Australian Foreign Minister Advises US: "tighten things up a bit"

Kevin Rudd defends 'robust' China relationship, urges US to 'tighten up' after leaks

• UPDATED Joe Kelly, James Massola
• From:The Australian
• December 06, 2010 5:03PM

KEVIN Rudd has suggested the United States "tighten things up a bit" following the publishing by WikiLeaks of confidential US documents.

The Foreign Minister also said Australia had a “robust” diplomatic relationship with China and would not contact Beijing to smooth over relations following the embarrassing leaking of a conversation he had with Hillary Clinton.

Mr Rudd was responding to revelations that while prime minister he warned the US Secretary of State in March 2009 that the world must be prepared to “deploy force” if China could not be integrated into the international system.

He said today such releases of diplomatic material could occur at any time and without prior warning from the United States.

“I think foreign ministers around the world from countries of all sorts of political traditions are scratching their heads a bit about this one at the moment. And I'm just being frank with you,” Mr Rudd said in Canberra.

“What now happens? I think rule number one for our friends in the United States is `how do you tighten things up a bit?”'“You've had recent reports concerning heads of government being accused of corruption, of being associated with the mafia, of.....urging the United States to go to war against particular countries....... it does create a separate and new dynamic,” he said.

Mr Rudd also said diplomacy was a “robust” business and leaked documents were “part and parcel of the business of the relations between states”.

While Mr Rudd repeatedly declined to comment on the content or the accuracy of the leaked documents, he defended Australia's posture towards China.

“The job of Australian foreign policy and security policy is to make provision for the long term defence of Australia's national security interest, as do all nation states,” he said.

“The business of diplomacy is not just to roll over and have your tummy tickled from time to time by the Chinese or anybody else. The business of diplomacy is to be firm about your national interests and prosecute them accordingly.”

Mr Rudd said Australian foreign policy toward China was balanced and had been “consistent over many years”.

On the one hand, Australia had an extensive economic relationship with China and was engaged in a range of initiatives aimed at introducing Beijing “more and more” to the world's multilateral institutions.

But Mr Rudd said that at the same time, “we've also been very plain with our Chinese friends over the last three years that where we have a disagreement, that we will make that disagreement very plain and be firm about standing up for our values and our interests”.

“This is the sort of balanced policy toward China which I have long supported,” he said.

Mr Rudd said he thought it was in the overwhelming interest of both the US and China for there to be a peaceful future and it was the job of Australia and other regional countries to help prevent any future conflict.

Asked whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had broken any Australian law, Mr Rudd said Australia was “a nation of laws” and would act according to “due process”.

“It's not for us to comment on the legality or otherwise of any individual actions. It's for the proper investigatory and prosecutorial bodies to do that.”

China experts, meanwhile, have played down any diplomatic blowback arising from Mr Rudd's comments.

Dr Ron Huisken, a security analyst and China expert from the Australian National University said the leaked cable confirmed what was already known about Mr Rudd's view of China and reinforced Australia's “close and comfortable” relationship with the United States.

He also said the context of the cable was important, stressing it was an account of a frank exchange over lunch and that it was written from the US perspective.

“It's not a discussion which you would call a policy development discussion or policy reconciliation discussion,” he said.

Whether Mr Rudd used anything like the “precise words” in the cable was also “very doubtful”.

Dr Huisken suggested Mr Rudd was saying that, in effect, China “certainly had the capacity and appears to have the interest to use long range conventional military capabilities that it may be tempted to use coercively in the future and that it would be sensible on the part of other states in the region to bear that in mind and to ensure that they have countervailing military capabilities”.

Professor Hugh White, head of the ANU's strategic and defence studies centre who has recently written a quarterly essay on China's challenge to American power, also cast doubt on whether the cable represented an accurate reflection of what Mr Rudd said.

“(But) on the assumption it's a fair and accurate report of what Rudd said, a core point is that what Rudd said won't surprise the Chinese, nor will it surprise the Americans,” he told The Australian Online.

Rory Medcalf, international security program director at the Lowy Institute, said Mr Rudd's comments were “consistent with the tone of the defence white paper”.

He said Mr Rudd was “certainly was not encouraging some aggressively forceful response to China”.

