Jack Granatstein shrinks us in the Ottawa Citizen:

Alice in Wonderland is right
…
The purloined WikiLeaks cables [lots more here] have caused a sensation all over the world, and Canada has been no exception. The former head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Jim Judd, told a senior visiting U.S. State Department official in July 2008 that Canadians had an ” Alice in Wonderland world view,” suffered from “knee-jerk anti-Americanism,” and would fall into “paroxysms of moral outrage, a Canadian specialty” at the drop of a hat [see "Speaking truth to power"].  Judd had much more to say, but these comments are worth consideration.
…
Alongside anti-Americanism goes the moral outrage of which Judd spoke. Canada may not be a military or economic superpower like the U.S., but in Canadians’ eyes, it is a moral superpower. We are peacekeepers, we say, ignoring the facts of history, and the Americans wage wars. We love the UN and they don’t.

Gerald Caplan expressed this moral idiocy perfectly in his online article on the Globe and Mail website on Nov. 26, enumerating all of America’s “permanent wars for peace,” even including the two world wars where victory could not have been won without the U.S. Caplan’s granddaughter, to whom he addressed his lament, would have been speaking German or Russian without the United States [see "Raging anti-Americanism, or, the Canadian mental disorder/Inferiority complex Update].

Add up Canadian anti-Americanism and the national assumption of moral superiority, and it amounts to an Alice in Wonderland world view. Canada did its share in the Cold War and it has done more than its share in Afghanistan, but grudgingly. How much better if the money wasted on defence spending had gone for day care or better medicare. That there would have been only a Soviet-style wasteland everywhere if the United States and the other democracies had not stood together against Moscow is scarcely considered. That Islamism today threatens the West is only dimly perceived.

As Alice said, “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would.”

Jim Judd had it exactly right, but politicians have already called his remarks “whining” and he is lucky that he has retired from the public service. Judd’s punishment for telling the truth could only have been dismissal.

Historian J.L. Granatstein is a senior research fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute.

Mark
Ottawa

Two compilations by Foreign Policy magazine; no wonder we have that inferiority complex:

1) Who’s Who in WikiLeaks

The world leaders embarrassed by Cablegate.

No Canadian.

2) The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers

Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2010′s global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them.

Three Canadians: Malcolm Gladwell (68), Steven Pinker (69) and, retch, Louise Arbour (71). But from reading the entries one would have no reason to think they are Canadian–one would assume that the first two are American and probably that Loopy Louise is Belgian (thank goodness, see here, here, here and here).

Meanwhile the world ain’t paying much mind to the flap over our Ambassador to Afstan, William Crosbie, less here.

Update: A version of this post is in the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

A lot of smoke, very little fire.  This is what Spiegel Online (Der Spiegel is one of the major media recipients of material from Assiduous Asshole Assange) manages to highlight today, focused on Russia:

Washington Concerned about Berlusconi-Putin Axis

Russian Mafia an International Concern for US Diplomats

The US Is Betting on Putin

Cables Track US Diplomatic Efforts to Avert Russian-Georgian Conflict

US Forced to Change Course in Relations with Ukraine

The US Ambassador Learns that Cognac Is Like Wine [already mentioned at this post]

I am shocked, shocked to find…what? In a quarter of a million documents:

INTERACTIVE ATLAS

A time lapse of 251,287 documents: The world map shows where the majority of the cables originated from, and where they had the highest level of classification. View the atlas …

But there are perhaps shocking downsides–from a leader in The Economist:

…any gains will come at a high cost. In a world of WikiLeaks, diplomacy would no longer be possible. The secrecy that WikiLeaks despises is vital to all organisations, including government—and especially in the realm of international relations. Those who pass information to American diplomats, out of self-interest, conviction or goodwill, will be less open now. Some of them, like the Iranian businessman fingered as a friend of America, could face reprisals…

On reading diplomats’ dissembling, people may be tempted to sneer. In fact diplomacy’s never-ending private conversation ultimately helps see off war and strife. That conversation will continue. Too many people have too much to gain for it to stop. But it will be less rich, less clear and therefore probably less useful. WikiLeaks claims to want to make the world a better place. It will probably do the reverse.

