Diplomacy! Now With New Truth!

Illegal document dumps means never having to say you're sorry.

So, I perused the NY Times version of the WikiLeaks bombshell of hundreds of thousands of State Department leaks.

Yawn.

Apparently a bunch of jack-offs in various jack-off filled governments around the world are indeed jack-offs.

The Karzais are corrupt!  Berlusconi's a double dealing attention monger!  The Chinese aren't fond of Google!  The Pakistanis are more afraid of being seen as helping America than creating a stable world!  Syria's helping Hezbollah!  Germany doesn't like it when we kidnap their citizens, and we don't like them arresting our spies!  North Korea is an unsustainable hell hole and maybe the Chinese can help us put them out of their(our) misery!

And the BIG ONE: Saudis are helping Al Qaeda!!!!!!111!!!

In substance, the WikiLeaks aren't really anything new.  I can't say anything I read in the Times summary shocked me in the very least.

I guess the point is that diplomacy exists when everyone avoids uncomfortable truths.  That's true in real life, too.  Everyone ignores that Aunt Emily never really sobered up since Uncle Edgar left her for "Uncle" Jose.  Everyone ignores the borderline sociopathic activities of the neighbor's kids.  Everyone ignores the loudmouth racist at the bar.

We ignore unpleasant truths in order for society to more or less function.

And that's no less true for nations.  We ignore Saudi complicity in 9/11 and other acts of terror, because we need their oil and every once and awhile they come through for us.  We ignore the Karzai's brazen criminality, because what other choice do we have?  We ignore Chinese wrong doing, because we need the shelves of WalMart filled.

So what the WikiLeaks have done is basically the same is applying truth serum to a Thanksgiving dinner.  Now we all talk about "Uncle" Jose and Uncle Edgar's cruise to Fiji and tell Aunt Emily to get over it and sober up.  We tell our friend that if they don't punish their kid for lighting stray cats on fire, we will.  We tell the racist at the bar that when you say, "I'm not a racist, but..." that means you're a racist.

Nothing in the WikiLeaks dump was unknown to the US, nor was it really unknown to the governments that were "dished on".  I mean do we really need to worry about Robert Mugabe's feelings?

Maybe we will see some silver lining to all this.  Maybe this will be a necessary dose of truth in some of our relations with other countries.  Hey, Syria/Afghanistan/Russia/China/Saudi Arabia!  You're not fooling anyone.  I know we look big and stupid, but we really aren't that dumb.  We know the crap you're trying to pull.

So maybe now we can get down to actually talking about the issues?  Maybe now we can cut through the bullshit?

After all, is it at possible that things could get any worse?

I guess they could.  They could have included a lot more leaks from the Bush Administration