But the disclosures are not just interesting; they are also ironic. That’s because they undermine the very worldview that Julian Assange and his colleagues at Wikileaks almost certainly support.
By and large, the hard left in America and around the world would prefer to see the peaceful resolution of disputes rather than the use of military force. World peace, however, is a lot harder to achieve if the U.S. State Department is cut off at the knees. And that is exactly what this mass revelation of documents is going to do. The essential tool of State Department diplomacy is trust between American officials and their foreign counterparts. Unlike the Pentagon which has military forces, or the Treasury Department which has financial tools, the State Department functions mainly by winning the trust of foreign officials, sharing information, and persuading. Those discussions have to be confidential to be successful. Destroying confidentiality means destroying diplomacy.
We can see that on Venezuela. For all of his paranoia there is no conclusive evidence that the US is actively working at unseating Chavez. All that is published so far reveals an embassy that does not know much more than what this blogger does. Containment is the word, Chavez is only a nuisance. An annoying one for sure, a potentially dangerous one for sure, but for the time being he ranks way below Iran, the FARC inside Colombia, etc, etc....
I also cannot resist this other excerpt:
There’s another irony here, too. The Wikileaks document dump, unlike the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, shows that American private communication with foreign leaders by and large reflects the same sentiments offered by U.S. officials in public. There is no grand conspiracy, no grand hypocrisy to uncover and expose. The big hypocrisies here are not being perpetrated by Americans; they are being perpetrated by foreign governments, namely non-democratic ones.
Of course in the twisted mind of Chavez and his main sycophants it is enough for you not to praise to high heavens Chavez to become suspect of conspiracy. But for the "hard left"? The assholes like Calvin Tucker who dared to come here to threaten me with judicial action? Where are they today after the wikileak fiasco and its consequences for the world peace process? Sure, eventually a couple of real damaging cables will be unearthed, but the price to pay for it, the slowing down of diplomacy at a time of great tensions (North Korea, Iran anyone?) was certainly not worth the leaks.
At least on one side it is now clear that Assange reputation is toast and that even some of the earlier interesting work on Iraq war violence will be questioned. A case of overreach if any!