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WikiLeaks' Harsh Lesson on Imperial Hubris
Jonathan Cook
The Electronic Intifada
The WikiLeaks disclosure this week of confidential cables
from United States embassies has been debated chiefly in
terms either of the damage to Washington's reputation or
of the questions it raises about national security and
freedom of the press.
The headlines aside, most of the information so far
revealed from the 250,000 documents is hardly earth-
shattering, even if it often runs starkly counter to the
official narrative of the US as the benevolent global
policeman, trying to maintain order amid an often unruly
rabble of underlings.
Is it really surprising that US officials appear to have
been trying to spy on senior United Nations staff, and
just about everyone else for that matter? Or that Israel
has been lobbying strenuously for military action to be
taken against Iran? Or even that Saudi Arabia feels
threatened by an Iranian nuclear bomb? All of this was
already largely understood; the leaks have simply provided
official confirmation.
The new disclosures, however, do provide a useful insight,
captured in the very ordinariness of the diplomatic
correspondence, into Washington's own sense of the limits
on its global role -- an insight that was far less apparent
in the previous WikiLeaks revelations on the US army's wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Underlying the gossip and analysis sent back to Washington
is an awareness from many US officials stationed abroad of
quite how ineffective -- and often counter-productive --
much US foreign policy is.
While the most powerful nation on earth is again shown to
be more than capable of throwing its weight around in
bullying fashion, a cynical resignation nonetheless shines
through many of the cables, an implicit recognition that
even the top dog has to recognize its limits.
That is most starkly evident in the messages sent by the
embassy in Pakistan, revealing the perception among local
US officials that the country is largely impervious to US
machinations and is in danger of falling entirely out the
ambit of Washington's influence.
In the cables sent from Tel Aviv, a similar fatalism
reigns. The possibility that Israel might go it alone
and attack Iran is contemplated as though it were an
event Washington has no hope of preventing. US largesse
of billions of dollars in annual aid and military
assistance to Israel appears to confer zero leverage on
its ally's policies.
The same sense of US ineffectiveness is highlighted by
the WikiLeaks episode in another way. Once, in the pre-
digital era, the most a whistleblower could hope to
achieve was the disclosure of secret documents limited
to his or her area of privileged access. Even then the
affair could often be hushed up and make no lasting
impact.
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Now, however, it seems the contents of almost the entire
system of US official communications is vulnerable to
exposure. And anyone with a computer has a permanent and
easily disseminated record of the evidence.
The impression of a world running out of American control
has become a theme touching all our lives over the past
decade.
The US invented and exported financial deregulation,
promising it to be the epitome of the new capitalism that
was going to offer the world economic salvation. The
result is a banking crisis that now threatens to topple
the very governments in Europe who are Washington's
closest allies.
As the contagion of bad debt spreads through the system,
we are likely to see a growing destabilization of the
Washington order across the globe.
At the same time, the US army's invasions in the Middle
East are stretching its financial and military muscle to
tearing point, defining for a modern audience the problem
of imperial overreach. Here too the upheaval is offering
potent possibilities to those who wish to challenge the
current order.
And then there is the biggest crisis facing Washington:
of a gradually unfolding environmental catastrophe that
has been caused chiefly by the same rush for world
economic dominance that spawned the banking disaster.
The scale of this problem is overawing most scientists,
and starting to register with the public, even if it
is still barely acknowledged beyond platitudes by US
officials.
The repercussions of ecological meltdown will be felt not
just by polar bears and tribes living on islands. It will
change the way we live -- and whether we live -- in ways
that we cannot hope to foresee.
At work here is a set of global forces that the US, in
its hubris, believed it could tame and dominate in its
own cynical interests. By the early 1990s that arrogance
manifested itself in the claim of the "end of history":
the world's problems were about to be solved by US-
sponsored corporate capitalism.
The new WikiLeaks disclosures will help to dent those
assumptions. If a small group of activists can embarrass
the most powerful nation on earth, the world's finite
resources and its laws of nature promise a much harsher
lesson.
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Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the
Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake
the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His
website is www.jkcook.net.
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