More from a story in the paper:

…
For the most part, the leaks’ content is less important than their source, and the manner of the betrayal. Individually, the disclosures are trivial: some would be barely newsworthy if published legally. But collectively, they are corrosive. America appears humiliatingly unable to keep its own or other people’s secrets [i.e., it's not the nature of the "secrets" that matters, see start of post, but rather the fact and manner of their revelation]…

…casual damage to bystanders sits oddly with the founding mission of WikiLeaks, as outlined in 2007: “Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations.” Early targets included high-level corruption in Kenya; alleged illegal activities in an offshore operation of the Swiss-based bank Julius Baer; the American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay; Scientology’s beliefs and practices; Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account; the membership list of the far-right British National Party; and a toxic-waste scandal in Africa. Cheekily, WikiLeaks also published classified Pentagon and British military documents about the damage leaks can do to national security…

Oddly, that material has now disappeared from its website. But the worries were prescient. This year WikiLeaks has focused almost exclusively on American government secrets, using material apparently leaked by Mr Manning…

So now a hatred-driven, mainly single target site, rather than a principled one aimed at tous azimuts. Thanks to that AAA fellow.

Update: The Guardian also has an interactive map.  And the NY Times lists cables on Canada here.

Mark
Ottawa

At the Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs:

…
International News
…
SIPRNet: Where America stores its secret cables – More – DISA – More

As for the significance, Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian:

…from what I have seen, the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of. Yes, there are echoes of skulduggery at the margins, especially in relation to the conduct of “the war on terror” in the Bush years. Specific questions must be asked and answered. For the most part, however, what we see here is diplomats doing their proper job: finding out what is happening in the places to which they are posted, working to advance their nation’s interests and their government’s policies.

In fact, my personal opinion of the state department has gone up several notches. In recent years, I have found the American foreign service to be somewhat underwhelming, reach-me-down, dandruffy, especially when compared with other, more confident arms of US government, such as the Pentagon and the treasury. But what we find here is often first rate.

As readers will discover, the man who is now America’s top-ranking professional diplomat, William Burns, contributed from Russia a highly entertaining account – almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh – of a wild Dagestani wedding attended by the gangsterish president of Chechnya, who danced clumsily “with his gold-plated automatic stuck down the back of his jeans”.

…one question remains. How can diplomacy be conducted under these conditions? A state department spokesman is surely right to say that the revelations are “going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world”. The conduct of government is already hampered by fear of leaks. An academic friend of mine who worked in the state department under Condoleezza Rice told me that he had once suggested writing a memo posing fundamental questions about US policy in Iraq. “Don’t even think of it,” he was warned – because it would be sure to appear in the next day’s New York Times.

There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict.

One thing I’d bet on, though: the US government must surely be ruing, and urgently reviewing, its weird decision to place a whole library of recent diplomatic correspondence on to a computer system so brilliantly secure that a 22-year-old could download it on to a Lady Gaga CD. Gaga, or what?

Via Norman’s Spectator.

Mark
Ottawa

The United States has been the world’s worst warmonger for over two centuries.  I guess they should have turned the other cheek to the Japs and also not responded to Hitler’s declaration of war. The world would certainly have been a better place. And, having actually bothered (at long last, delaying for good domestic political reasons) to get into the Second World War, the United States thereafter should have given Stalin and the Soviet Union free rein to try and wreak their will around the globe, starting with turning western Europe Communist one way or another.  And let Kim-il Sung, with Stalin’s and Mao’s backing, conquer South Korea.

Hell, perhaps better yet not to have fought the Civil War and left the Confederate States of America a free, independent and slave state (though ending slavery was not the purpose of the war, either not fighting it or losing it would have left the peculiar institution fully in force).

I give you Gerald Caplan, a true soul of Canada’s New Democratic Party:

Canada enlists in America’s permanent war for peace

Why “Canada’s National Whatever” publishes such venom, if only online, is a very good question. By the way, the ideologically-blinded and ignorant Mr Caplan seems not to realize that the US Marines went “to the shores of Tripoli” after war was declared on the United States when it refused to continue paying tribute to buy off the Barbary Pirates.

What a bitter and small-minded fool. A true useful idiot.  If the Marine Corps did not exist perhaps God would create them.  My personal theology or something.