“He was reminding the US allies in the region to have no illusions about the possibility there might be conflict in the future.”

Attorney-General Robert McClelland earlier condemned the release of the confidential cables as “grossly irresponsible”, and which would put the safety and even the lives of people helping western governments at risk.

The Coalition said it was troubled by the revelations, and called on Julia Gillard to clarify whether she supported Mr Rudd's comments.

But while declining to comment on the specifics of the cable, the first released by WikiLeaks in which Australia features prominently, Mr McClelland insisted Australia's strong relationship with China would continue.

“We have a very strong relationship with the Chinese government and the people of China, a strong business relationship, strong diplomatic relationships, strong government-to-government relationships, and that arrangement will continue,” he said.

Mr McClelland said the Australian Federal Police was investigating the release of the cable.

However he predicted that if criminal charges were brought against WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, it would likely happen in the United States, the source country for the diplomatic cables.

Australia would help the US government investigate the leaks.

But while the government said the release of the Rudd cable would not damage relations with China, some of the other 250,000-plus cables leaked through the website could put people's lives in danger.

“It is grossly irresponsible of an organisation to even contemplate publishing such information. Free speech is one thing, we all respect that, but we also respect the freedom and rights of people to live without fear,” Mr McClelland said.

He said it was “fair enough” that media outlets had published embarrassing material, but added: “I would again just caution people to come back and really see what's going on here.

“There is every prospect that national security sensitive information will be published that will actually prejudice the safety of individuals who have done nothing more and nothing less than provide information to assist law enforcement and security agencies whose task is to protect our communities.”

Mc McClelland also hit back at suggestions most recently made by Mr Assange's London-based lawyer that the WikiLeaks founder had not received Australian consular assistance over sex charges he faces in Sweden.

Mr Assange is entitled to assistance from the Australian government, Mr McClelland said, but given the countries involved that was unlikely to be necessary.

“Mr Assange as an Australian citizen is entitled to consular assistance overseas in respect to any criminal allegations he may face. He is entitled to procedural fairness in respect to those allegations,” he said.

And while Mr Assange was welcome to return to Australia, the Attorney-General warned: “Australia has obligations pursuant to agreements that we have signed that ensure we will provide mutual assistance to countries that are investigating criminal law enforcement matters”

Imperial Fatigue and an Age of Uncertainty

"America's ability to bring a modicum of order to the world is simply fading in slow motion."

Where's the American empire when we need it?

By Robert D. Kaplan
Washington Post
Friday, December 3, 2010; 8:00 PM

Currency wars. Terrorist attacks. Military conflicts. Rogue regimes pursuing nuclear weapons. Collapsing states. And now, massive leaks of secret documents. What is the cause of such turbulence? The absence of empire.

During the Cold War, the world was divided between the Soviet and U.S. imperial systems. The Soviet imperium - heir to Kievan Rus, medieval Muscovy and the Romanov dynasty - covered Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia and propped up regimes in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The American imperium - heir to maritime Venice and Great Britain - also propped up allies, particularly in Western Europe and East Asia. True to the garrison tradition of imperial Rome, Washington kept bases in West Germany, Turkey, South Korea and Japan, virtually surrounding the Soviet Union.

The breakup of the Soviet empire, though it caused euphoria in the West and led to freedom in Central Europe, also sparked ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and the Caucasus that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and created millions of refugees. (In Tajikistan alone, more than 50,000 people were killed in a civil war that barely registered in the U.S. media in the 1990s.)

The Soviet collapse also unleashed economic and social chaos in Russia itself, as well as the further unmooring of the Middle East. It was no accident that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait less than a year after the Berlin Wall fell, just as it is inconceivable that the United States would have invaded Iraq if the Soviet Union, a staunch patron of Baghdad, still existed in 2003. And had the Soviet empire not fallen apart or ignominiously withdrawn from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden never would have taken refuge there and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, might not have happened. Such are the wages of imperial collapse.

Now the other pillar of the relative peace of the Cold War, the United States, is slipping, while new powers such as China and India remain unready and unwilling to fill the void. There will be no sudden breakdown on our part, as the United States, unlike the Soviet Union, is sturdily maintained by economic and political freedom. Rather, America's ability to bring a modicum of order to the world is simply fading in slow motion.

