“Three months after 9/11, every major Taliban city in Afghanistan had fallen – first Mazar-i-Sharif, then Kabul, finally Kandahar. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar were on the run. It looked as if the war was over, and the Americans and their Afghan allies had won,”  ABC news reminded America on May 31, 2010. The war was then in its 104th month, and had become America’s longest, if the Cold War isn’t counted. (Vietnam, the next longest, lasted 103 months.)

ABC did not add that that was when America should have got out; which it should have, with a warning that if any American or American interest were attacked again by terrorists based in Afghanistan, all hell would be loosed on it – a threat that should of course have been carried out if the warning had not been heeded.

The war is now in its 110th month. It’s been dragging on for more than 9 years.

Yesterday, December 14, 2010, the New York Times reported, under the headline Intelligence Reports Offer Dim Views of Afghan War:

The findings in the reports [one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan], called National Intelligence Estimates, represent the consensus view of the United States’ 16 intelligence agencies, as opposed to the military, and were provided last week to some members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.

They were described to the NYT “by a number of American officials who read the reports’ executive summaries”.

The military objects to the findings.

Pentagon and military officials …  say the reports were written by desk-bound Washington analysts who have spent limited time, if any, in Afghanistan and have no feel for the war. …

The dispute “reflects the longstanding cultural differences between intelligence analysts, whose job is to warn of potential bad news, and military commanders, who are trained to promote ‘can do’ optimism”, and it also “reflects how much the debate in Washington over the war is now centered on whether the United States can succeed in Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan”.

After years and billions spent trying to win the support of the Pakistanis, [military commanders] are now proceeding on the assumption that there will be limited help from them. The American commanders and officials readily describe the havens for [Taliban] insurgents in Pakistan as a major impediment to military operations. … American officials say Pakistan supports the insurgents as a proxy force in Afghanistan, preparing for the day the Americans leave.

But the US continues to send Pakistan about $2 billion in military and civilian aid each year.

“You’re not going to get to the point where the Taliban are gone and the border is perfectly controlled,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat who serves on the Armed Services Committee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in an interview on Tuesday.

Mr. Smith … predicted that Democrats in Congress would resist continuing to spend $100 billion annually on Afghanistan.

“We’re not going to be hanging out over there fighting these guys like we’re fighting them now for 20 years,” Mr. Smith said.

Fifteen years? Ten? Five? One? Why even one more day?

An article by geologist Jonathan DuHamel at Townhall contradicts the emotive propaganda put out by the sly IPCC on “global warming” and species extinction:

In their quest to control carbon dioxide emissions, together with the economic power that entails, climate alarmists are claiming that global warming will cause massive species extinctions. The geologic record, however, shows the opposite. Major extinctions are associated with ice ages and other cooling events. The current wildlife extinction rate is the lowest in 500 years according to the UN’s own World Atlas of Biodiversity. …

Warmists are shedding seas of crocodile tears over the polar bear species, which they claim may soon be extinct as its arctic habitat is becoming too warm to sustain it (because wicked mankind is making it so). But –

People who live in the Arctic know that polar bear populations have been increasing, mainly due to changes in hunting regulations. Native Inuit hunters say that “The growing population has become a real problem, especially over the last 10 years.”

The polar bear has been around for a very long time and somehow survived conditions that were warmer than now and even warmer than computer projections. …

Abundant research shows that warming increases the range for most terrestrial plants and animals, as well as for most marine creatures. Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes plants more water efficient and more robust.

Looking at the greater geologic record, we see that in the warming period subsequent to each ice age, life rebounded with more speciation and greater biodiversity. We have ample reason to believe this pattern will continue.

There you have it: everyone who cares about the planet and its teeming life has a duty to enlarge his carbon footprint.

We despise feminism.

A large part of the reason why is explained in an article by Caroline Glick (read it all here) from which we quote:

The feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women. It has been about advancing the Left’s social and political agenda against Western societies. It has been about castigating societies where women enjoy legal rights and protections as “structurally” discriminatory against women in order to weaken the legal, moral and social foundations of those societies. That is, rather than being about advancing the cause of women, to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women’s rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do with women.

So to a large degree, the feminist movement itself is a deception.

