How dare they reveal these vital, yet completely trivial documents?

There's a special place in hell reserved for people who pretend that the Wikileaks cablegate-situation is somehow uninteresting, that there's nothing new in it, that everybody who follows the news knows these things. This is often paradoxically coupled to the idea that Julian Assange should be killed and that Wikileaks should be shut down, have their assets frozen, put on the terrorist watch list or bombed, possibly all at the same time. (An attitude excellently summed up in this cartoon.)

While a lot of the Wikileaks info has been conjectured already, the fact is that Wikileaks gives us hard evidence of many of these things for the first time. A large number of speculative suggestions have moved into the domain of fact. That's simply incontrovertible. The three last Wikileaks give us a systematic understanding of the workings, actions and sensory apparatus of American empire.

But more to the point, there's tons of new and interesting information. If you really think that there's nothing interesting about this, you're quite simply not understanding what just happened. Or, more likely, being unusually and purposefully obtuse. There's a great comment in The Economist's Democracy in America-blog which is worth reading in its entirety. Here's a quote:

Greg Mitchell's catalogue of reactions to the leaked cables is a trove of substantive information. For example, drawing on the documents made available by WikiLeaks, the ACLU reports that the Bush administration "pressured Germany not to prosecute CIA officers responsible for the kidnapping, extraordinary rendition and torture of German national Khaled El-Masri", a terrorism suspect dumped in Albania once the CIA determined it had nabbed a nobody. I consider kidnapping and torture serious crimes, and I think it's interesting indeed if the United States government applied pressure to foreign governments to ensure complicity in the cover-up of it agents' abuses. In any case, I don't consider this gossip.

But that's really just the beginning. Spying on the UN leadership and Ban Ki-Moon? Funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to transparently corrupt Afghan leaders? Projecting imperial power through Pakistan in the most volatile and nuclear-enabled region in the world? Secretly bombing non-combatants in Yemen? These things are not okay. Has the world become so desensitised to American unilateralism that these completely flagrant violations of international law and standards of good international relations that these things can just breeze on through with a shrug and an oh-whatever?

I'm hoping that the Wikileaks revelations will eventually prove to change our relationship to the US. There's been an unbelievable naivety about Euro-US relations for decades, also here in Norway. Hopefully this will mean that we can finally have some realism about what the United States are and what they do when they act in the world.

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Update: Two other interesting comments I've seen on this. The first is a short blog post by The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, who writes about the weirdness of the focus on Assange:

(...) but would arresting Assange really put an end to Wikileaks or something like it? The point, surely, is that Assange is to Wikileaks as bin Laden is to al Qaeda or Mark Zuckerberg is to Facebook.

The "culprit" is the Internet, and how it facilitates asymmetrical power and transparency and removes any individual's responsibility for that transparency and asymmetry. No single editor or newspaper editor had to take the hit for this. No one could stop it. Even if every MSM outlet refused to publish these, the blogosphere would soon swarm over downloads which could be shifted from server to server.

Sullivan is spot on. The ability to keep massive secrets is starting to have higher and higher transaction costs. And massive secrets will necessarily become more and more expensive and short-lived.

The second thing is something buried in this short comment by Matt Yglesias of ThinkProgress:

For the third time in a row, a WikiLeaks document dump has conclusively demonstrated that an awful lot of US government confidentiality is basically about nothing. There’s no scandal here and there’s no legitimate state secret. It’s just routine for the work done by public servants and public expense in the name of the public to be kept semi-hidden from the public for decades.

Obviously I completely disagree about this not being a scandal. But I think Yglesias is absolutely right about the hollowness of the secret parts of the state. The revelations, when they come, are always less threatening or immediate than we think. Outside threats are still a means of dousing political opposition across the industrialised world.

Politics in the time of cholera

They drink too much coffee up in the North of Norway. So now I can't sleep and I'm reading through old tabs.

I've had this moving and unsettling article in the NY Times open in my browser for two weeks now, since the morning after we returned from Africa. It deals with the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe which Mugabe seems to be largely dealing with by hoping it goes away.

Does anyone even remember cholera anymore? Cholera is a gastrointestinal bacterial disease, fatal in roughly 50 % of untreated cases. It is one of the most unpleasant ways of dying known to man: basically death by diarrhea-induced dehydration, with victims evacuating - that's the clinical term - as much as 30 % of body mass in a matter of hours. It is simultaneously an easily cureable disease. It is one of those many "easily preventable causes" which kills 30.000 children every day, according to UNICEF.

