Wiki-explosion!

Should anyone be surprised, for example, that Arab leaders have privately and repeatedly told American diplomats and officials that they would like to see the US take military action against Iran, all while they publicly say (and tell Iranians) that they are against another war in the region? Certainly not. It may embarrassing for Arab leaders to be caught exhorting the United States to attack yet another fellow Muslim country (and just how are they going to explain that to their own populations?), but Iranians have long known that many of the Arabs, deeply unpopular leaders among their own people in contrast to Iran, which enjoys a good measure of popularity among ordinary Arabs, would like nothing more than a weakened Iran and an Iran deprived of nuclear technology. Are Iranians, or indeed anyone else, surprised that Saudi King Abdullah, someone who once personally invited President Ahmadinejad to his country, would tell Americans to “cut off the head of this snake” (referring to Iran), or tell American diplomats that he once upbraided Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki, telling him to “spare us your evil”? Hardly. There is no reason to doubt the veracity of the cables, but plenty of reason to doubt whether what King Abdullah told the Americans is actually what he said to the Iranian foreign minister. Apart from questioning whether a Saudi king, someone who rules a country (named after his family) that is apparently still the largest source of funding for al Qaeda, is in a position to proclaim what is or isn’t “evil”, surely if the Saudis are so afraid of Iran that they want it bombed by anyone but them, it is unlikely that the king would insult an Iranian minister in the manner in which he boasted he had. But what many Americans might learn from these latest Wikileaks documents about the Saudis is what most of the world already knew: with allies like these, who needs enemies? 

Taking a look at another U.S. ally, should anyone be surprised that Egyptian President Mubarak believes that Iranians are “big fat liars”? Again, no, but reading that he does has a delicious irony to it, particularly given that a poll taken in 2006 in his country, one which he has ruled for decades under a state of emergency and with regular but farcically rigged elections, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah were voted the two most popular leaders in the Muslim world by his people. No, neither Iranians nor anyone else who follows international relations will be terribly surprised by any of these latest leaks, not even by the candid assessments of foreign leaders by American diplomats, unflattering assessments that might be embarrassing when made public but are, after all, only the views of some diplomats. And U.S. officials cannot be unaware that negative views of them are, undoubtedly, reported by foreign diplomats the world over in their cables. Of course that is the key to these Wikileaks documents: much like the previous leaks about Iraq and the accusations (‘proof’ as some in the media suggested) that Iran had been supplying Iraqi insurgents with arms and IED’s, the documents mostly represent the views of American diplomats and officials, and should be read as such and not necessarily as absolute facts. That many U.S. officials believe Iran is developing nuclear weapons is certainly no secret, and that some other countries share that view shouldn’t come as a surprise to any Iranian. What is mildly surprising and perhaps damaging to American efforts to convince the world that Iran must be pressured into giving up the nuclear fuel cycle is what is missing from the cables that reference Iran and its nuclear program. For years now one argument the U.S. has made against allowing Iran a nuclear program with the full fuel cycle is that it would be a proliferation concern; that the surrounding Arab states would then insist on their very own nuclear programs that might lead to bombs all over the strategically important and volatile Middle East. But nowhere in any of the cables released so far is that an issue that is brought up by those very Arabs, not as a threat to induce the U.S. to take action against Iran, nor as a hint that that is how they are even thinking. A UAE minister and Crown Prince may have once referred to President Ahmadinejad as ‘Hitler’, King Abdullah may have thought the Iranians “cannot be trusted”, but they didn’t seem to have ever suggested that they would start developing nuclear weapons if the Iranians continue to enrich uranium.

Other than mildly surprising, but not particularly sensational other tidbits, such as the revelation that the view of the British Embassy in Tehran was that President Ahmadinejad won re-election in 2009, just not by the margin claimed, while it was the view of U.S. diplomats that he came in third in the election, based on information gathered by their ‘Iran watchers’, truly interesting revelations in the Wikileaks documents so far (from a diplomatic perspective) are that Hillary Clinton, rather than protect her diplomats, their missions, and the diplomatic apparatus as a whole, apparently has done the opposite by asking them to act as spies, and that the U.S. fully expected its engagement strategy with Iran to fail. On the matter of spying, while it is a well-known fact that all countries use diplomatic cover for their intelligence services—so well known that most countries even know which diplomats at any given embassy are actually intelligence agents and not diplomats at all—for the U.S. to order its career foreign service officers to spy on other diplomats, at the UN, for example, is an astonishing breach of protocol that can put American diplomats in danger everywhere. According to the leaked documents, American diplomats were tasked with obtaining the credit card numbers (and biometric information) of North Korean diplomats (who knew that North Korean diplomats even carry Mastercard or Visa?) Why, one wonders, would the CIA not already have all the information the State Department was looking to gather? And if it did, presumably including the information that the North Koreans do leave home without American Express, then why on earth did Mrs. Clinton also want to know, or why couldn’t she, or one of her undersecretaries, ask the CIA? On engagement with Iran, it cannot come as a surprise to the Iranian leadership that the State Department never expected engagement to succeed, which might just validate Iran’s suspicions and its behavior and attitude vis-à-vis negotiations so far, but it might be somewhat of a surprise to most Americans who have consistently either praised or criticized President Obama, depending on their political affiliation, for his “outreach” to Iran.

Hillary Clinton and other U.S. diplomats and officials may have spent the few days leading up to the Wikileaks revelations doing damage control; calling foreign leaders and explaining what was about to be exposed, hoping to mitigate any negative fallout. And in the aftermath of the leaks, the U.S. State Department has created a 24-hour crisis room to deal with repercussions. In all likelihood the damage control will be largely successful: a country that can, according to cables, bully countries like Armenia into doing its bidding but also apply heavy pressure to countries like Germany is unlikely to suffer much in the long term. Its diplomatic prestige will, however, suffer for a while, and there might be some hesitancy among foreign leaders to speak as frankly as they have with their U.S. counterparts, but the foreign policy of the U.S. will not have to adjust simply because of Wikileaks disclosures, not now nor in the future. When it comes to Iran, though, two important policy issues are raised by the Wikileaks disclosures. One, that Iranian officials have probably been right all along that the U.S. will not attack Iran under any circumstances: if the Israelis and the Arabs have been spectacularly unsuccessful in persuading two very different U.S. administrations to do so, it is hard to imagine a circumstance, short of an Iranian first-strike, that would persuade President Obama to launch a war against Iran. And two, if U.S. policy is indeed geared to failure in negotiations with Iran, then Iranian officials have been right on that front too: that the famous outstretched hand of the United States is, in fact, an iron fist in disguise. It is harder than ever to imagine where President Obama’s (or is it Hillary Clinton’s?) Iran policy will lead us.