Ed
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/369-wikileaks/4157-imperial-retreat
WikiLeaks cables are dispatches from a beleaguered America in imperial
retreat
By Neal Ascherson
guardian.co.uk,: 4, December, 2010
There's more to the WikiLeaks dispatches than leaks. Look behind them, at
the writers, and you see the loyal rearguard of America: an imperial power
in retreat.
There was a tradition in our Foreign Office that a retiring ambassador could
blow off steam. In a final, exuberant telegram to Whitehall, he could say
exactly what he thought of the country he was leaving, and of the folly of
the Foreign Office in ignoring his advice.The best telegrams were treasured
by young diplomats. But they began to leak into the press. And a few years
ago this privilege was suppressed.
Now the WikiLeaks eruption has smothered the world with the secret thoughts
of the state department's ambassadors. Tmorrow's Observer, focusing on
China, reveals fascinating data about Chinese "muscle-flexing, triumphalism
and assertiveness" (as the US ambassador put it). But with the cables comes
a snapshot of the state department itself. It's a unique window on America's
search - with diminishing confidence - for a coherent, inspiring account of
what the US is trying to achieve in the world.
These diplomats who didn't want us to know their thoughts are not mere cogs
in an imperial machine. Many emerge as wise, courageous, patient, likeable
men and women- especially the women, who lead so many US embassies. Their
view of their host countries is not rosy. You begin to absorb their vision,
in which America is the only adult in a world of grasping, corrupt,
unreliable teenagers who cannot be abandoned to their own weakness.
The test of an ambassador is telling truth to those who wield the power -
having the guts to tell the department that its plan is a delusion. Here is
Anne Patterson in Islamabad, discussing Pakistan's support for "terrorist
and extremist groups" and telling Washington "there is no chance that
Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient
compensation for abandoning support to these groups". She states bleakly:
"The relationship is one of co-dependency, we grudgingly admit - Pakistan
knows the US cannot afford to walk away; the US knows Pakistan cannot
survive without our support."
Not all the dispatch-writers are that sound. In Georgia, ambassador John F
Tefft was assuring his employers only hours before the bombardment of
Tskhinvali that nothing of the sort could happen: that was what they wanted
to hear. But then we find Margaret Scobey in Cairo, warning Clinton ("Madame
Secretary") ahead of her meeting with Egypt's foreign minister that "he may
not raise human rights. political reform or democratisation, but you
should". Or Tatiana Gfoeller, ambassador in Kyrgyzstan, who reported with
amused disgust the ravings of Prince Andrew as he attacked "these
(expletive) journalists, especially from the Guardian, who poke their noses
everywhere". There's irony there. Those same journalists would print her own
secret words and touch off a palace uproar in London.
Britain doesn't cut a pretty figure in the cables. On the rare occasions
when US policies - on cluster bomb storage, on rendition flights through UK
territory - meet challenges from the UK, British politicians are assumed to
be thinking about voters rather than principles. Monotonously, Ambassador
Louis Susman in London writes off Gordon Brown's criticisms of Washington
policies as posturing "driven by domestic politics".
And the devastating pages about the "special relationship", published in
yesterday's Guardian, reveal a trembling British obsequiousness which the
Americans find absurd, even embarrassing. Only last year Richard LeBaron,
deputy chief of mission in London, said that the British attitude "would
often be humorous, if it were not so corrosive". The Tory cringe, as party
leaders prepared to take power, is shown to be as low as the Labour cringe
when Tony Blair rushed to offer Britain as a so-called "equal partner" in
invading Iraq. William Hague, as shadow foreign secretary, assured the
embassy in confidence he considered the US his "other country" and promised
"a pro-American regime".
This degree of toadying clearly poses problems for the Americans. The
dispatches repeat genuine appreciation of Britain's unique loyalty as an
ally. But LeBaron was typically shrewd to call this behaviour "corrosive".
The American diplomats are smart enough to know that buttering up the
Americans is a routine which incoming British leaders think they have to
perform, and that most of them privately resent it. They do it largely for
reasons the state department understands only too well. Britain's
"independent" nuclear deterrent flies the threadbare rags which are all that
remain of the United Kingdom's lost "Great Power" status. But its
manufacture and use are in reality dependent on the supply of American
technology and American strategic decisions.
