Month: November 2010

That’s right, INTERPOL has put out a “Red Notice” for Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange. Well, we knew there was some hair on fire about the recent diplomatic cables dump, so this sort of intergalactic law enforcement intimidation was to be expected. But wait, he’s not being charged with conspiracy to embarrass or create awkward situations, endangering national security or putting the safety of Planet Earth at risk? No, the Red Notice is for “sex crimes.” Seems the Swedish prosecutor wants Assange back in Sweden to answer more questions regarding the molestation charges brought about by two women he had consensual sexual relations with, but with whom he had reported disagreements over the use of condoms, last summer. Assange has failed to respond to her latest warrant in November, and has appealed the measure in Swedish court, so she has retaliated by calling in the Global goon squad, conveniently right around the time others are calling for his head. Sounds scary, until you realize that Interpol has no real police powers. With a staff of nearly 60o and a headquarters in Paris, it’s more like a bloated fusion center, which can be frightening in itself, but it can only encourage its member states  (of which there are 188) to apprehend him themselves.

So will Interpol pose a serious threat to the wily Wikileaks founder, who is likely fielding offers of Asylum from more sympathetic governments across the world ( Ecuador, which ironically is a member of Interpol, has already stepped up*)? That doesn’t seem likely. If anything, the thought of global police going after Assange for what is likely  a set-up and/or revenge by his former lovers, seems petty, desperate and way too obvious and I think it will read like that in the papers tomorrow. Or it should.

* As Watson points out below, apparently Ecuador is already backtracking on it’s “offer” of asylum to Mr. Assange.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for November 30th, 2010:

The Wall Street Journal: In his weekly column, Bret Stephens asks “Are Israeli Likudniks and their neocon friends (present company included) the dark matter pushing the U.S. toward war with Iran?” After analyzing the WikiLeaks documents, he concludes that, “Arab Likudniks turn out to be even more vocal on that score.” Stephens goes on to argue that the need for missile defense has not been overblown because, “we learned that North Korea had shipped missiles to Tehran that can carry nuclear warheads as far as Western Europe and Moscow.”

The Atlantic: Former New York Times investigative reporter Raymond Bonner blogs that the WikiLeaks documents have shown “…that Israel is, as Jeffrey Goldberg notes, [is] not alone in wanting decisive action to stop Iran’s nuclear program.” Bonner repeats the alleged comments from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and King Hamid of Bahrain, both of whom reportedly urged a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear program, and observes that “this the same chilling language, which the American public is accustomed to hearing from hardline Israeli officials.” He finishes his post by speculating that the death of an Iranian nuclear scientist on Monday might be the work of Saudi Arabia, UAE or Kuwait because it is “easier for one of those countries to have infiltrated, or recruited, and less likely to be caught, because they could be confident Iran would blame Israel or the United States.”

FrumForum: Executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), Noah Pollak, writes that this WikiLeaks release is “obliterating the Gulf-side Middle East” worldview of leftists and realists that had promoted negotiations with Iran and Syria, a withdrawal from Iraq and a policy of pressuring Israel to stop settlement construction. Pollak, attacking the “linkage” argument, blogs that Washington’s Arab allies are not alienated by the close U.S.-Israel relationship. Instead, “we now know that what’s really alienating the Arabs is America’s reluctance to use its power to confront Iran and enforce a security architecture in which Israel is America’s most capable client.”

National Review Online: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ Benjamin Weinthal observes that WikiLeaks has “forced [Arab world leaders] to come out of the diplomatic closet and declare Iran’s regime the number one enemy in the Middle East.” Now that the Arab world’s opposition to Iran’s nuclear program is known, says Weinthal, it’s time to ratchet up sanctions against the Islamic Republic’s energy and financial sectors. Weinthal stops short of calling for military action again Iran but concludes that the WikiLeaks information “vindicate[s] Israel’s longstanding position on the need for swift and powerful action against Iran’s out-of-control regime.”

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for November 29th, 2010:

The Wall Street Journal: Harvard professor and Project for the New American Century signatory Stephen Peter Rosen writes that while the United States promotes the elimination of nuclear weapons, Iran and North Korea have made the acquisition of nuclear weapons their high priority. Following the meme of equating North Korea and Iran as similar foreign policy challenges, Rosen argues the United States should not simply accept Iran or North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons but, instead, “If North Korea and Iran want nuclear weapons, and China does nothing to stop them, we can reintroduce tactical nuclear weapons onto American aircraft carriers and attack submarines in the Pacific.” Acknowledging the importance of working with allied nations, Rosen characterizes his call for increased U.S. military readiness as “an old-school response that doesn’t seek war, but that also doesn’t aspire to utopian goals.”

Commentary: Jennifer Rubin is one of dozens of hawks to jump on the WikiLeaks document dump of U.S. diplomatic cables to draw exactly the conclusions she was looking for. Despite confirmation of linkage — that the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict hurts U.S. interests in the Mid East — at the highest levels of the Pentagon, Rubin is determined to take the Saudi King’s word that the concept is “nonsense.” “In short, there is zero evidence that the Palestinian non-peace talks were essential to obtaining the assistance of the Arab states on Iran,” she writes. She calls Palestinian-Israeli peace talks a “grand waste of time and a dangerous distraction” and says, “Obama frittered away two years that could have been spent cementing an Israeli-Arab alliance against Tehran.” Her logic relies on the straw-man argument that the peace process is “essential to obtaining the help of the Arab states in confronting Iran’s nuclear threat” — the words “helpful” or “productive” used in conjunction with “peace process” would better describe this linkage.

Anyone who favors self-government should support the efforts by WikiLeaks to expose official lies. Their latest release of hundreds of thousands of State Department diplomatic cables will hopefully undermine the piety and pretentiousness of U.S. foreign policy for years.

The Obama administration is rolling out the same old “people will die!” hobgoblin in response to the latest disclosures. But as Nancy Yousef notes today in an article distributed by McClatchy newspapers, “Despite similar warnings before the previous two releases of classified U.S. intelligence reports by the website, U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone’s death.”

WikiLeaks provides a great litmus test for American politics. The vast majority of congressmen who rush forward to denounce WikiLeaks’ disclosures have themselves done little or nothing to expose or challenge the official lies that have long permeated U.S. foreign and military policy.

It would be wrong to assume that WikiLeaks is disclosing the whole truth and nothing but the truth about U.S. government policy. The leaks routinely show facts and policies that profoundly contradict official pronouncements. But simply because a government document is classified as “top secret” doesn’t mean that it is not full of crap.

This riff by Arthur Silber deftly captures the higher philosophical issues involved in this latest WikiLeaks controversy.