Wow. Iran’s neighbors are threatened by its rise! Many governments think Pakistan may not be able to secure its nuclear arsenal! The US attempts to use its leverage with its allies to achieve its political objectives! China has engaged in a cyber-campaign against Google and other American companies! Yemen approves of US’ targeted killings on its soil (but claims otherwise to quell domestic opposition)! Also, governments routinely spy on United Nations officials!
Who knew all this stuff, eh? Thank the stars for Wikileaks.
[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money]
P.S. Want to know what I did learn from this that I wouldn’t have assumed? The US State Department talks among itself far more about human rights than it does about terrorism.
One can also learn about the shockingly stupid frameworks of analysis used by the State Department. Â See for example this attempt to understand the “Persian mind”:Â https://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/1979/08/79TEHRAN8980.html
I'm explicitly leaving aside the conversation over whether it's right or wrong to leak…
That the global figures and picture confirm the understanding of those who study international politics as a full-time job is itself rather unsurprising. Indeed, this could be taken as a datum in itself. Turns out our picture of what's going on within the institutions of state policy aren't that off. Good for us.
But beyond the headline figures, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on here. Take the observation about human rights versus terrorism. Disaggregating that and figuring out what's really going on sounds like quite an interesting research project to me. Are cables concerned with human rights centred in a particular region or around a particular policy? Are those the regions and policies that we might expect? What is the State Department's operational definition of terrorism? Does it follow today's commonsense and refer only to non-state actors? Or is there explicit discussion of state terrorism anywhere in the cables? Perhaps most crucially, what is the content of the discussions around human rights and terrorism? Do officials of the US government discuss human rights because they're explicitly interested in how to extend them in concrete ways? If so, which rights? And where? Or are they discussing them in terms of 'how do we get around the perception that we're systematically violating human rights in Gitmo, Iraq and Afghanistan'?And what goes for human rights and terrorism surely goes for the detail of spying at the UN, relations with Yemen, analyses of Chinese cyber-power, and the ins and outs of negotiations around Af-Pak, not to mention half-assed psychologically-reductionist accounts of those wacky Persians and their strange egoism…
It would seem to me that those are some pretty interesting questions in purely scholarly terms that the cable dump opens up for researchers. But maybe I'm missing something.
Wow, truly great article. Where can I get this subscription?
Jane Swingfield
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This is simply the latest manifestation of the transition to an “Age of Transparency” where governments (along with corporations and individual citizens) will find it much more difficult to maintain a veil of “polite society” behind which they regularly perform actions that strain the bounds of legality, morality, or other social expectations. This article goes into more detail about several aspects of the Cablegate debate, including the “so what” theme that Dr. Carpenter raises here.