The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law. If feminism weren’t a hollow term, then prominent feminists should be the leaders of the anti-jihad movement. …

Leading feminist voices in the US and Europe remain unforgivably silent on the unspeakable oppression of women and girls in Islamic societies. And this cannot simply be attributed to a lack of interest in international affairs. Islamic subjugation and oppression of women happens in Western countries as well. Genital mutilation, forced marriage and other forms of abuse are widespread.

For instance, every year hundreds of Muslim women and girls in Western countries are brutally murdered by their male relatives in so-called “honor killings.”…

If all the feminist community’s policy of ignoring Islamic oppression of women did was keep it out of the headlines it would still be unforgivable. But the fact is that by not speaking of the central challenge to women’s rights in our times, the organized feminist movement, and the Left it is a part of, are abetting Islam’s unspeakable crimes against women and girls. …

Hundreds of millions of women and girls throughout the Islamic world are terrorized daily by everyone from their families to their judges.

“Being pro-women’s rights and being a feminist are increasingly mutually exclusive,” the author concludes.

We don’t speak much of rights, preferring to speak of freedom –  wanting to say “we are free to …” rather than “we have a right to …” ; but “human rights” is the cri de coeur of this chattering age. And we’ll accept it, and believe that those who cry it are truly humane when –  and only when –  all the self-proclaimed humanitarians raise an uproar in every land, West and East, North and South, and even in the glorified sewer called the United Nations, against women being subjugated, tormented and broken in body and mind, by the law of Islam.

Go here to see video footage of a woman being flogged in a public carpark in Sudan. Men stand about watching and laughing as she screams. The 17-year-old woman’s offense is reported to be that she wore trousers under her burka.

RedState reports on a fight over an important issue in New Jersey:

The fight erupted in May when [Governor Chris] Christie exercised his … prerogative to not re-appoint the liberal John E. Wallace to the New Jersey State Supreme Court.

As we have seen all too often at both the State and Federal level, liberals view the judiciary as a useful tool to undo anything they don’t like which is done by the legislature or, in this case, the governor. Therefore, Christie’s (absolutely legal) attempts to change the composition of the court were seen as a direct threat to their most sacred institution. Accordingly, the New Jersey Senate, led by Democrat Stephen Sweeney, refused to allow a vote to confirm Anne Patterson, Christie’s nominee to replace Wallace. Thus far everything that had occurred in this fight could be chalked up to political posturing.

However, New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner then took a step which raised the specter of possible coordination between Rabner and Sweeney by unconstitutionally elevating Edwin Stern, a Court of Appeals judge to the New Jersey Supreme Court (thus bypassing Christie’s right to nominate the next appointee, and the Senate’s vote on confirmation of that nominee), despite the fact that the New Jersey Supreme Court had a five-member quorum even in Wallace’s absence. This naked power grab was so appalling that McGreevey appointee Justice Roberto Rivera-Soto stunned observers on Friday by noting, at the end of a published opinion, that he would be abstaining from all decisions as long as Stern remained on the Court. …

In typically Orwellian fashion, the New Jersey Democrats have accused Christie throughout the process of playing politics with the Court. Justice Rivera-Soto has exposed very plainly that it is really Sweeney (working hand in hand with Rabner) and the rest of the New Jersey Democrats who are playing politics with Justice.

We’d like to see Governor Christie as a candidate for the presidency.

This video shows why, and so does this one.

If he wins this battle, he might convince a lot of voters nation-wide that he’s made of the right stuff for the supreme office.

Obama finds the job of being president too hard, hands over to Bill Clinton, and bolts home to Mother Michelle.

From a first-hand account:

Here’s what I saw. I saw a current president who has never looked less interested in doing his job. I also saw a former president who never lost interest in doing that job. Obama’s demeanor and body language suggested that he’d rather be anywhere but where he was, and then he followed through and actually bolted for the door. Clinton’s demeanor was that of a passionate wonk trying to sell a policy he actually cared about, that he thought would be good for the country. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t even his own policy that he was selling.

I saw a president who … ceded his job to his predecessor. …

It was far and away the weirdest presidential press briefing I’ve ever seen. Where Obama goes from here is anyone’s guess.

