Iran's gut reaction to the publication of United States diplomatic cables by
WikiLeaks was to blame ''Mideast enemies''. A senior Turkish official also
accused Israel of being behind the leaks (while days later, an Egyptian
regional governor opined that the Israeli Mossad might be orchestrating shark
attacks in the Red Sea). [1] The former claim attracted some attention, since
Israel is widely perceived as having benefited from the release.
With the direct peace talks officially pronounced dead just days after the
publications, this is a tempting topic to explore, but some caution is due:
many diverse and powerful forces are drawn into the WikiLeaks scandal. The
relationship between Israel and the United States has certainly been impacted
by it, and Israeli politicians attempted to capitalize on it early on, but more
careful
projections of the effects are turning in contradictory results. In any case,
the claim that Israel conspired to set the whole thing in motion seems too
politically motivated and simplistic to do justice to the full complexity of
the situation.
On the one hand, when senior American administration officials announced last
Tuesday night that they "have determined that a moratorium extension will not
at this time provide the best basis for resuming direct [Israeli-Palestinian]
negotiations", many observers interpreted this as a victory for Netanyahu over
US President Barack Obama, precipitated by the blow that the leaked cables
dealt to American diplomacy. [2] Even Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak drew
a link between the two when speaking to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
The relationship between the administrations seems to be increasingly on the
rocks. Some analysts, such as David Goldman, have even argued that the conflict
is rooted deep in the American president's ideology, and is practically
irreconcilable. [3] While Goldman's thesis has raised some controversy, there
are numerous indications that the two allies are at odds.
The personal relationship between Netanyahu and Obama isn't going too well.
When Netanyahu visited Washington, DC, following the American congressional
elections last month, Obama was away on a trip to India. Even so, the Israeli
prime minister's visit was fraught with tensions over the stalled peace process
and the next steps on Iran. The compromise that Netanyahu worked out with
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, including an American gift to Israel of 20
F-35 stealth airplanes, unraveled when he demanded an official letter of
guarantees.
In my story Bluff
and bluster over East Jerusalem, Asia Times Online, November 9, 2010, I
look at how the Israeli announcement of additional construction in East
Jerusalem during Netanyahu's trip marked an escalation of tensions and echoed
the March spat between the two administrations. One month later, it is clear
that the two crises developed in very different ways, and the WikiLeaks affair
was one of several factors that contributed in a major way to that outcome.
Whether we believe that Netanyahu purposefully initiated two East Jerusalem
construction confrontations or not (the first time, he claimed he had no
advance knowledge of the announcement, and reprimanded his Interior Minister
Eli Yishai about it), we might say that his team learned a lesson since March.
Then, Obama's strong reaction took the Israelis by surprise, and the American
administration kept them off-balance by continuously raising the pressure. The
construction project was swiftly postponed. There was a lot of speculation that
the Iranian question took center-stage during the secret discussions, and some
have argued that Obama extracted a promise from Netanyahu not to attack Iran
during the summer. Nine months on from March, no such attack has taken place.
This time around, Netanyahu kept upping the pressure, and events such as the
WikiLeaks release and the North Korean crisis contributed to the effect of
Obama being thrown off-balance. The Israelis (aided by the Palestinians)
delivered a string of calculated blows to the peace process, [4] and ultimately
buried it. In the absence of diplomatic progress with Iran, Obama was compelled
to raise the war rhetoric against the Islamic Republic. The American president
seems to have been forced to swallow his pride and ambitions, at least for now.
The cables bolstered some of Israel's main arguments about Iran: that Arab
leaders see the Iranian crisis as much more important than the peace process,
and, moreover, that privately they urge strongly for an American military
intervention. This is a big embarrassment not only for the heads of several
Arab countries, but also for the Obama administration. American officials have
argued, among other things, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a major
impediment to their foreign policy, and that advancing the peace process would
greatly help solve the standoff with Iran.