The days of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency are numbered, just as our diplomacy is hobbled by wide-ranging security leaks that are specific to an age of electronic communication, itself hostile to imperial rule.

Then there is America's military power. Armies win wars, but in an age when the theater of conflict is global, navies and air forces are more accurate registers of national might. (Any attack on Iran, for example, would be a sea and air campaign.) The U.S. Navy has gone from nearly 600 warships in the Reagan era to fewer than 300 today, while the navies of China and India grow apace. Such trends will accelerate with the defense cuts that are surely coming in order to rescue America from its fiscal crisis. The United States still dominates the seas and the air and will do so for years ahead, but the distance between it and other nations is narrowing.

Terrorist acts, ethnic atrocities, the yearning after horrible weaponry and the disclosure of secret cables are the work of individuals who cannot escape their own moral responsibility. But the headlines of our era are written in a specific context - that of one deceased empire that used to be the world's preeminent land power and of another, the world's preeminent sea power, that finds itself less able to affect events than ever before, even as it is less sure than ever of the cause toward which it struggles.

This is no indictment of President Obama's foreign policy. There is slim evidence of a credible alternative to his actions on North Korea, Iran and Iraq, while a feisty debate goes on over the proper course in Afghanistan. But there is simply no doubt that the post-imperial order we inhabit allows for greater disruptions than the Cold War ever permitted.

Husbanding our power in an effort to slow America's decline in a post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan world would mean avoiding debilitating land entanglements and focusing instead on being more of an offshore balancer: that is, lurking with our air and sea forces over the horizon, intervening only when outrages are committed that unquestionably threaten our allies and world order in general. While this may be in America's interest, the very signaling of such an aloof intention may encourage regional bullies, given that rogue regimes are the organizing principles for some pivotal parts of the world.

North Korea already plows onward with its nuclear weapons program, even as it lobs artillery shells on a South Korean island, demonstrating the limits of both U.S. and Chinese power in a semi-anarchic world. During the Cold War, North Korea was kept in its box by the Soviet Union while the U.S. Navy dominated the Pacific as though it were an American lake. Now China's economic dominance of the region, coupled with our distracting land wars in the Middle East, is transforming the western Pacific from a benign and stable environment to a more uncertain and complex one.

China's navy is decades behind America's, but that should offer little consolation. The United States, having just experienced asymmetric warfare on land, should now expect asymmetric challenges at sea. With its improving mine-warfare capability, seabed sonar networks and cyber-warfare in the service of anti-ship ballistic missiles, not to mention its diesel-electric and nuclear submarines, China will make U.S. Navy operations more dangerous over the coming years.

As for Taiwan, China has 1,500 short-range ballistic missiles pointed at the island, even as hundreds of commercial flights each week link Taiwan with the mainland in peaceful commerce. When China effectively incorporates Taiwan in the years to come, that will signal the arrival of a truly multipolar and less predictable military environment in East Asia.

In the Middle East we see the real collapse of the Cold War imperial order. The neat Israeli-Arab dichotomy that mirrored the American-Soviet one has been replaced by a less stable power arrangement, with a zone of Iranian influence stretching from Lebanon to western Afghanistan, pitted against both Israel and the Sunni Arab world, and with a newly Islamic, and no longer pro-Western, Turkey rising as a balancing power.

Yes, empires impose order, but that order is not necessarily benevolent, as Iran's budding imperial domain shows. U.S. threats against Iran lack credibility precisely because of our imperial fatigue resulting from Iraq and Afghanistan. Out of self-interest we will probably not involve ourselves in another war in the Middle East - even as that very self-interest could consign the region to a nuclear standoff.

One standard narrative is that as we recede, China will step up as part of a benign post-American world. But this presupposes that all imperial powers are the same, even when history clearly demonstrates that they are not. Nor does one empire sequentially fill the gap left by another.

While the Soviet Union and the United States were both missionary powers motivated by ideals - communism and liberal democracy - through which they might order the world, China has no such grand conception. It is driven abroad by the hunger for natural resources (hydrocarbons, minerals and metals) that it requires to raise hundreds of millions of its citizens into the middle class.