Update: Real Clear Politics has a video of the spectacle. Obama actually interrupts Clinton delivering an answer, to say his bit about keeping the first lady waiting, before hitting the exit. Clinton says, “I don’t want to make her mad, just go” and waves POTUS on his way …

Most commentators on this incident have interpreted it as a tacit admission by Obama that he cannot defend the tax agreement he reached with congressional Republicans.

It is that, but we wonder if it isn’t also the most vivid sign yet that Obama cannot cope emotionally or intellectually with the job he was elected to do as president.

Is he in the early stages of mental derangement?

In our post immediately below, The cables show…, we said we were waiting to hear of a single person who has been harmed by the WikiLeaks cables.

Our wait is over.

Ken Blackwell reports in his Townhall column that Hillary Clinton had a very bad week as a direct result of the documents leak.

Even the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza noticed. He designated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as having “the worst week in Washington”, a week ago. This is something of a comedown among liberals, who have been fawning over Hillary. …

He notes the damage done to Hillary’s image by the WikiLeaks revelations. Those leaked cables—those undiplomatic diplomatic documents—show what he calls “a chatty and at times petty State Department offering strikingly candid assessments of the relative strengths and weaknesses of various world leaders.”

That is putting it most diplomatically. These leaks are devastating.

As former Speaker Newt Gingrich says, they show an administration wholly incapable of protecting classified documents. Why, Newt asks, does a low-level Army private have access to a quarter million classified documents? Who gave this grunt a security clearance? Former UN Ambassador John Bolton chimes in: This WikiLeaks scandal shows an administration so weak, so disorganized, that it does not understand the first thing about national security.

We’re trying to look sad about Hillary’s distress.

More WikiLeaks information that it’s good for us to know:

On Iran and North Korea here.

The release of confidential diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks (and the pending release of thousands more) has undoubtedly done damage to our ability to win the trust of informants, foreign officials, and intelligence services. [We doubt it – JB.] There is ample reason to be angry over this scandal, but there is also reason to be encouraged. The content of the documents shows the roof is collapsing on the Iranian and North Korean regimes and that a coalition has formed to support regime change for both.

The begging among the Arabs for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program has been widely covered, but their appetite to go even further and support regime change has not been. …

The cables also show optimism about the prospects for a policy of regime change. The chief of Kuwait’s military intelligence comments on the instability in Iran, and says that an event like the arrest of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi could spark an uprising that ends the regime. President Aliyev of Azerbaijan is documented as having “viewed the situation as very tense within Iran and believed it could erupt at any time.”

The U.S. is also pressured by Meir Dagan, the director of Israel’s legendary Mossad intelligence service, to make moves to support regime change by supporting minorities like the Azeris, Baluchis, and Kurds, as well as the student democracy movement. Dagan is recorded as being “sure” that the regime could be toppled with U.S. support. That comes from a cable in August 2007, well before the uprising in the summer of 2009 following Ahmadinejad’s so-called “re-election.” Dagan’s confidence in fomenting regime change has surely been strengthened since then.

A cable from June 2009 reports that several Iranian contacts say that there is a “surge in Baluchi violence in the border area” so severe that the government may be losing control of the region. Violent clashes by Baluchis and other minorities have grown markedly since then. The Obama administration has put distance between the U.S. and the Baluchi militants, condemning their attacks and listing the Jundullah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, as was previously done to the Free Life Party of Kurdistan.

Another document shows that a rare opportunity to undermine the regime will come soon. A source was told by former President Rafsanjani in 2009 that Ayatollah Khamenei was in the last stages of his life and could die from cancer within months. Once the supreme leader dies, the regime will face its biggest fracture since 1979 as the battle over his successor ensues.

Altogether, the cables give good reason to believe that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, and Lebanon would all support military action and even a strategy of regime change towards Iran. Yemen, Oman, Algeria, Morocco, and other countries can also be expected to quietly back it. …

Europe can also be counted on to support such a strategy. A cable from September 2009 records a French diplomat as saying: “The current Iranian regime is effectively a fascist state and the time has come to decide on next steps.” …

The cables also report on the Iranians’ failures in Iraq. …

The WikiLeaks disclosures also paint a disturbing picture for the North Korean regime. The cables show that South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Chun Yung-woo was told by two senior Chinese officials that the leadership of their country was increasingly supportive of a united Korea with Seoul as the capital. … [and] after the story broke, Chinese officials in Europe anonymously said that their country supported a united Korea “in the long term.” …

The WikiLeaks document dump, though its negative affects overshadow anything positive [do they?– JB], shows that the West does not have to accept the Iranian and North Korean regimes. If they survive over the long-term, it will be because the U.S. allowed it.

