Leak Out

The WikiLeaks revelations that surfaced last week have been more comical than critical. Despite a lot of hair-tearing over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's dumping of highly classified diplomatic documents, there's really nothing in these documents, at least as far as I can see, that is really news, except for maybe the revelation out of the Middle East - that the Arab countries and Israel agree on the need to contain Iran, and that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (not to be confused with King Abdullah II of Jordan) has even advocated some form of military action against Iran because of its nuclear program. At best, it suggests that the Israelis and the Arabs could become brothers in arms; at the least, it suggests a possible short-term alliance of convenience ("The enemy of my enemy is my friend"), though our own anti-Iranian alliance with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s didn't work out so well.

Most of the "revelations"" have been laughable. Among them are that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is an "emperor with no clothes" (a similar revelation of Charles de Gaulle in the sixties would probably have been more newsworthy), Prime Minister Slvio Berlusconi of Italy is "feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader" (your point being?), and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev "plays Robin to [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin's Batman." This last revelation is actually very damaging - not to our relationship with the Russians but, rather, to American diplomats, because it shows that they are so undereducated and unsophisticated that they use comic book metaphors to describe foreign leaders. The Russians probably have low opinions of us, yes, but they likely describe Obama and Biden with allusions to the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The revelation that Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, was a "weak personality" who was "driven by paranoia" and "conspiracy theories," may give anti-war activists a stronger argument in their efforts to get NATO troops out of that country and encourage new ways to resist al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It also might give Ben Kingsley a fascinating challenge as an actor if that movie about the war on terror in which he's supposed to play Karzai is ever made. But even this revelation is nothing new, as anyone who's been paying attention would tell you after seeing Karzai govern.

And Julian Assange? He's just been arrested on rape charges in London based on a pair of secual encounters in Sweden. Meanwhile, many Web sites have stopped doing business with WikiLeaks, while unsympathetic hackers try to disable the site even as Assange's supporters try to help keep it going. This story is getting stranger by the second.