Treatment for cholera is oral rehydration: drinking lots of water with salt and sugar in it. Also, washing your hands a lot. I told you it was easy. Not so easy when your government isn't doing it's job though. Not so easy when you don't have clean running water.

The failure to stop the death of many hundreds, possibly thousands, of people, is an indication of the profound, criminal incompetence of the Mugabe government. How criminal? Well, Oxfam & Unicef indicates that there will be roughly 60.000 cases by the end of January alone, and that 10 % of these will be fatal. The disease is still spreading.

A cholera outbreak is a good indicator of a failed state in two ways: 1) how it spreads and 2) how it is treated.

1) The disease spreads orally, via faecal matter. Basically the faeces of sick people needs to get into the drinking water. This represents a collapse of infrastructure: the government is not securing the water supply, containing and disposing of sewage and preparing properly for the rainy season (the direct cause of the outbreak, "leading to contaminated faeces being washed into water sources, as well as providing readily available but contaminated water", according to the excellent Wikipedia page on the subject. Incredibly, the administration is blaming the outbreak on the colonial days, despite having responsibility for the water & sewage system for almost 30 years. A spokesman is also claiming that the British are deliberately causing it as an act of genocide, instilling great confidence in the competence of the Mugabe regime.

2) Since treatment of cholera is simple, it should be possible to contain and deal with an outbreak provided one has a functioning health care system. It has not been remotely contained. It has not been dealt with (in fact, it seems to be spreading, with cases now being reported in Mozambique, Botswana, Zambia and South Africa). Unpleasant to think I was one day's travel by car away from a cholera epidemic.

Because of the economic crisis in the country, many of the country's hospitals have been forced to close in the middle of an epidemic. They can't buy supplies or pay staff b/c of lack of public funds and hyperinflation. Bad timing.

The crisis has intensified calls for the removal of pathological asshole Robert Mugabe from power in Zimbabwe. As well it should. Not dealing with this means you're not dealing with the most basic business of governing: securing health, security and care for the community.

So that was two weeks ago. The latest development is that two days before christmas, the US announced it had now changed its official stance from a nose-holding, but Mugabe-tolerant policy to an actively anti-Mugabe one. An American envoy calls Mugabe "a man who's lost it". Basically, they are saying they will no longer support any kind of power sharing deal (the deal which is still being negotiated now) that does not involve kicking Mugabe out on his octogenarian ass.

The problem is that the current interrim government in South Africa (since Thabo Mbeki stepped down a few months back) remains Zimbabwe's linchpin ally in the region. It is still trying to get the old power-sharing deal through. The one good thing about the almost certain fact of a Jacob Zuma presidency is that he might put renewed pressure on Mugabe to leave office. One of the very few policy differences between Zuma and Mbeki (notorious rivals) is on the Zimbabwe question, where Zuma has voiced slightly stronger objections to Mugabe. Though not a lot, mind you, and also, this is a man who believes that you can avoid AIDS by having a "vigorous shower" after unprotected sex. Good thing he won't be sitting at the top of one of the most HIV-infected countries in the world. But I digress.

In short, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish someone would magically create a completely new government in Zimbabwe as well as a functioning health system. That seems to be the best solution right now. Anyone out there have any strong connections in the underworld?

Updated to add: Just learned that the Nordic foreign ministers have released a statement calling for mr Mugabe's head on a pike (I paraphrase).

Real, Actual People That I Have Met Being Killed By Terrorism

The Taliban launched an attack at the Serena hotel in Kabul a few hours ago. The Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre was staying at the hotel and attending a meeting at the time. He was one floor below the suicide bomber, but was not injured. A Norwegian reporter from the Dagbladet newspaper was killed by gunfire. I've seen both of these men in real life. Støre just two months ago.

Foreign policy as we experience it is mostly just ink on a page or pixels on a screen, but suddenly it zooms up very very close. The accelerating speed at which the world can go from being very far away to killing someone standing next to you seems to be rapidly becoming how we think, hohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifw we have to think, of globalisation. Even in this, the most shielded and padded corner of the world. But there is something hypocritical about this, isn't there? About how important it suddenly gets when it's people we've vaguely seen in the middle distance sometime?

The UN Secretary General is saying Støre was the target, and this shows that we must strengthen security. The Taliban are saying they didn't even know Støre was in the building, they were just gunning for NATO personell in general, but oh by the way would we mind terribly pulling our troops out of Afghanistan?

Update: Daily Kos has a post, too with more info in English on Norwegian Afghanistan policy and some background on the hotel.