El Pais On Western Failure

El Pais On Western Failure

by digby

As I mentioned in the post below, the charge of Wikileaks being a terrorist organization seems to be gaining steam. Darrell Issa thinks that if the government assassinates Assange or imprisons him indefinitely as they legally can do under the terrorism laws, that the world will stop laughing at us. But I think the problem may extend a little bit beyond Wikileaks and shutting Wikileaks down isn't going to fix it.

The world thinks that we are incompetent because we've been demonstrating it constantly for the past decade, first with our disastrous forays into neocon empire predicated on obvious lies, our apparent desire to outpace the Soviets for fecklessness in Afghanistan our financial leadership is actually a bunch of petulant Randian gamblers and our political leaders are either weak or crazy. Wikileaks just provided more evidence for what everyone already knows.

From Why EL PAÍS chose to publish the leaks

Cynics will argue that none of what we have learned from WikiLeaks differs from the usual way in which high-level international politics is conducted, and that without diplomatic secrets, the world would be even less manageable and more dangerous for everyone. Political classes on both sides of the Atlantic convey a simple message that is tailored to their advantage: trust us, don't try to reveal our secrets; in exchange, we offer you security.

But just how much security do they really offer in exchange for this moral blackmail? Little or none, since we face the sad paradox that this is the same political elite that was incapable of properly supervising the international financial system, whose implosion triggered the biggest crisis since 1929, ruining entire countries and condemning millions of workers to unemployment and poverty. These are the same people responsible for the deteriorating quality of life of their populations, the uncertain future of the euro, the lack of a viable European project and the global governance crisis that has gripped the world in recent years, and which elites in Washington and Brussels are not oblivious to. I doubt that keeping embassy secrets under wraps is any kind of guarantee of better diplomacy or that such an approach offers us better answers to the problems we face.

The incompetence of Western governments, and their inability to deal with the economic crisis, climate change, corruption, or the illegal war in Iraq and other countries has been eloquently exposed in recent years. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know that our leaders are all too aware of their shameful fallibility, and that it is only thanks to the inertia of the machinery of power that they have been able to fulfill their democratic responsibility and answer to the electorate.

The powerful machinery of state is designed to suppress the flow of truth and to keep secrets secret. We have seen in recent weeks how that machine has been put into action to try to limit the damage caused by the WikiLeaks revelations.

Given the damage they have suffered at the hands of WikiLeaks, it is not hard to see why the United States and other Western governments have been unable to resist the temptation of focusing attention on Julian Assange. He seems an easy enough target, and so they have sought to question his motivation and the way that WikiLeaks works. They have also sought to question why five major news organizations with prestigious international reputations agreed to collaborate with Assange and his organization. These are reasonable questions, and they have all been answered satisfactorily over the last four weeks, despite the pressure put on us by government, and worse still, by many of our colleagues in the media.

You can shut down Wikileaks, jail Julian Assange and crack down on leakers all you want. But it won't change the fact of massive elite failure on an epic scale.

"When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down."
— Barbara W. Tuchman (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century)