Update:  What may really underlie Mr Caplan’s rant (and the views of many other Canadians):

…
The leaked diplomatic cables, dating from January 2009 to June 2010, cover a huge range of issues and include ”lively commentaries” to Washington about a host of world leaders. A series of leaks is thought to deal with Canada’s ”inferiority complex”…

It’ll be fun city watching our greatest and goodest go ape-shit.

Mark
Ottawa

From Tom Ricks’ Best Defense:

Wikileaks crap: Tell me one thing

Maybe I’m going soft, but the Wikileaks dump kind of makes me ill. The whole situation strikes me as a bit sordid. I worry that great newspapers are getting played. If the leaks brought great revelations, I might think differently, but so far I don’t think I have been surprised by a single thing I’ve read. Civilian contractors shooting up people, Arab-Kurd tensions, abuse of prisoners, Rumsfeld in denial, Iranian meddling, Maliki paranoid? At this late date, that’s the full-house Iraqi version of a dog bites man story. (Or maybe a book.)

Here is an attempt to argue the opposing viewpoint. But I still say that adding mayonnaise doesn’t turn chicken shit into chicken salad. Here’s my test: Tell me one thing we didn’t know last week that we know now about the Iraq war.

Ditto for the Afghan docs, more here.

Mark
Ottawa

Further to the Update here, Paul lays it on the line at Celestial Junk:

Anatomy of Cowardice

Plus from Terry Glavin:

Liberalism’s Long Walk

…you have found yourself sitting across a desk from Liberal Senator Colin Kenny.

The oafish senator last came to our attention last year with his ridiculous “We are hurtling toward a Vietnam ending” effluvium about Afghanistan, not long after he’d been relieved of his tasks in turning the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence into what the good Senator Pamela Wallin charitably described as a “dysfunctional public spectacle.” Do read Kenny’s slightly repackaged complaints in Monday”s Montreal Gazette. You may find much in his litany to agree with – I certainly did -but at last, he concludes: Let us face a harsh truth: for all the efforts of our courageous troops, and the courageous troops of our allies, nation-building doesn’t make sense in a nation that doesn’t want to get built.

Setting aside the mercifully few idiocies in Kenny’s latest op-ed, it’s the cynicism and the sneering bigotry of his conclusion you’ll want to keep your eye on. It is an ignorant caricature of the Afghan people that Kenny relies on to support his case, a self-exculpating arrogance that treats Afghans as though they were unruly schoolchildren, or at best, their annoying parents. It’s precisely the sort of thing that was efficiently exposed only the other day by Steve Coll,  author of the seminal Ghost Wars: A Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

Writing in The New Republic, Coll observes: “As the war has grown more difficult, American and European commentators who advocate for troop withdrawal often seem to find it necessary to dehumanize Afghans to justify their own loss of will, or to blame Afghans for the international community’s own policy failures — i.e., saying the country is hopelessly corrupt, drug-addled, primitive, perpetually at war. Among its other flaws, this line of thinking misjudges Afghanistan, a pluralistic and very poor country that has repeatedly rejected Taliban-style ideology and retains a strong sense of national identity, one that produced a unified and mainly peaceful nation for much of the twentieth century, until a succession of outside invaders shattered its cohesion and independence.”..

Bipartisan bashing here, eh?

Related:

Guess who else is staying firm on Afstan?/Dead Talibs and brazen media

Update: Media round-up from the Conference of Defence Associations:

Afghanistan: An unwinnable war?

Mark
Ottawa

From Paul at Celestial Junk:

CBC Treason

My son just pointed out to me that he can now read the content of the confidential reports he was privy too in KAF … online.

Kill the beast!…

Earlier, our “National Newspaper” in, er, action:

WikiLeaks derangement syndrome

Update: More from Paul, who has a good, living reason to take this all very personally:

Canada’s Cowardly Prime Minister

There is naturally another view, from the Canadian Journalism Foundation:

Documents in the raw undermine propaganda

While the leaking of Afghan war documents has been criticized in some Canadian columns, on the pages of J-Source WikiLeaks is described as citizen journalism we need and a new form of asymmetrical journalism. Founder Julian Assange, a self-described ‘person of interest’ to U.S. authorities, explains his decision to provide advance viewings to select outlets. The mainstream media partnerships weren’t completely comfortable: Assange later criticized the New York Times for its handling of the data, including checking with the White House before publishing and not providing a direct link to the documents. An alternative strategy could have been dribbles instead of dumps. Here are links to compare the special reportage sites: New York Times, Der Spiegel, the Guardian.

