WikiLeaks and LikiLeaks

December 14, 2010

by Umapagan Amikapaikan@www.nst.com.my

IT is the holiday season and WikiLeaks is the gift that keeps on giving. It is the tide that refuses to be stemmed. It is the bloody wound that just will not clot. It is the counterpoint to the modern high-tech security state — listening, watching, with its ubiquitous wiretaps and omnipresent CCTV cameras. It is governmental gossip girl. It is tweeted, facebooked, and blogged.

WikiLeaked. It has already become a verb. Every week brings a new disclosure. And while not always confessional, they are at least gossipy. Full of tasty tidbits and tittle-tattle, scandal and scuttlebutt, casual and unconstrained conversation.

And while the deluge of documents, of secrets, have offered plenty of open and honest evaluations, they provide little to no revelation. There is barely any news. There is very little insight into current policies and events. It is more embarrassing than incendiary. It is akin to being caught with your pants down, while having egg on your face, and being subjected to a full body scan.

 

There is nothing quite as scandalous as President George W. Bush’s approval — and eventual embrace — of torture tactics. There are no grand betrayals, or lies, or criminalities. No divulgences of secret CIA assassination attempts. Or government sanctioned coups. Nothing quite on the scale of Pinochet’s rise to power in Chile. Not yet at least.

For the most part, the leaks merely display, in black and white, what we already, sort of, kind of, know. We suspected that China hacked Google. We sized up the Italian prime minister in similar ways. We worked out who the “hound dogs” were. We figured that the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom was always more one-sided than they let on.

Are we really shocked that Singapore regards us with suspicion and even a little contempt? It is, after all, a sibling rivalry almost five decades old. Yes, it stings a little when we discovered that she’s been writing it all down in her diary. But it is a heartbreak that lasts only as long as she doesn’t discover what we’ve been writing in ours.

Are we truly surprised that the rest of the world has an opinion about the trials and tribulations of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim? (Then again, he may be somewhat shocked that said opinion does not fall in his favour.)

What the leaks do let slip, however, are the unrestrained thoughts of a business that is often characterised by reserve and moderation, by dispassion, by lack of emotion. They uncloak the true nature of diplomacy. In that they aren’t diplomatic in the least.

And therein lies the real fear. Not in the leaks having “potentially dramatic and grievously harmful consequences”. Not in the leaks aiding and abetting terrorists. But in how the diplomatic community will conduct themselves following these disclosures.

Diplomacy at this level relies on a mutual but tenuous trust that governments have with regard to being able to protect each other’s secrets. Mutually assured embarrassment is a powerful deterrent. It is naive to think that we conduct the business of international relations with anything other than self-interest as our primary motivations.

Governments are elected to put their people first. And while it isn’t in any way the utopian, even altruistic, vision we aspire to, it is, nevertheless, the reality in which we reside.

There is little doubt that the most valuable achievement of Julian Assange’s endeavour is that it has made honest the numerous conversations about transparency and openness that governments the world over are having with its people and with one another.

The concern, however, is that this rude awakening will have the opposite effect. That it will cause more caution. That it will result in even greater secrecy. Diplomatic cables will become duller. They will contain less analysis and more staid statement of fact. The spies will go quiet. Things that will undoubtedly make the work of international affairs all the more difficult.

Part of being able to make educated judgments about how a foreign government or leader will think, about how they will act, is based on an understanding and analysis of their deliberative process. It is based on frank and forthright appraisals. Truths that can only come with the ability to be unrepentantly honest and off the record. Without fear.