On the climate change scam here.

Just a year ago, the Climategate … files’ release probably led to the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference — to which the Obama administration had committed no little amount of political capital — and certainly contributed to the public’s increasing skepticism about the supposed consensus of climate science. …

Almost exactly a year later, Julius Assange and the WikiLeaks website revealed another collection … [this time of] cable traffic among American diplomats all over the world …

On December 3rd, the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom published one of a series of stories based on the cables, this one titled “WikiLeaks cables reveal how U.S. manipulated climate accord.” The United States really was applying considerable political and diplomatic pressure on other players; the scientific “consensus” had long since been subsumed by the pressure to score a political win. As the Guardian put it:

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage. … bribes ….. no mean amount of money … [of] tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. …

This pressure, however, wasn’t limited to financial transactions: the United States was developing intelligence on the other participants in the conferences. …

The lesson of the WikiLeaks climate cables turns out to be very much like the lesson of the Climategate files last year. The most surprising aspect of this story is how thoroughly the cables confirm the dark suspicions of climate skeptics.

On Iran and Latin America here.

The WikiLeaks sabotage campaign against the US gave us a first person account of the magnitude of Ahmadinejad’s electoral fraud.

In a cable from the US Embassy in Turkmenistan dated 15 June 2009, or three days after Ahmadinejad stole the Iranian presidential elections, the embassy reported a conversation with an Iranian source regarding the true election results. The Iranian source referred to the poll as a “coup d’etat.”

The regime declared Ahmadinejad the winner with 63% of the vote. According to the Iranian source, he received less than a tenth of that amount. As the cable put it, “based on calculations from [opponent Mir Hossain] Mousavi’s campaign observers who were present at polling stations around the country and who witnessed the vote counts, Mousavi received approximately 26 million (or 61%) of the 42 million votes cast in Friday’s election, followed by Mehdi Karroubi (10-12 million)…. Ahmadinejad received ‘a maximum of 4-5 million votes,’ with the remainder going to Mohsen Rezai.” …

In April 2009 US President Barack Obama sat through a 50-minute anti-American rant by [Daniel] Ortega [Nicaragua’s Sandinista president] at the Summit of the Americas. He then sought out Chavez for a photo-op. In his own address Obama distanced himself from US history, saying, “We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations.”

Unfortunately, Obama’s attempted appeasement hasn’t done any good. Nicaragua invaded neighboring Costa Rica last month along the San Juan River. Ortega’s forces are dredging the river as part of an Iranian-sponsored project to build a canal along the Isthmus of Nicaragua that will rival the Panama Canal.

Even Obama’s ambassador in Managua admits that Ortega remains deeply hostile to the US. In a cable from February illicitly published by WikiLeaks, Ambassador Robert Callahan argued that Ortega’s charm offensive towards the US was “unlikely to portend a new, friendly Ortega with whom we can work in the long-term.”

A wealth of vital information poured out for us through the conduit of WikiLeaks!

And we’re still waiting to hear of a single specific instance of any real harm being done to an individual anywhere, or convincingly to the United States as a whole, as a result of WikiLeaks’ “scandalous” operation.

Lord Chrisopher Monckton reports in near despair from the UN’s climate conference at Cancun, Mexico:

I usually add some gentle humor when I report. Not today. Read this and weep. Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself. No one in the mainstream media will tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not bloody care.

He goes on to explain how –

the UN Convention’s Secretariat will become a world government directly controlling hundreds of global, supranational, regional, national and sub-national bureaucracies. It will receive the vast sum of taxpayers’ money ostensibly paid by the West to the Third World for adaptation to the supposed adverse consequences of imagined (and imaginary) “global warming”.

