WikiLeaks and the putrefaction of US power

The leaks of US diplomatic cables by the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks are a reflection of the sense of helplessness experienced by a fading superpower as it watches power slipping from its grasp, says Jeremy Seabrook.

THERE has always been a discrepancy between what the United States enunciates as its high principles in the world - transparency, freedom of speech and individual liberty - and actions which frequently contradict them. The WikiLeaks revelations of secret ambassadorial cables demonstrate a more telling discrepancy, namely between what the United States says and what it actually means. This is a fateful distinction, because actions can always be said to have been overtaken by events, to have resulted from a failure in communications, whereas assessments, judgments and opinions expressed in secret cables offer up candid communications which cannot be argued away.

The current avalanche of diplomatic indiscretions has a confessional quality, the ebbing stream of consciousness of a fading superpower which observes a world in the process of slipping from the iron control it managed to maintain when it could still present itself as the bastion of freedom against the evil empire of communism.

Something of the confusion of America appears in the responses of politicians and the corporate media to the WikiLeaks disclosures. Responses veer from 'they tell us nothing new', 'it is all tittle-tattle' to 'they put lives - especially American lives - in danger', they represent 'a betrayal', they have 'compromised' American diplomacy. Newt Gingrich called for Julian Assange to be denominated an 'enemy combatant' (echoes of Guantanamo), while Sarah Palin, the huntress Diana of American politics, suggested he be 'hunted down like bin Laden'. Others demanded WikiLeaks be declared 'a terrorist organisation'. Some suggested  its leader be 'taken out' or 'assassinated'; among the advocates of this helpful expedient was an adviser to the Prime Minister of Canada, whose novel recommendations in defence of democracy must surely have earned him the respect of all right-thinking people in the world.

Now it is true that much of what has been disclosed was already known, albeit deniably, hazily, unattributably. What had been experienced in the world as a slightly unpleasant odour around America's decline has become sharper to the senses: it is the unmistakeable smell of the putrefaction of power. We in Britain are in a unique position to recognise it, since this was our fate only the day before yesterday, when our empire also slipped away, as all mouldering empires must.

Media channels bypassed

The real crime of WikiLeaks is not to have endangered personnel, or to have given comfort to the enemies of the USA, but to have demonstrated the often absurd interpretations of the world by America's ambassadors of the sites to which they have been posted. Some, of course, it should also be said, are marvels of insight and candour, expressing the way things are. But generally, WikiLeaks has disturbed the serene and stately process whereby things become known in the USA and other allegedly 'mature' democracies. Events first have to be sifted through the ideological filter of the great media conglomerates before they become officially objects of discussion or dispute; the gate-keepers of acceptable ideas, the opinion-formers and shapers of admissible views must first sanctify whatever happens before they gain certification as facts.

A spectacular bypassing of official channels has already become part and parcel of the myriad alternative outlets of the new media; but since these are so idiosyncratic, varied and contradictory, they more or less cancel each other out. People have been able to believe what they wanted to believe, and find their views reinforced by the Internet locations they select, in order to find confirmation of their prejudices - whether Obama is a Muslim, or if aliens rule the USA or whether liberal cabals are planning a Communist takeover of America by such subversive practices as bailing out banks or providing health care for the most destitute.

All this has been marginalised by the clarity of the official cables, which have simply expressed the true nature of the tutelary prerogative with which the USA regards the rest of a world from an understanding of which it is increasingly estranged; and this despite the prodigious resources it expends on buying in 'intelligence', and its annual harvesting of global brainpower, its cull of the cleverest on the planet for its academies and think-tanks.

Vindictiveness

Since 9/11 there has been a - perhaps understandable - increase in secrecy, a greater protection of 'information' not to be shared with the people, those putative beneficiaries of the values the US preaches to the world. It has not been lost on the recipients of these lessons that efforts by some authoritarian Third World regimes to stifle information, to censor the Internet and withhold from their people knowledge of the opaque dealings of their masters exhibit an uncomfortable convergence with the vindictiveness with which WikiLeaks and its courageous leader Julian Assange are now being pursued.