Turkey, which in the past two years has turned into a fierce critic of Israel,
also received a slap. The documents revealed the large rifts between Ankara, on
the one side, and Washington and Jerusalem, on the other. In some of the
cables, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was characterized as an
unreliable (in some accounts also corrupt) fundamentalist. He reacted angrily,
threatening to sue diplomats for slander, but also moved swiftly to repair
relations with Israel by sending planes to help the recent wildfires, and by
adopting a more flexible stand in his demands on the Jewish state. It appears
now that a rapprochement between the two countries is close. [5]
All this is at the core of what sparked the claims that Israel somehow supplied
WikiLeaks with the documents. In an odd twist, the organization's leader,
Julian Assange, widely portrayed as an anti-establishment anarchist hacker,
spoke positively of Netanyahu in a Time magazine interview, and thus fueled
speculation himself. [6]
Then again, WikiLeaks also appears to have courted some very clearly
anti-Israeli elements, such as the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese al-Akhbar newspaper.
[7] More importantly, it is uncertain if the leaks ultimately served or
undermined Israeli foreign policy interests. The peace process may have hit a
dead end for now, but who knows what will come in place of the lucrative offer
of free American warplanes and diplomatic support. A small but increasing
number of countries have offered to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967
borders, [8] a course of action seen as an alternative to the negotiations, in
a blow to Israel's international standing.
Moreover, ''WikiLeaks blows cover off Israel's covert Gulf states ties,''
Israeli analyst Barak Ravid writes for Ha'aretz. "The disclosures are
ultimately embarrassing to the moderate Arab camp that wants to stop Iran,''
says Professor Shimon Shamir, quoted by Inter Press Service. ''While it is true
that they have been urging the US to take a tough stand on Iran's nuclear
ambitions, they're always wary of being seen by their own publics as adopting
policies that are in line with those of Washington. This will only weaken them
and is thus damaging to Israel's 'Stop Iran' campaign.''
Israel is not even the most likely state candidate to have released the cables,
as it would risk weakening and alienating a key ally. Other actors have an
interest in seeing the documents published: Russia is an obvious example. A
major diplomatic reversal for the United States means a vacuum that Russia
could easily step into. Given the aggressive foreign policy in which the
Kremlin is engaged recently, we can at the very least expect it to try to take
advantage of the situation.
There is no evidence that Russia was in any way involved in the publication of
the cables, just like there is no evidence that Israel was involved, but there
is plenty of potential motivation. In a sense, that would be tit for tat: in
interviews with Russian newspapers in October, reported by The Christian
Science Monitor, Assange threatened to publish ''compromising material'' about
Russia's government. ''We are helped by the Americans, who pass on a lot of
material about Russia,'' he added.
Such threats are not taken lightly by Russia's elite, which has a long history
of suppressing internal dissent. Add to that the humiliation of the spy scandal
with the sleeper agents (of whom Anna Chapman attracted the most attention),
the continuous delays of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), and
the setbacks in the Russian-American ''reset,'' [9] and we have an explosive
mixture.
Yet to blame Russia based on circumstantial evidence also seems simplistic and
insufficient as an explanation. The severe response of the American
administration against WikiLeaks itself - the organization's US servers were
taken down, its ability to receive donations by credit card was taken away, and
Assange was arrested in Britain on highly controversial charges [10] - suggests
a high level of agitation, attested to by the fact that it tarnishes whatever
is left of Obama's image as a reformer.
Such anger, coming from a state that remains the only global superpower, seems
much more consistent with an internal rather than an external threat. As
Sreeram Chaulia writes, ''Assange knows too much because there are Americans
within the state paraphernalia who detest the seemingly endless military
intervention in Afghanistan-Pakistan and the pressures and backroom planning to
attack Iran ... The breaks in the ranks of the US ruling elites and
rank-and-file on the question of wars and threats of war are today able to vent
out and cut through the fog due to WikiLeaks.'' [11]
It is very difficult to say who is behind the release of the cables. In a
situation where the interests of several powerful international players and a
rogue organization [12] cross, there are many gray areas. This is also, in a
way, the main significance of the leak. State actors will adapt to it, if they
haven't already - thus, we shouldn't be surprised if we see Russia expanding
its positions vis-a-vis the United States, say, in Central Asia and
Afghanistan. [13] But it is unlikely that any single one of them orchestrated
the situation, as it is unlikely that any of them will be able to shape its
outcome single-handedly.
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