Letter From Washington: Good Gossip, and No Harm Done to U.S.

WASHINGTON ? WikiLeaks is one of those stories where the passions of the moment blind us to what may eventually be seen as the more important lessons.

Ever since The New York Times, The Guardian and three other European publications began to publish the secret U.S. State Department and Pentagon documents, obtained by the WikiLeaks Web site, the conversation has focused on how embarrassing this is for the U.S. government and others around the world; whether WikiLeaks? erratic founder, Julian Assange, should be put on a terrorist list and prosecuted; and did the news media, especially The New York Times, act responsibly in publishing the material?

To be sure, there are embarrassing revelations in the thousands of cables, often raw files. Arab governments are urging the United States to strike Iran; the United States and South Korea are gaming China?s reaction to a collapse of North Korea; the portraits of heads of state aren?t flattering.

This no doubt will complicate some relations as well as American diplomacy for a while. Despots probably will go out of their way to distance themselves publicly.

Still, rather than exposing ineptitude, a reading of a fair portion of the documents suggests that they actually reflect well on U.S. policy and diplomacy. Pressure to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons isn?t effective if China, which gets much of its oil from that country, is opposed. U.S. efforts to cut a deal with the Saudis, who fear Iran, to possibly supply more oil to China come across as shrewd.

Most of the cables, along with the good gossip, reflect similar professionalism, probably to the consternation of the WikiLeaks crowd.

Take a moment to think over the sensitive U.S. diplomatic and military documents that could have been revealed over the past half-century. There would have been reports of attempted assassinations, bribes and the procurement of prostitutes for foreign leaders, or the illegal use of torture.

This isn?t to characterize the motives of WikiLeaks and its publicity-seeking founder, Mr. Assange, who said his purpose was to humiliate the U.S. government. Beyond the predictable reactions both inside and outside the Obama administration, the actual effect may have been best captured by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who suggested that while the cables were ?awkward? and ?embarrassing,? the consequences for U.S. foreign policy are ?fairly modest.?

In this light, the analogy to the 1971 Pentagon Papers, which exposed the internal deliberations of Vietnam War decision-making, appears strained. Those documents chronicled years of deliberate lies and misrepresentations that caused a debacle resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. There?s nothing comparable in the WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, the ?transparency is always good? defense is flawed, too.

The result, short-term at least, will be to discourage candor in cables, just as the immediate aftermath of kiss-and-tell books is to discourage dialogue.

It is worth considering this when measuring the cries to lynch Mr. Assange. Mike Huckabee, a Republican presidential hopeful, wants him executed; others want to lock him up at Guantánamo Bay. His actions may be offensive; it?s not clear they?re prosecutable under the almost century-old Espionage Act.

Facing potential legal obstacles, some politicians now say the law ought to be rewritten to make it easier to go after people like Mr. Assange.

Rather than doing anything that smacks of tinkering with the First Amendment, it may be better to leave Mr. Assange to the mercy of the Swedes, who have issued a warrant for his arrest for alleged sex crimes.

The swirl of controversy, of course, has gone far beyond Mr. Assange. The former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin blasted the Obama administration for its ?incompetent? handling of the affair.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=80658d1efda34d077416ac327f8fa394

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