To Afghanistan observers, the documents undermined government propaganda, which – we learn from the docs – includes paying for positive stories. Unlike the NYT, J-Source has no problem providing a direct link to the WikiLeaks war documents site, as well as to data-dumping links and instructions for CAR journos. (And we didn’t check with Ottawa first.)

(Photo: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, by Martina Harris/Julian Assange.)

Sexy beast, eh?  Now if only that blessed Foundation in this blessedly free (pretty) country could get its knickers knotted over some other propaganda, all too effective within Afstan:

MILNEWS.ca Blog
TALIBAN PROPAGANDA WATCH

Mark
Ottawa

I guess lust does overcome reason.  Luscious Leah McLaren sure seems to be the Globe and Mail’s new, improved version of Horrible Heather Mallick (more here):

WikiLeaks founder brings sexy back to whistle-blowing
…

You may not believe this, but Julian Assange is strangely sexy in person. Not sexy in a silkily charming sort of way, but prickly evil-genius sexy. An openly neurotic geek with all the weird charisma of a Bond villain or a demented superhero, he’s an uber-nerd with the universe-altering credentials to match…

Deep thinking in “Canada’s National Newspaper”, eh? Via Lowell Green, CFRA Ottawa.

Earlier, with a photo of Ms McLaren’s intellectual toy boy:

AfPak WikiLeak: Biased, er, exposure?/Dead Afghans Update

And from Adrian on Ms Mallick:

Whoops, She Did It Again

The lady’s current gig is with our, er, national broadcaster.

Update thought: Imagine the reaction if a male Globe columnist so swooned over the rampant sex appeal of a female seriously trying to undermine several countries’ war efforts:

…with all the weird charisma of a Bond villain or a demented superhero…

Mark
Ottawa

First Adrian:

But To Some People, We’re The Bad Guys In Afghanistan

Now Terry Glavin Gatlings quite a few:

One Picture Is Worth 90,000 “Secret Documents” Published By WikiLeaks.

Aisha is an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off by a Taliban butcher for the “crime” of running away from the beatings she routinely suffered at the hands of her husband’s family. Aisha’s picture appears on the cover of Time magazine this week, provoking controversy.

Lost in all the self-serving and cowardly Code Pinkish yesbuttery and the handwringing about the propriety of a major magazine running a photograph so shocking – can we not at least stop for a moment to notice that Aisha, in the full flower of womanhood, is unspeakably beautiful in spite of her disfigurement? – is the fact that she wants the world to see her face. By her own account, she wants the world to see what the Taliban’s resurgence means to Afghan women, and to see the obvious implications of the “negotiated” solution to the Afghan struggle that is so de rigueur in bourgeois-left circles in the rich countries of the world…

Not so fortunate, in the matter of the concurrent media hubbub arising from WikiLeaks’ recent sticking-it-to-the-man document dump, are the uncounted ordinary Afghans whose exposure to reprisals and terror has been so disgracefully overlooked in all the crawthumping about the implications for “our” security interests and “our” troops in the WikiLeaks affair. Once again, a round of applause to the self-congratulating WikiLeaks archgeek Julian Assange…

Do read all of Mr Glavin at his best. Wish we had more like him. Plus from Brian Platt, another good fellow, at The Canada – Afghanistan Blog:

…
How the hell has it come to be that when stories of moral atrocities committed by the Taliban against Afghan women are prominently displayed, it’s the self-styled progressive bloggers who are the first to chastise us that we cannot let our emotions distract us from the national security interests of the war?…

More earlier on WikiLeaking:

AfPak WikiLeak: Biased, er, exposure?/Dead Afghans Update

Leaked AfPak docs: Journalistic ethics? Shmethics! Plus: “Shame on [Canadian] us”–and the NDP

Mark
Ottawa