This could abet the development of a trading system between the Indian Ocean, Africa and Central Asia that might maintain peace with minimal American involvement. But who is to fill the moral void? Does China really care if Tehran develops nuclear weapons, so long as it has access to Iran's natural gas? And Beijing may not be entirely comfortable with the North Korean regime, which keeps its population in a state of freeze-frame semi-starvation, but China props it up nevertheless.

It can be argued that with power comes moral responsibility, but it will probably be decades before China has the kind of navy and air force that would lead it to become an authentic partner in an international security system. For the moment, Beijing gets a free ride off the protection of the world's sea lanes that the U.S. Navy helps provide, and watches us struggle to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan so that China can one day extract their natural resources.

If the Cold War was an epoch of relative stability, guaranteed by a tacit understanding among empires, we now have one waning empire, that of the United States, trying to bring order amid a world of rising and sometimes hostile powers.

Looming over all of this is the densely crowded global map. Across Eurasia, rural populations have given way to megacities prone to incitement by mass media and to destruction by environmental catastrophe. Lumbering, hard-to-deploy armies are being replaced with overlapping ballistic missile ranges that demonstrate the delivery capabilities of weapons of mass destruction. New technologies make everything affect everything else at a faster and more lethal rate than ever before. The free flow of information, as the WikiLeaks scandal makes clear, and the miniaturization of weaponry, as the terrorist bombings in Pakistani cities make clear, work against the rise and sustenance of imperial orders.

The American empire has always been more structural than spiritual. Its network of alliances certainly resembles those of empires past, and the challenges facing its troops abroad are comparable to those of imperial forces of yore, though the American public, especially after the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, is in no mood for any more of the land-centric adventures that have been the stuff of imperialism since antiquity.

Americans rightly lack an imperial mentality. But lessening our engagement with the world would have devastating consequences for humanity. The disruptions we witness today are but a taste of what is to come should our country flinch from its international responsibilities.

Robert D. Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for the Atlantic. He is the author of "Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power."

Sometimes You Just Need a White Sandy Beach

What is Happening with Mark Steyn, an Honest Man?

I really enjoy hearing Mark Steyn and hope that he is OK. This from his website:

A note to our readers (from SteynOnline)

WEDNESDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2010
I know the on-again off-again nature of SteynOnline in recent months has sorely tried readers’ patience. Rather boringly, I have some health issues that demand somewhat more attention than I’ve been able to give them. So rather than keep driving you nuts by showing signs of life on the home page for a day or two and then lapsing back into sleep mode for a week, we’re going to close up shop for a while.

I very much regret having to do this. SteynOnline opened up just before Thanksgiving 2002 and, usually at this time of year, we’d be doing a big old anniversary bonanza. In recent seasons, late November and December have found me out on the airwaves plugging Jessica’s and my annual Christmas offering. But our instant disco classic will have to make it without my help this year. I would be remiss in not adding that it and many other delights remain available at our bookstore.

We will return before the end of the year. You can take that to the bank (and stick it in the vault next to your credit default swap).

Mark

Saudi Arabia Assesses Shiite rule to giving Iraq to Iran on a "golden platter."

Again I ask, how could a PFC have access to so much secret data (250,000 and counting)?

What does "SECRET" mean? Much of what comes out seems so obvious and so not news but fascinating in a voyeuristic way. We now have more about Iraq and what those in the Middle East really think about a new Shiite power center next to Iran.

Today's Wikileak peek into US diplomacy shows the reality of the unintended consequences of our ill-conceived and ill-prepared mission in Iraq, a mission that was to be paid for by Iraqi oil but fell a trillion dollars or so short.

The same people that thought Iraq was a good idea are the same that created or supervised a system of security for US secret cables.

It has become obvious that a lot of people that confided with the US, people whose cooperation was needed by the US are now embarrassed or in trouble because of these revelations.

Why would anyone in their right mind, domestic or foreign, trust anything the US Government says or does?

__________________________________


Analysts: Cables between Sunnis, U.S. diplomats might push Iraq closer to Iran


By Leila Fadel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 2, 2010; 7:35 PM

BAGHDAD - Private conversations between Sunni Arab leaders in the Middle East and U.S. diplomats, leaked in confidential State Department documents this week, may push Iraq's future Shiite-led government closer to Iran, analysts said.

