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Cryptic clues to intricate diplomacy | The Australian

POLITICIANS everywhere are reeling at the content and implications of the leaks.

THE scale and random nature of the WikiLeaks affair exposes the weakening grip democratic governments have on their secrets, delivers another body blow to American prestige and reveals the vulnerability of databases to individuals with access and expertise.

These leaks will become a milestone in changing the operations of government and diplomacy. The point is they are driven by technological capability. The leaks occur because they can occur, not because of any political cause such as exposing corruption, ending the Vietnam War, fighting human rights abuses or bringing democracy to China.

As usual, the US occupies the forefront of change. But this is a double-edged status. The control functions of the US state are being undermined by a small, elusive and hi-tech WikiLeaks outfit headed by an Australian, Julian Assange, whose narcissism is barely disguised by his polemical recruitment of the ideology of free speech, the great American virtue.

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Related Coverage

• WikiLeaks: Rudd stays cool under pressure The Australian, 12 hours ago
• PM now plumbing new depths Herald Sun, 12 hours ago
• WikiLeaks: key points for our region NEWS.com.au, 1 day ago
• Labor rejects Arbib spy tag Adelaide Now, 1 day ago
• Arbib leaks to US 'like a sieve' The Australian, 1 day ago

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If you want a reality check, read what the leaker, Bradley Manning, now in solitary confinement, said of his "unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, seven days a week" for more than eight months: "I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' . . . erase the music . . . then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing . . . [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history . . . Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available in searchable format to the public . . . everywhere there's a US post, there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format . . . it's beautiful and it's horrifying."

Welcome to the new world of cyber insecurity. Welcome to the attack on government secrets precisely because they are secrets. The politicians, stranded by an event beyond their control, seem clueless. The Gillard government kept mumbling about illegality. The Obama administration wants to throw the book at WikiLeaks. But the politicians, ultimately, face a losing battle and the huge publicity Assange has generated gives him a cult status that guarantees more leakers will service WikiLeaks down the track.

Indeed, this is a marketing campaign the power of which could never be purchased. The core idea of WikiLeaks as a superhighway for whistleblowers, hackers and public officials bent on betrayal is unstoppable.

Any newspaper editor would seize and publish the cables the Fairfax papers are publishing in Australia. Such disclosure is the red meat and circulation driver of journalism. But nobody should indulge the prattle that these stories constitute a service to free speech and human rights. They are nothing of the sort and such pomposity is ludicrous. The sour taste left by WikiLeaks is that its inevitable focus is the US, with no sign that it will trouble the closed tyrannies of China, North Korea and Burma where democracy is denied.

The WikiLeaks cables about Australia are fascinating, revealing, embarrassing yet unsurprising. The bottom line after three days (with more to come) is that Kevin Rudd, target of so much cable traffic criticism, is taking heavy political water. Rarely, if ever, has such strong US criticism of an Australian PM's foreign policy been documented so close to his time in office. While Rudd's fidelity to the US alliance was never at issue, the embassy plugged into the standard criticism of Rudd, that he was a control freak, prone to micro-management and obsessed with the media cycle.

Indeed, the US reports were superior to much of Australia's media in identifying the reasons Rudd would fall.

This judgment contrasts with the early Whitlam years when the US embassy in Canberra was ill-informed and shooting wildly about the so-called risk Gough Whitlam constituted, a reminder that relations work best when diplomats are on the money.

Nobody should be surprised that the US embassy was speaking regularly to Labor figures such as NSW powerbroker Senator Mark Arbib, former minister Bob McMullan and MP Michael Danby.

It is a long tradition. The intimacy of political exchanges between the nations helps make the relationship special and has been facilitated by annual meetings of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue.

In past decades the Americans had close ties with Bob Hawke, Kim Beazley and former senator Stephen Loosley. Rudd himself was a valued intimate of high-placed US officials in Washington when Labor was in opposition. This week Loosley told The Australian he had briefed the US nearly 20 years ago to expect Paul Keating to replace Hawke as PM. Insights into key events in domestic politics on both sides are integral to such exchanges.

