Wikileaks And The Middle East: What If They Are Just Part Of The Game?

Lee Smith writes that more than anything else, the Wikileaks documents do not reveal so much what the Arabs really think but rather the games they play:

A number of analysts [3] have spent the first weeks of the post-Cablegate era fighting a rear-guard action against the reality of Mideast diplomacy portrayed in the Wikileaks cables. Some are claiming [4] that what the Arabs say in private to U.S. diplomats about Iran is not what they really mean, or that Arab security regimes do not represent the will of the Arab people. Others argue [5] that those American analysts who find their positions vindicated in the released cables are just looking for any evidence to justify [6] their desire to make war on Iran.

Even if these critics are just trying to cover their tracks, their remarks raise, albeit indirectly, an essential point: We know what the Arabs tell diplomats and journalists about Iran, but we don’t know what they really think about their Persian neighbor.
The gap between internal Arab discourse and statements made to Westerners is a staple of that branch of intelligence work often neglected here in the United States known as counterintelligence, which helps sift out truth from noise.

By the same token, Smith is not abandoning everything that the Saudis have said either--in the course of his article, he does some sifting of his own, and concludes that US interests are best served by keeping its eye on the ball:

Just as the Saudis accurately mirrored Washington’s fears of the Soviet Union in order to seduce us into protecting their own interests, they are now reflecting our fears of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is likely they fear Iran as much as they say they do, even as they are already moving to make certain accommodations with the Shia power. The fact is that the Arabs live in the Middle East and understand that someday, even if that day is far off in the future, the United States will leave, either by choice or coercion, and they will be stuck with their Iranian neighbors whether they like it or not.

In the meantime, the words the Saudis utter to American diplomats are not intended to provide us with a transparent window into royal thinking but to manipulate us into serving the interests of the House of Saud. Accordingly, once we have dispensed with the noise, it should not matter one whit to U.S. policymakers whether Iran is a danger to the Arabs or, for that matter, to Israel: Tehran represents a major strategic threat to American interests.

Daniel Pipes is thinking along similar lines, which bring him to the conclusion that it is necessary to raise doubts about the usefulness of the Wikileaks documents:

It's intuitive to privilege the confidential over the overt and the private over the public. However, Middle East politics repeatedly shows that one does better reading press releases and listening to speeches than relying on diplomatic cables. Confidential views may be more heartfelt but, as Dalia Dassa Kaye of the Rand Corporation notes, "what Arab leaders say to U.S. officials and what they might do may not always track." The masses hear policies; high-ranking Westerners hear seduction.

This rule of thumb explains why distant observers often see what nearby diplomats and journalists miss. It also raises doubts about the utility of the WikiLeaks data dump. In the end, it may distract us more than clarify what we know about Arab policies.

So the bottom line is that there really is no substitute to doing one's homework. Relying on reading the newspaper and watching TV--the Cliff Notes of understanding the world--is no more a guarantee to the inside track than reading Wikileaks.

Technorati Tag: Wikileaks and Middle East.