Of course, the use of sexual charges to attack unpalatable political views is scarcely a novelty; one has only to recall how the diaries attributed to Roger Casement were used to reinforce popular hatred in 1916 and to justify his execution; and when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, it will be remembered that White House personnel were despatched to break into the office of his doctor, to steal medical records which might incriminate him. The recent late accession of Sweden in the neoliberal project, as well as its new prominence in the politics of European racism, make that country - so recently an example of an 'alternative' model of capitalism - the perfect accomplice in the persecution of Assange.

It is not so much that WikiLeaks speaks truth to power, as its defenders have claimed, as that power has been heard speaking truth to itself, sotto voce as it were, in a way deemed unfit for popular consumption. 

The idea that the publication might 'compromise' America's relations with the world is highly fanciful, since its overt behaviour has effectively accomplished this very end without benefit of leaks. Indeed, when we pass in review the 'damage' done, it appears very modest, not only in comparison with the slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in relation to the daily injuries to the people of the United States themselves, in the cause of whose well-being secrecy is deemed essential. In a poignant blog, Donna Smith of the California Nurses' Association points out that by the end of November 2010, 41,082 Americans had died because they lacked the means to furnish themselves with health care, casualties which had nothing to do with WikiLeaks, yet a piece of information more effectively covered up by general indifference than by the obsessive secrecy of any government department.

The principal disclosures by WikiLeaks are unlikely to convulse a world order already in turmoil from the vast unstoppable experiment of globalisation, which has uprooted and disturbed whole populations, laid waste vast tracts of the earth and set the planet on a collision course with its own material limits. This process appears to have run beyond the control of even the most powerful.

In this context, the revelations of WikiLeaks appear less apocalyptic. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in his repeated urging of the USA to attack Iran, beseeches its ally to 'cut off the head of the snake', a metaphor which must occur naturally to the leader of a country which beheaded 67 people in 2009, two of them women. It is scarcely news that Iran has become the obsession of the hour: just what new danger its accession to nuclear weaponry would pose is unclear, since were it to use any such acquisition, this would result in its prompt annihilation. That Yemen covered up the deployment of US warplanes to bomb its own people, is an embarrassment unlikely to trouble the people of the USA any more than it will reconcile the disaffected of Yemen.

We learn that Hamid Karzai is driven by paranoia, that Berlusconi is 'feckless', Sarkozy an 'emperor with no clothes', that Gaddafi is accompanied everywhere by a 'voluptuous' Ukrainian blonde, that the daughter of the leader of Uzbekistan is the most hated woman in the country - none of this displays any unusual insight on the part of those eager to inform their employers of the state of affairs of countries in which, one suspects, their interaction with the people is extremely limited. Indeed, one of the more interesting questions is whether diplomacy itself has not become an archaic art form, since the USA seems uncertain as to whether its envoys are spies, business touts or interpreters of a world which has become increasingly opaque to them.

Qatar's reluctance to pursue terrorist suspects, negotiations with regimes in Slovenia and Kiribati to take in some of the expellees from Guantanamo, are more troubling, but the fact that the Vice President of Afghanistan carried large sums of money in a suitcase to the United Arab Emirates, that China might be induced - perhaps with the money owed to it by the USA - to negotiate the reunification of Korea, and Hillary Clinton's request to diplomats to supply information on Pakistan, Somalia or Iran reveal little more than the want of imagination which is a constant attribute of power.  

In the meantime, a thought should be spared for Bradley Manning, the young intelligence analyst, prime suspect as the principal source of the leaks, whose ready access to the cables made it possible for him to have downloaded them. He, too, has been subject to a vilification which is of a similar order to that visited upon Julian Assange. Son of a Welsh mother and a US soldier, he has been described as a 'hot-headed loner'. He is 'openly homosexual' and, prior to joining the military, was a low-paid greeter at a pizza restaurant. All this is calculated to isolate him and invalidate his alleged actions, which can then be interpreted as the consequence of some personality disorder; when in fact, it is the mental health of America which ought to be the real concern of the world.                                        

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 244, December 2010, pp 26-27