You can lay money, however, these cables are mild compared with cables from the US embassy when Mark Latham was ALP leader. This provoked the greatest period of US alarm about Australia for decades. Concern about the damage Latham might perpetrate resonated at high levels in Washington, and Rudd and Beazley were involved in talks with US officials on how Latham could best be managed.

The practice of close ties between Labor's right wing and the US tended to be overlooked during the Howard era given the media's obsession about the links between John Howard and George W. Bush. That Arbib reassured the Americans about Julia Gillard is hardly a surprise. It is interesting, however, that he told them he backed the Iraq military commitment. The tradition of political intimacy between the ALP right wing and the US has passed to a new generation; witness Chris Bowen, Stephen Conroy, Bill Shorten and Arbib, each of them increasingly wired into US networks. These exchanges, of course, are not just one way. Australia has had a succession of Washington ambassadors with excellent inside contacts; witness John McCarthy, Andrew Peacock, Michael Thawley, Dennis Richardson and now Beazley. One of the consequences is that Howard expected Bush to become president in 2001 and had an agenda ready to greet him. In the context, talk about Arbib being an "agent of influence" or a US spy is naive and ignorant of how Australia-US relations are conducted.

For Gillard, the most damaging cables, so far, are those on Afghanistan. This is because they document an explicit contradiction between Rudd-Gillard Labor's public optimism about the war and its private pessimism. It is an old-fashioned credibility gap but is unlikely to be fully exploited because the Coalition also backs the war.

Rudd told visiting US politicians in late 2008 that Australia's national security establishment was "very pessimistic" about Afghanistan. A year later the US reports were that Australia's special envoy, Ric Smith, was "increasingly pessimistic". Australian officials are shown to be highly dubious about our capacity to train the Afghan National Police. The US notes Rudd's obvious reluctance to lift troops levels.

In her defence, Gillard will argue the situation has changed but her problem is summarised by Australian National University strategic analyst Hugh White. "There is a glaring gap between the Labor government's public optimism and its private pessimism," he says. "The cables verify the private assessments that many of us have been getting for some time. I think this gap between the public and private is highly significant. It means the government has misrepresented why Australia is in Afghanistan. Because Labor doesn't want to concede we are there primarily to uphold the US alliance, it has to argue we are there to achieve other objectives that are, in fact, being achieved. This distorts and misrepresents the real reason we are in Afghanistan."

However, the most enduring foreign policy fallout from the cables (so far) concerns China. Consider what Beijing is reading. Rudd presented himself to Hillary Clinton last year as a "brutal realist" on China, damned the Chinese as "paranoid" over Taiwan and Tibet and raised the prospect of military conflict with China. Meanwhile Beazley as ALP leader in 2006 is reported telling the Americans that in any conflict with China that Australia would always be with the US. For the record, this is an assurance Howard and former foreign minister Alexander Downer conspicuously refused to give, notably on Taiwan.

China is unlikely to be surprised by Labor's remarks. It will, however, incorporate them into its assessments of Australia. The conclusion is obvious: in the evolving strategic relationship between China and the US, Australia under Labor is tightly aligned with the US. This alignment is closer than Beijing or many Australian analysts would have believed when Rudd took office in 2007 as a Mandarin-speaking Asianist keen to focus on China. Indeed, judged on their public and private remarks, at least on China, Labor is more closely aligned with the US than was Howard.

The issue in dealing with the US and China is not the obvious risk of military conflict but how to structure debates and policy to avoid such conflict. WikiLeaks has given Rudd a tough week. He needs to avoid getting rattled but reflect on the lessons.

via theaustralian.com.au

Link: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/cryptic-clues-to-intricate-diplo... (sent via Shareaholic)

At last the beginnings of some mature reflections on WikiLeaks

The question we should be asking ourselves is "If its OK to publish confidential US documents around the world is it also OK to publish confidential personal Medical Records, Business negotiations, sexual preferences etc?" Or is it just OK to indulge in anti-American bashing?

Jeremy