The nation is already divided along sectarian lines and since the U.S. invasion in 2003 Iraq has become the center of a regional power struggle between Shiite Iran to the east and Arab Sunni neighbors to the west - a struggle that played out during Iraq's parliamentary elections in March.

The first few hundred cables leaked by the WikiLeaks Web site could further damage Shiite incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's weak relationship with Arab neighbors, countries the United States had hoped would counter Iran's influence in Iraq as U.S. influence here wanes and the U.S. military prepares for a scheduled exit at the end of 2011.

The cables show candid moments over the past two years in which, among other things, the king of Saudi Arabia called Maliki an "Iranian agent" and a "liar." Meanwhile, Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, advocated a military coup in Iraq and said that the United States should "forget democracy" there and that the country should have "a dictator."

Sunni Arab hostility toward the growing Shiite power in Iraq is no revelation. But the sensitive cables are coming out just as the recently reappointed Maliki is cobbling together a cabinet that may finally lead to a government.

"Sunni Arab dislike of a Shiite ascendancy in Iraq is well known by Maliki. But this will exacerbate the problem and may push him closer to the Iranians," said Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2007 to 2009. "Tehran will certainly try. We'll see if there are any Arab overture to the new government once it is formed - that would help, but I doubt it."

Iraqi officials were quick to dismiss the likelihood of lasting effects, pointing out this was more of a problem between Iran and the Arab Gulf than a problem for Iraq. A new era of Shiite Arab majority leadership was forged in Iraq following the invasion, after decades of dictatorship under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab who oppressed the Shiite majority and the Kurds. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia likened the Shiite rule to giving Iraq to Iran on a "golden platter."

"These are not secrets. We know this," said Sami al-Askari, a Shiite legislator close to Maliki. "I think it has no effect at all. With Saudi Arabia, our relationship is not good, and with Egypt our relations are not that good. It's more an embarrassment for the American establishment. How can these secret documents get out? It's shaking the entire American system."

Should Julian Assange be Hanged or Given a Medal?

The U.S. government, apparently aided by freelance computer hackers, chased WikiLeaks from an American commercial computer network and temporarily stopped the leak of embarrassing diplomatic documents. But within hours, the website was back online, publishing from a fortified bunker in Sweden.

The virtual chase Wednesday was mirrored by a real-life pursuit as European authorities hunted for the site's fugitive founder, Julian Assange, who is wanted in Sweden on rape charges.

Undeterred, Assange continued releasing confidential government documents. Some showed how the Obama administration and Congress helped persuade Spain not to pursue charges against members of George W. Bush's administration for allowing torture of terrorism suspects.

Below Surface, U.S. Has Dim View of Putin and Russia
By C. J. CHIVERS NY Times
Published: December 1, 2010

Early in 2009, as recession rippled around the world, the United States Embassy in Moscow sent to Washington a cable summarizing whispers within Russia’s political class. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, the rumors said, often did not show up at his office.

The embassy titled the cable “Questioning Putin’s Work Ethic.”

“There are consistent reports that Putin resents or resists the workload he carries,” it said, citing Mr. Putin’s “fatigue,” “hands-off behavior” and “isolation” to the point that he was “working from home.”

The cable, approved by the American ambassador, John R. Beyrle, assessed the Kremlin rumors not as indicators of Mr. Putin’s weakness, but of the limits of his position in a period of falling commodity prices and tightening credit. Russia’s most powerful man sat atop Russia’s spoils. The recession left him with less to dole out, eroding “some of his Teflon persona.”

“His disengagement reflects,” the cable concluded, “his recognition that a sharp reduction in resources limits his ability to find workable compromises among the Kremlin elite.” Officially, the United States has sought since last year what President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri A. Medvedev, have called a “reset” in relations.

But scores of secret American cables from recent years, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations, show that beneath the public efforts at warmer ties, the United States harbors a dim view of the post-Soviet Kremlin and its leadership, and little hope that Russia will become more democratic or reliable.

