Wikileaks: a Yankee view

I note the Anglo-American relationship is back in the news along with a zillion other diplomatic red herrings thanks to Wikileaks. Richard LeBaron, the US deputy chief of mission, mirrored my views when he stated that the UK's obsession with the Anglo-America alliance would “be humorous, if it were not so corrosive”. Corrosive, I assume, because it was self inflicted and betrays a totally unnecessary paranoia. The UK is our daddy.

But this item is but the tip of this edition of the Wikileak iceberg. We are being delightfully entertained by all sorts of catty back-stabbing real politik snippits and revelations that most of us already knew or at least strongly suspected. Conspiracy theorists must be having a ball with all the confirmations of what the Yemeni's are claiming, and the Chinese are wrangling the French are screwing up and the Germans are wallowing in apathy.

The Wikileak issues and implications have already been dissected and digested by the pundits with the conclusion that this round is but a tempest in a teapot. It speaks ill of the US' inability to manage its confidential and secret files. As I understand the situation, no top secret documents were released, if indeed Adrian Assange has any at all. He neatly encrypted another 'doomsday' batch for immediate release should anything happen to him. Historians are having a field day, albeit short-lived as they fear future original resource data will be much more difficult to obtain and considerably more circumspect and politically correct. Few scalps have been taken as a result and even Hillary turned around her initial bitter reaction by joking about what the victims might have said about her.

The big question for me is whether Assange is an angel or a demon. On the demon side he has stripped naked major world figures revealing, in my view, rather impoverished tackle. He has certainly endangered lives, both physical and political, but to far less an extent than was initially reported. The Turk minister with a Swiss Bank account has some explaining to do, but such revelation is hardly considered demonic, unless of course you are the account holder. He has broken diplomatic rules and flouted national pride. More seriously, he claims to have additional information about banking for example, that could be seriously damaging.

As an angel, he has exposed the lies, the posturing and the inflated egos of bright but unwise people. He has also made the democratic process a bit more transparent. Shrouded in secrecy as the US is, there is much to explain in terms of our constant references to being the world's leading democracy. What we can now share equally among our leaders and their minions is the shame of sham. We now have confirmation that in diplomatic circles, yes means no and compliments are reserved for our detractors. We more resemble the court of Louis the Fourteenth than the traditions of parliamentary process inherited from our English ancestors.

I do not endorse hanging Assange as a traitor. Nor do I seek to deify him. We need to tighten our information security; but we also need to dramatically and drastically reduce our efforts in petty spying. It is totally unreasonable and unconscionable that we know the sexual behavior of a UK backbencher while at the same time we cannot locate Osama bin-Laden. We are snooping in the wrong holes and coming up only with dirt on our faces.

We should be grateful to Assange for having exposed our hypocrisies and we should study the attendant lessons to be learned. Let Adrian float into history as a hero and not a villain and for heaven's sake, pull up our socks and man-up for the difficulties ahead by speaking truth and catering to sound principles.