War against Iran more likely — thanks to Wikileaks

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by Paul Woodward

Ellsberg: ‘These documents are not the Pentagon Papers’

If the release of the Pentagon Papers epitomized the value of government leaks as a means of speaking truth to power, Wikileaks at this point can claim no such distinction.

As if to underline the extent to which the Afghan war logs are making the fog of war more, not less, dense, Katrina vanden Heuvel says: “more than a few commentators — including Daniel Ellsberg himself — have called [the war logs] a 21st-century Pentagon Papers.”

She may understandably have been misled by a headline in The Guardian that read: “Daniel Ellsberg describes Afghan war logs as on a par with ‘Pentagon Papers’.” However, “These documents are not the Pentagon Papers — we still await their equivalent for Afghanistan,” is what Ellsberg unambiguously told the Financial Times.

While Wikileak’s founder, Julian Assange, is no doubt sincere in his hope that these intelligence revelations will expose the futility of war, the fact is, because intelligence is not intelligent it can very easily be used to serve a host of diverging political agendas.

If opponents of the war in Afghanistan now feel better armed, so do proponents of an expanding war in Pakistan. Likewise, those pushing for military action against Iran will welcome a new supply of ammunition served by Wikileaks.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported:

Cooperation among Iran, al Qaeda and other Sunni extremist groups is more extensive than previously known to the public, according to details buried in the tens of thousands of military intelligence documents released by an independent group Sunday.

U.S. officials and Middle East analysts said some of the most explosive information contained in the WikiLeaks documents detail Iran’s alleged ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda, and the facilitating role Tehran may have played in providing arms from sources as varied as North Korea and Algeria.

The officials have for years received reports of Iran smuggling arms to the Taliban. The WikiLeaks documents, however, appear to give new evidence of direct contacts between Iranian officials and the Taliban’s and al Qaeda’s senior leadership. It also outlines Iran’s alleged role in brokering arms deals between North Korea and Pakistan-based militants, particularly militant leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and al Qaeda.

Here we see one of the most bizarre twists in the story: US government sources now using the leaked documents to buttress the current anti-Iran narrative and in the process acting as though the intelligence reports are providing information that hadn’t been accessible inside government until they were leaked!

At the very same time, the State Department’s leading expert on Iran, John Limbert — a genuine source of intelligence and “the most qualified person on the Iran team at State in the three decades I have lived in the United States,” according to Haleh Esfandiari, head of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars — is about to resign.

At Foreign Policy, Barbara Slavin writes:

[I]t’s hard not to view Limbert’s departure as a turning point and yet another missed opportunity in U.S.-Iran relations. A number of players with more skeptical views about the prospect of rapprochement with Tehran — such as White House aide Dennis Ross and nonproliferation experts like Robert Einhorn and Gary Samore — appear to be driving U.S. policy now, and the president himself blames the Iranian government for failing to respond to his outreach.

What could please the attack-Iran lobby more than to see the departure of the most skilled American proponent of engagement and at the same time to be served a prize piece of propaganda by an outfit aligned with the anti-war movement?!

Ellsberg: ‘These documents are not the Pentagon Papers’ by Paul Woodward In an interview with Der Spiegel, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange when asked why he published the Afghan war logs, said: These files are the most comprehensive description of a war to be published during the course of a war — in other words, at a time when they still have a chance of doing some good. They cover more than 90,000 different incidents, together with precise geographical locations. They cover the small and the large. A single body of information, they eclipse all that has been previously said about Afghanistan. They will change our perspective on not only the war in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars. Those are very grand claims which appear to be based more than anything on the sheer quantity of information that has been released. Even so, Assange is probably over-estimating the capacity of the American public to become deeply politically engaged on an issue with which most people lack personal involvement. Comparisons are being made between the war logs and the release of the Pentagon Papers which were leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, yet the content of the documents and the contexts in which they appeared are vastly different. The Pentagon Papers revealed a massive level of deception through which US governments had led, by that point, 54,000 Americans to their deaths in Vietnam. “These documents are not the Pentagon Papers — we still await their equivalent for Afghanistan,” Ellsberg told the Financial Times. “But they do add to the strong doubts that most of us have about a war that has cost us more than $300bn so far in which the Taliban only appears to get stronger with each passing year. They reinforce the question: What is the point of this war?” Ellsberg told the Wall Street Journal he had mixed feelings about the release of so many documents: “To put out such a large amount of material is of some risk if you haven’t read it all,” said Ellsberg, reached in Mexico where he was attending a screening of “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” a documentary about his Pentagon Papers ordeal. Because the leaker was taking a risk in releasing the material, Ellsberg concluded it was released quickly and not likely carefully vetted… Ellsberg said he had studied every word of the Pentagon Papers and carefully weighed whether their release would harm anyone. “I had read all of it and made a judgment of the 7,000 papers and concluded they deserved to be out and would not harm any Americans,” he said. However, Ellsberg said, such a volume of material can be noteworthy for what it lacks: in this case, a justification for the U.S. continuing to wage war in Afghanistan.

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