Hundreds of these “new interlocking bureaucracies answerable to the world-government Secretariat will vastly extend its power and reach”. (And these will be in addition to multiple new bureaucracies in every one of the 193 states which are parties to the Convention.) Here are some of them:

• a Body to Clarify Assumptions and Conditions in National Greenhouse-Gas Emission Reductions Pledges
• a Negotiating Body for an Overall Level of Ambition for Aggregate Emission Reductions and Individual Targets
• a Body for the Process to Develop Modalities and Guidelines for the Compliance Process
• a Body to Supervise the Process for Understanding Diversity of Mitigation Actions Submitted and Support Needed
• a Body to Develop Modalities for the Registry of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions
• an Office to Conduct a Work Program for Development of Various Modalities and Guidelines
• a Forum on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures
• a Work Program Office to Address the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures
• a Body to Review the Needs of Developing Countries for Financial Resources to Address Climate Change and Identify Options for Mobilization of Those Resources
• a Body to Launch a Process to Further Define the Roles and Functions of the New Body to Assist the Conference of the Parties in Exercising its Functions with respect to the Financial Mechanism
• a Network of National, Regional, Sectoral and International Technology Centers, Networks, Organization and Initiatives
• an Expert Workshop on the Operational Modalities of the Technology Mechanism
• a Work Program Body for Policy Approaches and Positive Incentives on Issues Relating to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries
• a Body to Implement a Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures
• a Body to Develop Modalities for the Operationalization of the Work Program on the Impact of the Implementation of Response Measures.

How do you develop a modality? How negotiate a level of ambition? How supervise a process for understanding? What are mitigation actions and how do you diversify them? What does a forum do with an impact? Why do you need a body to define the roles and functions of a body to assist in exercising its functions? A network of networks? A network of initiatives? A work program body for incentives on issues? A body to implement a work program on an impact? What is operationalization, and what might its modalities be, and why does it need a body to develop them?

It’s typical of the gobbledygook that substitutes for thought on the political left.

Somehow, amidst such dense clouds of unknowing, these minds are negotiating a level of ambition to supervise a process to launch another process that will function as a body controlling all the networks of networks to establish a supreme body that will govern the world, operationalize world-wide economic redistribution, and reduce all emissions except those from their own mouths in order to save the earth from the evil depredations that human existence inevitably wreaks on it. And they themselves, the Elect, will sit in the seats of power and command the weather and control every aspect of the lives of every living man woman and child to force them to keep compliant and healthy, if also rather cold and perhaps somewhat hungry, for as long as the Elect allow each of them to pollute the earth with his or her existence.

The Elect of the Elect constitute The Secretariat, which, Lord Monckton says, will have the power to compel nation states to “perform their obligations under the climate-change Convention”.

It may claim that power, but how will it enforce its will? If there plans for an international SS, it is still being kept secret.

Is there no opposition from any countries or groups to this plan for International Communism under a World Government?

Yes, there is some. Lord Monckton reports:

At the insistence of sensible nation states such as the United States [a surprise, considering the collectivist and warmist bent of the present administration], the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada, and Italy, the Cancun outcome acknowledges that The Process is causing, and will cause, considerable economic damage, delicately described in the Chairman’s note as “unintended side-effects of implementing climate-change response measures”. The solution? Consideration of the catastrophic economic consequences of the Secretariat’s heroically lunatic decisions will fall under the control of – yup – the Secretariat.

Some supranational organizations perceive a threat to their interests:

In particular, the World Trade Organization has been getting antsy about the numerous aspects of the Secretariat’s proposals that constitute restrictions on international trade.

This objection is dealt with by the Chairman  of the “Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” by simply recording, in the same “note” that names the new bodies, a “decision” that “the Secretariat’s policies are not restrictive of trade”.

So the Secretariat will decide, and reality will obey.

This note, Lord Monckton writes, “reflects what the Secretariat now confidently expects to get away with.”

He stresses that the agenda spells the doom of democracy.

Forget government of the people, by the people, for the people. Forget the principle of “no taxation without representation” that led to the very foundation of the United States. The provisions for the democratic election of the new, all-powerful, legislating, tax-raising world-government Secretariat by the peoples of the world may be summarized in a single word: None.

While we accept that everything he tells us is true, we feel less alarmed than Lord Monckton. We think the myth of manmade global warming is fading away since the Climategate papers proved the science to be a scam, and with that pretext for world government gone, it will be some time before the sinister Secretariat and its black-winged warmist minions conjure up another.

