12/14/10
Blame Bill Gates for Julian Assange David Rieff
The childish panic that has swept the policy establishment over the past few weeks over the Wikileaks revelations themselves will soon subside. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s sensible remark that “[g]overnments deal with the United States because it's in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets,” is worth a boatload of apocalyptic prognostications on the order of Michael Cohen from Democracy Arsenal insisting that Wikileaks has “fundamentally undermined US national security and effective US diplomacy.”), or Joe Klein in Time claiming that, “This entire, anarchic exercise in ‘freedom’ stands as a human disaster.”The frenzy was unwarranted from the start. Secretary Gates could express his confidence that the long-term effects would actually be “fairly modest,” at least in part because the ‘revelations’ contained in the Wikileaks document dumps mostly confirmed things that were at least long suspected. For example, many supporters of the Israeli government’s alarmed (or alarmist, depending on your point of view) position on stopping the Iranian nuclear program, if necessary by force, have been saying for some time that it was a view shared by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council. They were right. And while it may be satisfying to have the details of Washington’s anxieties over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal, China’s inability to bring North Korea to heel, or the Yemeni president’s willingness to collaborate with U.S. anti-terrorist operations in his country, the broad outlines of all three of these stories were already largely public knowledge—at least among specialists.