The cables portray Mr. Putin as enjoying supremacy over all other Russian public figures, yet undermined by the very nature of the post-Soviet country he helped build.

Even a man with his formidable will and intellect is shown beholden to intractable larger forces, including an inefficient economy and an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts.

In language candid and bald, the cables reveal an assessment of Mr. Putin’s Russia as highly centralized, occasionally brutal and all but irretrievably cynical and corrupt. The Kremlin, by this description, lies at the center of a constellation of official and quasi-official rackets.

Throughout the internal correspondence between the American Embassy and Washington, the American diplomats in Moscow painted a Russia in which public stewardship was barely tended to and history was distorted. The Kremlin displays scant ability or inclination to reform what one cable characterized as a “modern brand of authoritarianism” accepted with resignation by the ruled.

Moreover, the cables reveal the limits of American influence within Russia and an evident dearth of diplomatic sources. The internal correspondence repeatedly reflected the analyses of an embassy whose staff was narrowly contained and had almost no access to Mr. Putin’s inner circle.

In reporting to Washington, diplomats often summarized impressions from meetings not with Russian officials, but with Western colleagues or business executives. The impressions of a largely well-known cadre of Russian journalists, opposition politicians and research institute regulars rounded out many cables, with insights resembling what was published in liberal Russian newspapers and on Web sites.

The cables sketched life almost 20 years after the Soviet Union’s disintegration, a period, as the cables noted, when Mr. Medvedev, the prime minister’s understudy, is the lesser part of a strange “tandemocracy” and “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman.” All the while, another cable noted, “Stalin’s ghost haunts the Metro.” Continue here

The US and its Friends in the Middle East

WikiLeaks cables: reading between the lines

One message, often buried, comes out loud and clear from the embassy cables: the US should choose its allies more carefully

• 
• • Stephen Kinzer
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 December 2010 16.30 GMT
  • Article history

President Obama with King Abdullah in Riyadh, during an official visit in 2009. The Obama administration has since concluded a $60bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The WikiLeaks US embassy cables have revealed that the king has urged the US to attack Iran. Photograph: AFP/Mido Ahmed

Among the most arresting lines in the trove of diplomatic cables made public this week was one from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. "Cut off the head of the snake," he advised his American friends. Any herpetologist would agree that this is good advice in dealing with a threatening viper. But who is this snake? King Abdullah was referring to Iran, obliquely arguing for a military attack.

Yet, there was another tantalising detail in the trove of cables that suggests the larger threat comes from inside King Abdullah's own country. "Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like al-Qaida," the New York Times reported in its first article on the leaked documents.

That is a huge, though not unsurprising, revelation. It reflects how complex and sometimes self-defeating America's foreign alliances have become. Saudi Arabia is an intimate ally of the United States, yet Saudi money supports the world's most violently anti-American terror network.

This deeply troubling contradiction has its roots in Saudi history and tradition. The regime's survival is based on a deal with the Wahhabi clerics who dominate religious practice in Saudi Arabia – and whose austere brand of Islam is among the world's most reactionary. Clerics agree to support the regime, ignoring both its alliance with infidel America and the notoriously unIslamic lifestyles of its thousands of princes. In exchange, the regime gives these clerics billions of dollars, much of which they use to run mosques and religious schools across the Islamic world. More than a few of these mosques and schools, often run by Saudi clerics or others they have trained, are incubators of terror, where generations of lost boys learn to chant the Qur'an and hate America.

The deal is, as former CIA director James Woolsey once described it, "for the Wahhabis to be given all of the money in the world they could ever remotely dream of needing or wanting to spread their sect's beliefs, and for them to leave the House of Saud alone."

Successive American presidents have turned a blind eye to piles of evidence that Saudi money is being used to foment holy war against America. They have reason to do so. The absolute monarchy that rules Saudi Arabia generously cooperates with American global policies – even agreeing, according to one leaked cable, to supply China with oil in the hope of wooing it away from reliance on Iran. Saudi Arabia supplies much oil to the US. And it is the world's largest consumer of American weaponry.

