By now you’ve probably either seen or read something about the massive dump of classified US diplomatic communications by WikiLeaks. The rogue organization secretly obtained over 250,000 cables, memos, and other raw field communications written mostly by US State Department officials over the past three years. The New York Times and several other worldwide news outlets published excerpts of the documents on Sunday. A disgruntled State Department worker is suspected to be behind the leak.
As can be expected based on the nature of the documents, they contain candid, unedited observations and opinions as well as unverified and speculative reports from field operatives. According to The Politico, “Some of the material was so explosive that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent much of the past week preparing foreign leaders for the fallout — what the Guardian described as a “meltdown” of the U.S. diplomatic corps.”
Der Spiegel wrote, “Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information … Never before has the trust America’s partners have in the country been as badly shaken.”
Glenn Reynolds asked, “Is this what they meant when they were promising us “smart diplomacy?”
Robert Stacy McCain observed, “…am I the only one who has noticed that WikiLeaks didn’t seem to have unfettered access to America’s top secrets until the Obama administration came to town?”
Perhaps the best description of the WikiLeaks dump came from a senior American diplomat, quoted by The Politico: “I don’t see the world ending … but lots of red, sputtering faces in D.C., embassies and capitals … various and sundry interest groups will cherry-pick whatever can be found in the documents to support whatever version of reality they are peddling.”
As far as my version of reality goes, I found it most interesting that the leaked documents confirmed that North Korea managed to smuggle 19 Soviet-designed ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear payloads to the Iranians. Silly me, I thought the Iranian nuclear program was solely for peaceful purposes — energy production and so forth.
It is entirely possible that the Obama administration’s limp-wristed treatment of aggressor nations could result in a frightening amount of nuclear proliferation over a very short time span, perhaps only a few years. Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez recently wrote, “The collapse of the American security guarantee would mean the only way to guarantee security would be to rely on one’s own deterrent capability rather than rely on the word of Barack Hussein Obama.” Wealthy, technologically advanced nations such as South Korea or Japan could very easily construct nuclear weapons and integrate them into missile-based weapons delivery systems.
For those of you who cannot understand how advancing a “peace” agenda can actually lead to warfare, this is how it is done. You may now return to your own version of reality.