And the people are on to them now. Or so we hope.

Chorus: The United Nations must be destroyed!

“Suddenly, it’s not about secret information anymore, or diplomatic relations. It’s about control. The atmosphere chills.”

So Diana West writes on the continuing Wikileaks affair in a Townhall article which needs to be read in full. (We have quoted her before on this subject in our post Thanks to WikiLeaks? December  3, 2010.)

WikiLeaks is exposing the way our government conducts “business.” It is not a pretty process. …

The rock-bottom worst of the revelations … shows Uncle Sam patronizing the American people, lying to us about fundamental issues that any democracy catastrophically attacked and supporting armies abroad ever since doesn’t merely deserve to know, but needs to know. Our democracy demands it, if it is to remain a democracy.

Most pundits, certainly on the Right, disagree. As Commentary editor Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote in the WSJ this week: WikiLeaks “is not informing our democracy but waging war on its ability to conduct diplomacy and defend itself.”

Funny, but I feel more informed — and particularly about what a rotten job the government knows it’s doing in conducting diplomacy and waging war on democracy’s behalf. I know more about the government’s feckless accommodation of incomparable corruption in Afghanistan; its callousness toward Pakistani government support for the Taliban and other groups fighting our soldiers in Afghanistan; its inability to prevail upon “banker” China to stop facilitating the military rise of Iran … and its failures to prevail upon aid-recipient Pakistan to allow us to secure its vulnerable nuclear assets.

One running theme that emerges from the leaked cables is that the U.S. government consistently obscures the identity of the nation’s foes, for example, depicting the hostile peoples of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States as “allies.” It’s not that such hostility is a secret, or even constitutes news. But the cables reveal that our diplomats actually recognize that these countries form the financial engine that drives global jihad … But they, with the rest of the government, kept the American people officially in the dark.

Then came WikiLeaks, Internet publisher of leaked information, prompting the question: What is more important — the information theft that potentially harms government power, or the knowledge contained therein that might salvage our national destiny? …

The body politic should be electrified by the fact, as revealed by the leaked cables, that nations from Pakistan to Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia are regularly discussed as black holes of infinite corruption into which American money gushes, either through foreign aid or oil revenue, and unstaunched and unstaunchable sources of terror or terror-financing. If this were to get out — and guess what, it did — the foreign policy of at least the past two administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, would be unmasked as a colossal failure.

And maybe that’s what behind the acute distress over WikiLeaks. Last week, I put it down to political embarrassment; this week, a new, more disturbing factor has emerged. The state power structure, the establishment more or less, believes itself to be threatened. Its fearful response has been quite startling. First, there were calls for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange’s execution; these have simmered down to calls for trial. Amazon and PayPal cut off service to the WikiLeaks website. Then, in a twist or kink perhaps beyond even Orwell’s ken, Assange was arrested without bond this week on an Interpol warrant over very fishy-sounding charges about “unprotected” sex in Sweden — a country, we may now ironically note, of draconian laws governing sexual intercourse and no laws whatsoever governing violent Islamic no-gone-zones.

Those two harpies – a pair of celebrity groupies? – who conspired together to get a man they’d chased after arrested on absurd charges under ridiculous Swedish sex laws, are contemptible, and the Swedes who made and enforce such laws are beneath contempt.

Assange has not committed an act of treason since he is not an American citizen or resident in the US. If he is guilty of espionage for publishing the cables someone stole, then so is the New York Times, and if he is extradited and prosecuted for it, the responsible NYT people should be too.

We have yet to hear if any person has been exposed to danger or actually harmed by the leaks, and no cables that we have read could so expose anyone. We have been told by a commenter, CEM, that we “lack understanding as to the seriousness of the Wikileaks release of classified documents and information”, that “there  does not have to be a direct leaking of names to expose agents and sources”, as “often, the information alone can be innocuous”, but “the content and context of the data alone can provide clues to counter agents and governments as to the identities of agents and sources that can place them in grave danger”. He may be right. Some of us have, however, had some years of experience dealing with organizations concerned with international affairs and have learnt something from them (enough to state confidently that by far the greater part of “secret information”, about 95%, is from open sources, and of the remaining 5% very little is ever useful). In our judgment, the claim that these cables could harm the United States’ foreign relations, implicate secret friends among enemies, or dissuade any foreign power from dealing with the US if it needs to, would be hard to substantiate.

