO working in the United Nations Bureau andlooking for an onward assignment with my good friend Peter T...... who had succeeded Les as Executive Secretary of the State Dept. Les had subsequently fetched up as the head of Policy Planning and then Peter told me Les had to resign because of a "heart condition." Thiry years later, Les is still going strong and expatiating on US foreign policy goodness as revealed by the WikiLeaks that world-class butt-hole Assange spewed out onto the Internet:
Julian Assange clearly intended the State Dept. cable leaks to smear the U.S. as evil and selfish. Leslie H. Gelb on how he inadvertently proved the opposite.
T

he Wikileakers dumped a vast pile of secrets to prove that the United States was selfish, stupid and wicked–but their revelations proved just the opposite. When you remove the gossip and obvious trivia that mesmerized the press, you clearly see what the Wikileakers never expected: A United States seriously and professionally trying to solve the most dangerous problems in a frighteningly complicated world, yet lacking the power to dictate solutions. U.S. policymakers and diplomats are shown, quite accurately, doing what they are supposed to do: ferreting out critical information from foreign leaders, searching for paths to common action, and struggling with the right amount of pressure to apply on allies and adversaries. And in most cases, the villain is not Washington, but foreign leaders escaping common action with cowardice and hypocrisy.

After an obligatory rant on the hypocrisy and silliness of the narcissistic streaker Assange, another fellow trying to demonstrate what a lover of world peace he is by sowing discord, Les goes on to demonstrate that indeed, the WikiLeak data dump show the US to be relatively a Fr. Damien among the [moral] lepers of the UNGA and Security Council.

And as a cautioning note, don't believe any of the posers like Putin who do the French colonel in Casablanca about gambling in Rick's upstairs rooms, because Putin is the biggest hypocrite among our putative allies. And from the leaks, we can see that in many respects, China [yes, that PRC Commie holdover from the 20th c. that the lamestream media like Tom Friedman gush over on a daily basis] are still our enemies, in all sorts of dangerous ways. Here's more of Assange's dirty work & US highmindedness:

• Washington needs China’s help in bolstering sanctions against Iran, and China balks for fear of jeopardizing its oil and gas flow from that country. The Obama team arranges for Saudi Arabia to guarantee any loss in supply to China. If the world wants to slow or even prevent Iran’s march to nuclear weaponry, this is a key path to doing so.
• The U.S. discovers that North Korea has manufactured new medium-range missiles and is trying to deliver them to Iran through China. The Obama team discovers this, informs Beijing, and asks Beijing to stop the transfer. Beijing declines. Really creepy.
• Yemen’s leader takes public responsibility for American missile attacks against Al Qaeda in Yemen. He wants to diminish the power of these terrorists, as do Americans and most others in the world. The “lie” by the Yemeni president is a harmless way to get a critical job done–that is, the job of fighting international terrorism. Wikileaks tears away the political cover of Yemen’s leaders.

When you actually read the cables, here’s what you see: American leaders and American diplomats trying to solve crucial world problems. And miscreants and malefactors like the People's Republic of China, the NorK starvation workers' paradise and the Iranian Islamic Republic are all part of a new Axis of Evil---with Syria remaining a nasty little protuberance on said Axis.

• No country has anywhere near as much influence over nutty North Korea as China. So, U.S. diplomats are searching desperately to figure out Chinese thinking about North Korea in order to compose a plan for avoiding war on the Korean Peninsula. So, the Wikileakers expose some Chinese leaders who are actually trying to give us some insight into Chinese thinking about North Korean craziness. They won’t do that again soon.
Time and again, as one actually reads these cables, one has to be heartened by the professionalism and the insights of U.S. diplomats. What are they doing? They are not lying, and U.S. leaders are not lying. They are actually, believe it or not, trying to solve problems. That seriousness of purpose and the professionalism to execute it is what jumps out at you in these materials.

Gelb says that Clinton might also show, if she cared to, how underhanded the Arabs remain in the dissonance between private and public attitudes they share with US diplomats---this happened to me often in the three-plus years I was Political/Military Officer in Saudi Arabia and Yemen plus the three years as internal political affairs officer [along with Legal Affairs Officer and dean of the Embassy staff plus the only American who spoke Arabic on the Embassy staff. The Saudis make public pronouncements and tell us privately what they really think---and from reading thousands of State cables from overseas, this is normal. Anyone who thinks the Saudis or French or Russians are scandalized by US frankness in its cables is naive to the point of being an ultra-left wing schlub. But Gelb says it better:

None of this is to say that there should not be leaks, or that the press should not pursue classified information that is necessary or very helpful to a sensible public debate on policy. If a U.S. administration is lying, or distorting the facts, or telling one story to the public and another to itself, then by all means, let’s have it out in public. If the U.S. government is concocting intelligence in order to justify wars, let’s hope an enterprising reporter finds it out for the rest of us.
But the Wikileaks dump is not about providing essential information to Americans or to others–information they need for serious policy discussion. This massive trashing by Wikileaks of a legitimate effort by the U.S. government to preserve confidentiality is the very least a shame and at the most, a crime.

The very last observation may be premature, as WikiLeaks may be holding back some of the juiciest morsels of diplomatic bad faith and malpractice. But the other country in the leaks which appears almost favorable in its lack of being caught with hands in a metaphorical cooke jar is Israel.

Just goes to show just how distorted the lamestream MSM has our policy in the Middle East region due to pressures having to do with Arab perfidy and violent brutality rather than any evil deeds on the part of Israel. Palin was right: the MSM is a lamestream collection of cowards and dildos, fit only for the gossip pages and second-rate scribbling.