Some WikiLeaks Links

Wikileaks - Anti-Israel Foreign Policy Experts Got Saudi Arabia, Other Arab Countries 100% Backward On Iran Attack - '...Either Walt, Mearsheimer, Lynch, Chas Freeman, and their ilk don't know much about the Middle East, or they're ignoring what they do know in order to push their own foreign policy wishful thinking as objective analysis. Which is fine - everyone gets to have an agenda - but now can we at least dispense with the aggravating hagiographies to their vaunted neutrality and expertise? Because apparently their wrongheaded assumptions are influencing policymakers, and - predictably - that's not going well.'

WikiLeaks: Israel-Related Cables - '...using The Guardian's search-by-country feature, I managed to summarize the Israel-related cables...'

Cables Tell Us: Linkage Was Nonsense - 'The WikiLeaks documents have multiple ramifications, but I will focus on one: the confirmation that the Obama "linkage" argument was pure bunk. Recall that the Obama team over and over again has made the argument that progress on the Palestinian conflict was essential to obtaining the help of the Arab states in confronting Iran's nuclear threat. We know that this is simply and completely false...'

Analysis: Wikileaks vindicate, don't damage, Israel - '...According to one cable published by WikiLeaks on Sunday, Saudi King Abdullah "frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program" and to cut off the head of the snake. According to another cable, King Hamad of Bahrain, a country with a majority Shi'ite population, urged in a meeting with former CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus that action be taken to terminate Iran's nuclear program. "That program must be stopped," Hamad said, according to the cable. "The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it."...'

Wikileaks: Iran used Red Crescent to send agents and weapons to Hezbollah - 'A heavily redacted memo in Wikileaks as presented by The Guardian shows that Iran has cynically used its Red Crescent to smuggle weapons -including missiles - and agents into Lebanon during the 2006 war as well as elsewhere...'

Lee Smith: Deadly Fictions - The classified diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks are the Pentagon Papers of the pro-Israel right - '...With all due apologies to Oliver Stone (and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey), what the Wikileaks documents reveal is not a conspiracy of any kind but a scary and growing gap between the private assessments of American diplomats and allies in the Middle East and public statements made by U.S. government officials. The publication of these leaked cables is eerily reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a decade-long attempt by U.S. officials to distort and conceal unpalatable truths about the Vietnam War, and manipulate public opinion. The difference is that while the Pentagon Papers substantially vindicated the American left, the Wikileaks cable dump vindicates the right...'