We respect the views of those who think otherwise. We share their patriotic instincts. We have thought long and hard about the whole affair (giving special consideration to the reasonable points made by Fernando Montenegro – see our post More on Wikileaks, December 4, 2010). From what we can discover about Julian Assange we do not think he would be on our side of most issues. If the publication of the cables really harms any individual, we wouldn’t think of defending it. If it has damaged the United States in any way that we would recognize as damage, we would be as angry as the angriest. But as far as we can see now, and knowing that we risk the disagreement of some of our highly valued readers, we line up with Diana West. Our libertarian instincts have been strongly roused. We wonder if some of our more libertarian readers feel and think the same way. We hope all our readers will consider our arguments as carefully as we try to consider theirs.

The WikiLeaks operation could be put to permanent good effect – if only our fellow conservatives who hold liberty to be the highest value would learn the real lesson from it, and let the information they have been given make a difference in the future to the sort of people they trust to steer the ship of state.

It should ensure that never again is there another captain like Obama.

And that no administration and Department of State goes on treating citizens like kids who must be kept from knowing what they’re doing.

Michael Gerson, a conservative writer, fulsomely praises the Obama administration and the State Department for what he considers a triumph of US foreign policy, a referendum to be held in southern Sudan on its secession.

The Obama administration … is on the verge of a major diplomatic achievement in Sudan. Barring technical failures that delay the vote, or unexpected violence, South Sudan will approve an independence referendum on Jan. 9. Six months later, a new flag will rise, a new anthem will be played. It is a rare, risky, deeply American enterprise: midwifing the birth of a new nation. …

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been pushing to elevate the issue to the presidential level, demanding, according to one official, “one team, one fight.” In August, President Obama declared that Denis McDonough, then the chief of staff on the National Security Council and now deputy national security adviser, would coordinate a unified government response. The administration’s common approach, dubbed “the road map,” publicly promised the regime in Khartoum a series of carrots — reviewing its status on the state sponsors of terrorism list, beginning the lifting of sanctions and starting discussions on debt relief — in exchange for allowing the south to go quietly. …

Elements of the regime in Khartoum seem prepared for sullen acceptance of southern independence …

Every diplomatic achievement is rewarded by new complexities. Between the independence referendum in January and full independence on July 9, 2011, a variety of issues — concerning borders, citizenship, security and the distribution of oil revenues — will need to be resolved. …  South Sudan will require considerable help to avoid the fate of a failed state — particularly to build its capacity to govern and fight corruption. … 

But even partial diplomatic successes are worth celebrating — and this is less partial than most. Assuming the last lap of a long race is completed, southern independence will allow these long-suffering people to govern and defend themselves … And southern sovereignty will permanently limit the ability of Khartoum to do harm in a vast region it has harmed for too long.

The most timely message sent by this achievement concerns the nature of the diplomatic task. It was the intention of recent WikiLeaks disclosures to reveal the names of American diplomats and expose their malign influence in the world. Well, here is a leak of my own. People such as McDonough, Michelle Gavin and Samantha Power [see here and here]  in the White House, along with Johnnie Carson, Scott Gration [see here] and Princeton Lyman at the State Department, are employing American power to noble purpose. I mention their names (none of them secret) because they represent how skilled, effective government officials can shape history, improve the lives of millions and bring honor to the country they serve.

This is not only counting chickens before they’re hatched, but celebrating their surpassing excellence before the eggs are even laid.

True, Gerson touches on possible problems and set-backs, some of them potentially disastrous, but his delight overcomes all doubt.

It would be highly desirable for the Christian and animist south to separate from the Muslim north, but will it really be achieved bloodlessly? We should wait to see. And if the south’s independence is achieved, will it be safe from the terrible persecution by the north that it has suffered from for centuries? Will “southern sovereignty  … permanently limit the ability of Khartoum to do harm in a vast region it has harmed for too long”, as Gerson so confidently asserts?

And the question should be asked, is it just – or sound policy – for Sudan, ruled by the blood-soaked tyrant President Omar Bashir, to be taken off the list of countries that sponsor terrorism when he himself is one of the most monstrous and persistent terrorists, persecutors, and mass murderers in the world?