The Obama administration recently announced a deal to sell Saudi Arabia a staggering $60bn worth of weapons. This is new only in scope. In 1990, the New York Times ran a story headlined "US to Sell Saudis $20bn in Arms; Weapons Deal is Largest in History." Seventeen years later, the same newspaper ran an almost identical headline: "US Set to Offer $20bn Arms Deal to Saudi Arabia and Other Gulf States."

How could President Obama, in the midst of a recession, refuse to sell the Saudis another $60bn worth, given the number of jobs this sale will create? He might argue that it is unwise to send so much highly sophisticated weaponry to a kingdom with an uncertain future. King Abdullah is 86 or 87, and is currently hospitalised in New York. He has no designated successor in the country where Osama bin Laden was born and remains highly popular. Weapons systems the US sold to the Shah of Iran wound up in the hands of Islamic militants who seized power there in 1979; a comparable scenario in Saudi Arabia is hardly impossible.

Obama might also argue that arming a country that arms our enemies endangers American lives. That, of course, would provoke questions about Pakistan, America's other two-faced ally. It is no secret that while Pakistan takes billions of dollars in American aid, most of it military, it arms and supports the Taliban and other violently anti-American groups.

Raising questions about these relationships is difficult. Revising them would require sacrificing short-term convenience for long-term benefits, and the US government is not good at long-term thinking. Yet, as King Hamad of Bahrain told American diplomats in one newly-leaked cable: "The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it." He was talking about Iran, but his wisdom applies at least as well to America's perverted relationships with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

King Abdullah, according to another leaked document, was also talking about Iran when he told American diplomats, "The bottom line is that they cannot be trusted." This week's leaks suggest that this truism applies at least as much to his own government, and that of Pakistan, as it does to Iran.

From deep in the vast archive of these leaked documents, a voice cries out to America: look more closely at your allies. Those who served your purpose at one time may now be dangerous enemies.

The Guardian

You Have to Love Nigel Farage, Truth Teller, Independent, Freedom Defender

Nigel Farage To European Parliament: "The Euro Game Is Up... Just Who The Hell Do You Think You Are? You Are Very Dangerous People"
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/25/2010 13:07 -0500 Zerohedge



Famous euroskeptic Nigel Farage (as seen previously here), in just under 4 brief minutes tells more truth about the entire European experiment than all European bankers, commissioners, and politicians have done in the past decade. As we have already said pretty much all of this before, we present it without commentary:

"Good morning Mr. van Rompuy, you've been in office for one year, and in that time the whole edifice is beginning to crumble, there's chaos, the money's running out, I should thank you - you should perhaps be the pinup boy of the euroskeptic movement. But just look around this chamber this morning, look at these faces, look at the fear, look at the anger. Poor Barroso here looks like he's seen a ghost. They're beginning to understand that the game is up. And yet in their desperation to preserve their dream, they want to remove any remaining traces of democracy from the system. And it's pretty clear that none of you have learned anything. When you yourself Mr. van Rompuy say that the euro has brought us stability, I supposed I could applaud you for having a sense of humor, but isn't this really just the bunker [or banker?] mentality. Your fanaticism is out in the open. You talk about the fact that it was a lie to believe that the nation state could exist in the 21st century globalized world. Well, that may be true in the case of Belgium who haven't had a government for 6 months, but for the rest of us, right across every member state in this union, increasingly people are saying, "We don't want that flag, we don't want the anthem, we don't want this political class, we want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history." We had the Greek tragedy earlier on this year, and now we have the situation in Ireland. I know that the stupidity and greed of Irish politicians has a lot to do with this: they should never, ever have joined the euro. They suffered with low interest rates, a false boom and a massive bust. But look at your response to them: what they are being told as their government is collapsing is that it would be inappropriate for them to have a general election. In fact commissioner Rehn here said they had to agree to a budget first before they are allowed to have a general election. Just who the hell do you think you people are. You are very, very dangerous people indeed: your obsession with creating this European state means that you are happy to destroy democracy, you appear to be happy with millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor. Untold millions will suffer so that your euro dream can continue. Well it won't work, cause its Portugal next with their debt levels of 325% of GDP they are the next ones on the list, and after that I suspect it will be Spain, and the bailout for Spain will be 7 times the size of Ireland, and at that moment all the bailout money will is gone - there won't be any more. But it's even more serious than economics, because if you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens."