Did Some Good Come Out of Wiki-Leaks

One thing Wiki-leaks recent document dump may have inadvertantly done is blown away the liberal fiction that the United States has acted the bully in the Middle-East all this time and that our presence is not wanted in the region.

As it turns out, apparently the leaders of the surrounding Arab nations are just as creeped out by folks like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saddam Hussein as Western nations.  Arabs, as has been pointed out by historians and as many Arab commentators themselves have explained, the Arabs are basically businessmen. The political aspirations of tyrant powers like Iraq and Iran are destabilizing to the region. An unstable Middle-East is bad for business and many local Arab diplomats have, apparently, expressed their concern about Iran's leadership over the years, even to the point of suggesting the U.S. "cut off the head of the snake". 

Sadly, these concerns have all been expressed in private. Publicly, the leadership of Iran's neighbors have been conspicuously silent all these years. Liberal pundits and politicians have seized on this silence to criticize Republican presidents for becoming militarily involved in the region.  What has not been revealed clearly before the recent Wiki-leaks dump is how heavily the more peaceful Arab nations of the region depend on U.S. military might to back their own security.

They'd never say it, but secretly, I bet many Arab leaders (and a significant portion of the U.S. diplomatic corps) would really love it if Israel would bomb the heck out of Iran's nuclear facilities. That way the threat would be eliminated and everybody could blame the Israelis for "over-reacting" and make the the villains in the piece.

It appears from Wiki-leaks, that the U.S. understands how to play Islamo-politics better than most liberal pundits would ever admit.  The name of the game for the Arab nations in that volatile region is to get the U.S. or Israel to slap around the local bully-boys, while they register "official' disapproval for our actions. They are like the kids on the playground that won't challenge a bully for fear of attracting his attention to themselves.

In a region where people blow themselves up and you with them if you make them mad, it's little wonder local Arab leaders avoid criticizing thugs like Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. It's a good way to get yourself personally blown up.

Business people can't do business if you blow them up.  So a practical businessman wants to avoid that sort of thing and as we all learned on the playground in elementary school, the best way to avoid drawing the attention of bullies is to either remain silent or laugh at their jokes. Everyone is always relieved when the teacher shows up to enforce the rules.

Anti-American Wiki-leaks founder, Julian Assange, may have inadvertantly helped America in posting all those documents.  If that's the case, you can bet the documents will soon "disappear" or be universally ignored.  Can't have United States policy proved to have been correct, now can we? I'll bet old Julian is really unhappy about that.


Tom