But, between the lines, the leaks are telling a bigger, more ominous story.
These are exclusively state department documents - not the thoughts of other
American power centres with an interest in foreign policy. And these
diplomats' reports reveal how far their department has lost prestige and
influence. It's a far cry from the days when foreign service giants like
Averell Harriman or George Kennan, in the Moscow embassy or in Washington,
could issue judgments which would sway a president. Now, though, other
agencies - hairier and more shadowy - take it as read that they can require
state department officers to carry out their leg work. It's enough to look
at the instructions, pretty clearly from the CIA, for US diplomats to spy on
their colleagues at the United Nations and even on the secretary-general's
office.
Weren't these foreign service men and women humiliated, when they were asked
to record the credit card numbers and frequent flyer details of those they
worked with? Who asked the embassy in Buenos Aires last year to find out how
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was "managing her nerves and
anxiety", what pills she was taking, and "how does she calm down when
distressed"? And "what is the status" of her husband's gastro-intestinal
ailment and "what are the most common triggers to [his] anger?" There are
spies based in most British embassies, usually with "attaché" cover, but at
least MI6 does not order diplomats to collect the intimate personal details
of its targets. The professions are kept reasonably separate. So they should
be.
It's true that the US system of selecting ambassadors has sometimes been
baffling to foreigners. Rich businessmen who donate millions to parties have
traditionally been rewarded with embassies (the British, less riskily,
reward them with peerages). But these dispatches show that the intellectual
quality of the "career diplomat" ambassadors remains pretty high. It would
be a disaster for the US if the state department became a "penetrated
system" allowing other agencies which, since the Reagan presidency, have
progressively pushed state aside to gain the ear of the White House.
Enormous damage was done in the run-up to the Iraq war. As Niall Ferguson
puts it in the latest edition of his book Colossus, "responsibility for the
postwar occupation of Iraq was seized by the defence department, intoxicated
as its principals became in the heat of their blitzkrieg". The state
department had laboured hard on long-term plans for the occupation. as the
fighting ended. But state had to stand by and see its work junked by Donald
Rumsfeld and his neocon team around the Pentagon, who convinced President
George W Bush that the Iraqis would simply welcome the Americans as
liberators.and romp forward to liberal democracy. The tone of the leaked
dispatches suggests thatthis shattering blow to the standing and
self-confidence of state has still not been repaired.
Behind all these diligent reports glows an evening landscape, in which a
declining empire has lost its way. When communism collapsed, the US expected
to become the unchallenged global superpower. But instead the US instantly
lost control of countless nations and movements stampeding away from cold
war discipline. Paradoxically, it was in those cold war years that America
had been in charge of most of the world, mostly by consent, and knew why it
was in charge. Now that world has burst into a thousand pieces: all sharp,
many of them unstable, some of them fearfully dangerous. And the certainty
of mission has gone.
So what is America for in the 21st century? The report-writers are confident
about its superior wealth, though it is "banked" by China. They are sure
about America's superior military strength, though only a fraction of that
strength can be brought to bear in "insurgency" wars. But they are
strikingly less sure about America's aims.
In the 1990s the "New American Century" neocons proposed: let's use that
wealth and power to act as the world empire we really are! Few traces of
that remain. Several ambassadors deny they are playing any great game
against Russia or China, because great games are played by empires and the
US isn't one. Yet several others indignantly reject the idea of "zones of
influence" - no firewall must keep out the benevolent "soft power" influence
of America. US policy is stuck aground in muddy places: Israel and Pakistan,
Iraq and Afghanistan, Cuba and the Caucasus. If it could extract itself from
these, would it simply drift "rudderless" (as the ambassador said about
Gordon Brown)?
Perhaps not. Two aims do recur obsessively through these reports. One,
rooted in American history, is that the independence of new nations must be
honoured and protected. The other is the struggle against nuclear
proliferation. Preventing apocalypse has become more important than striving
for world leadership. This is a diplomacy clearer about what it doesn't want
than what it does.
That's a "mission" we can salute. A British ambassador said: "Our duty at
the Foreign Office has been to cover Britain's retreat from greatness and to
prevent that retreat turning into a rout." One day the state department may
say the same about its service to America.
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