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Paris, December 7, 2010 – The WikiLeaks thus far published are less interesting for their content, which reveals very little that was not already obvious or predictable to anyone who follows American foreign policy and international relations, than for the motivation for collecting all this information (and gossip). Its reporting must have burdened the State Department’s communications system and clogged its analytic capacities ever since the system was established by the Bush administration to centralize information. Why is all this necessary? It obviously originated in the American government belief that for the nation to be saved from terrorist enemies it was necessary that Washington have extensive intelligence about, and with that, the possibility of control or potential control, over all possible American enemies: the hostile big nations, but especially the minor Islamic states seen as vulnerable to religious extremism, and therefore to infiltration and exploitation by terrorist movements. U.S. officials took seriously Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s theory about a forthcoming war between civilizations, irresponsible and biased as the theory was. The elaborated information-gathering system, based on traditional diplomatic note-taking and analytic reporting, provided material for intimidation or blackmail as well as the general and background information necessary to policy-making in Washington. But what policy was all this meant to serve? Initially it was President Bush’s dramatic but intellectually puerile “Global War on Terror.” It was the war in Iraq that dominated policy between 2003 and last year (and may dominate it again). Beyond that war, and the parallel Israeli-inspired preoccupation with the supposed nuclear threat from Iran, what did American policy become? The Wikileaks reveal the irrelevance in much of what was being reported by American diplomats. There was no recognizable pattern or purpose. To make use of Churchill’s famous comment on a dessert (as the American language has it) set before him to close a dinner: “this pudding has no theme.” Churchill sent it back. Today, American foreign policy can’t be sent back to be given a coherent theme. That is what the 2008 election was supposed to do -- but didn’t, as last November’s election confirmed. |
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