One might say that it is worth doing, even if unjust, if it is the price that must be paid for the safety of the southern Sudanese. But will Bashir stick to the deal?  The answer is bound up with the question of whether or not the International Criminal Court’s warrant for his arrest, for crimes against humanity and war crimes, will be cancelled. A cancellation is not one of the carrots he’s been offered, and it may not be in the power of the US administration to offer it. But it is what Bashir wants more than anything else.

It’s worth listening to an opinion very different from Gerson’s. Here’s a regional Islamic view, from the current internet issue of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram:

The ICC arrest warrant on Al-Bashir is taking its toll on Sudan on more than one level. It has …  impeded a possible solution of the Darfur crisis, for the Darfur insurgents are in no mood to negotiate with a president who’s been indicted as a war criminal. Even before the warrant was issued, Khartoum was having trouble reaching a deal on Darfur. Now the prospects are indeed dire.

As for the self-determination referendum, slated for 9 January 2011, no happy ending is likely to develop. Incensed by the warrant, Al-Bashir’s government may try to disrupt the referendum. Why? Because if they allowed the south to secede, the international community may be emboldened and press harder for the implementation of ICC rulings, or try to coerce the Sudanese government into resolving the problems in Darfur …

The hardliners with Al-Bashir’s party, the National Congress, believe that the secession of the south would be the thin end of the wedge. …

Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman Taha, who took part recently in discussions concerning Sudan’s future in New York, says that the ICC warrant on Al-Bashir should be rescinded. He also calls for sanctions to be removed and Sudanese debts to be written off.

The international community has so far declined to make such sweeping concessions, but it has offered smaller gestures. … Sudan was told that it may be removed from the terror list within months. But, for now at least, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for the ICC warrant to be cancelled.

There is always the possibility that Sudan may offer concessions on the south in the hope of getting the warrant removed. …

What makes the warrant such a delicate issue is not just that Al-Bashir’s future is at stake. Two other Sudanese have been indicted by the court: Humanitarian Affairs [sic] Minister Ahmed Haroun and Janjaweed leader Ali Abdel-Rahman. … Many other Sudanese officials fear that they would be next. If they allow Al-Bashir to fall, the chances are more heads are going to roll.

Sudanese presidential advisor Ghazi Salaheddin is dismissive of what the international community has so far offered Sudan. …

Sudan is being asked to hold the elections on time without much regard to the referendum’s crucial repercussions or the fact that it may lead to secession and war simultaneously …

In return (for helping with the referendum), Sudan was promised “six export licences for American companies working in agriculture and health,” Salaheddin noted. Then, once the country is divided, the president will still have to turn himself in to the ICC. Not exactly the arrangement Sudan was hoping for.

Salaheddin said that such offers debase the referendum, for they turn it from a matter of principle into a business proposition or worse, a bargaining chip in US foreign policy. …

Sudanese writer Tharwat Qassem maintains that the abrogation of the warrant on Al-Bashir is the sole concern for Sudan’s National Congress. Removing Sudan from the terror list doesn’t mean much. And the lifting of sanctions for Khartoum is beside the point. Also, allowing Khartoum to import agricultural equipment and computers, as Washington did recently, is a joke.

The cancellation of the warrant is the “only carrot the National Congress craves,” Qassem said. But the price for revoking the warrant would be high. For starters, Khartoum will have to promise to facilitate the birth of a new state in south Sudan.

Al-Bashir may be willing to do just that, according to Qassem. “The statements in which Al-Bashir says that the loss of the south is not the end of the world is a step in this direction.”

It is true that the loss of the south may not be the end of the world. But it may mean that Al-Bashir would tighten his hold on power indefinitely. This is something that many lobbyists in the West, including human rights groups, don’t want to see happen. …

So nothing is cut and dried, not even the carrots. The referendum may well go ahead in January, and – just as in Afghan and Iraqi elections – there may be a huge and excited turn-out for it; but what then results is not predictable. There’s too much ominous doubt in Khartoum to allow bragging confidence in Washington, D.C., and Gerson’s applause is premature.

[See also this article at PajamasMedia: the iniquitous rulers of Sudan are already reacting by intensifying the jihad.]