nathan28 wrote:AlicetheKurious wrote:Incidentally, the cables actually corroborate what Hizbullah has been saying for years
This fits into your meta-narrative that the cables are a pro-Israel hatchet job how?
Look at the glee with which Netanyahu and the Israeli right-wing press greeted the Wikileaks revelations about how certain Arab "leaders" secretly told the US to attack Iran. The Israelis are so utterly divorced from reality that they think, "Now that it's all in the open, those Arab "leaders" will be forced to finally say in public what they've been saying in private!" They have no clue...
If that was the plan, as I suspect it was, it will backfire big-time and even further de-legitimize these regimes and put them very much on the defensive. They've been outed as liars and hypocrites and in some cases, traitors; as conspirators with the vicious invaders and killers and oppressors of millions of innocent Arabs and Muslims. There's a reason why not one Arab newspaper, even among the bravest of opposition papers, has dared to publish the more revealing leaks about their own president or king (with the unique exception of the truly independent Lebanese leftist
Al-Akhbar): because it strips these rulers naked and shows them for the lying sycophants they are, and provokes among their public that most dangerous of emotions: contempt. Far from coming out of the closet, so to speak, Arab leaders will now feel under pressure to prove that they are not the weak sycophants and hypocrites the leaks show them to be. In Lebanon, where tensions have been very high between the Hariri-led and the Hizbullah-led camps, the leaks have given a big moral push to the latter and put the former even more on the defensive.
But clearly that wasn't the plan. See, as the prime consumers and believers in their own propaganda, neither the Americans nor the Israelis see themselves the way others see them. To most Egyptians, Israel is associated with atrocities against helpless people, with wanton destruction and sadism and theft and implacable hatred. Business between some high-level Egyptians and Israelis can flourish only in the dark. The Egyptian regime understands, but the Israelis can't, that once exposed to the light of day it will not be tolerated and there's a point beyond which people will rise up, no matter what the cost.
I think that we have a long way to go before we can assess the full impact of the Wikileaks. Iran now can claim the moral high ground, having generously dismissed the leaks about how its neighbours have been inciting Iran's enemy to bomb it. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the next official meeting between the two presidents. Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Yemen and Qatar now exist under a cloud of suspicion that smells like treason, as do many of America's "allies", and the onus is on them to dispel it somehow. If, as I believe, the intent was to force Arab leaders into a more open relationship with Israel, it was a very serious miscalculation and will have unpredictable but almost certainly negative consequences for both.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
You really captured that pre-war Prussian-dominie 
