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06 December 2010 By
Jonathan Cook 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 recognise 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. 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 destabilisation 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 over-reach. 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. 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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