What the WikiLeaks cables don’t tell you

While the focus of the WikiLeaks story has turned from the actual cables to the plight of Julian Assange and whether he can raise bail, experts are debating their longer-term significance.

READ ALSO: Assange freed on bail, but faces possible US charges

At their best, the cables that have been released – and this map at Spiegel Online shows they cover most of the world (New Zealand excluded) – generally depict the US diplomatic community as doing a good job. As a Newsweek cover story says, [they are]

using their reporting skills to try to illuminate the complexities of the countries where they serve, and their negotiating skills to reduce the threat of war, whether with North Korea or in the Middle East.

The analysis goes on to discuss the case of Iran in detail and how US diplomats are working with the Chinese, Russians, Turks and various Arab nations in a common goal:

Despite the barrage of headlines shouting over how sour their relationship has become, the cables reveal Washington and Moscow working on intimate terms to blunt Iran. The account of an exchange between top Russian and American officials in February paints a portrait not of Cold War-era adversaries who can barely sip vodka together, but of intelligence comrades cooperating closely.

This account also reminds us the WikiLeaks cables, which originate only from the US State Department, do not tell the full story and fail to cover some of bigger developments involving the military and the CIA (such as the defection of a top Russian spymaster).

Snake heads and forked tongues
A contrarian view of the WikiLeaks cables, and whether the diplomats are giving the unvarnished inside story, has come from Middle East observer Daniel Pipes, whom readers may recall I met during his recent visit to New Zealand.

Dr Pipes throws cold water on whether key Arab leaders, such as Saudia Arabia’s King Abdullah, really want Washington to "cut off the head of the snake" [Iran] while publically saying the opposite.

It may be a case, Dr Pipes says, of the Arabs playing a typically duplicitous game of telling people what they want to hear while acting according to their own lights:

Their appeals could be part of a process of diplomacy, which involves mirroring one's allies' fears and desires as one's own. Thus, when Saudis claim Iranians are their mortal enemies, Americans tend uncritically to accept this commonality of interests…

Dr Pipes uses an earlier example to make his point: how Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's strongman from 1952 to 1970, played down the Palestinian issue as “unimportant” in private advice to western diplomats while in public always speaking out strongly against Israel, supposedly because this is what the Arab masses wanted to hear.

Another example is Yasser Arafat, who used the same ploy when giving western diplomats one (confidential) version of his intentions while saying the opposite to his supporters. Dr Pipes concludes:

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.

• If you are into WikiLeaks trivia, try this quiz at Spiegel Online.

An island in your dreams
The topic of long-stay tourism, or international retirement migration as it is more technically known, doesn’t often come up or given much consideration.

But it arose with the release of the Foreign Affairs select committee report on relationships with the Pacific Islands, including Papua New Guinea.

Said to have taken four years in the preparation, the report is strongly worded and comprehensive (at 96 pages). About the only media mention it received was the idea of setting up a retirement home in Nuie.

It was probably suggested by a Nuiean, given the island has spare buildings and a declining population. No mention is made among the many recommendations.

Further investigation of the idea shows people leaving their own countries to retire overseas is not a fanciful or stupid notion. It is, in fact, widely practised in Europe, with pensioners from the cold north moving to the warmer Mediterranean region.

In America, whole colonies of retired Americans and Canadians live in Mexico, while in Asia the practice is common among the Japanese.

The advantages are obvious: you get a higher standard of living and a better climate for less cost. The Japanese mainly move to Malaysia and Thailand, where they enjoy the local culture and bring many opportunities for the locals in healthcare and other facilities.

Nuie might be a stretch, given its remoteness and limited attractions. But the idea of giving the place some form of livelihood is better than the status quo.

The scandalous truth is that Pacific dependencies such as Nuie cost us more per person than a New Zealand pensioner, have no viable private sector or sustainable economy, and no long-term future.

The report spells this out in untypical clear and pungent prose.

Russia’s clash of darkness and light
For anyone interested in Russian history and civilisation, these are interesting times.

The gulags may be emptier – they are now called Putlags – but what crime writer Boris Akunin calls “the centuries-long confrontation between two competing forces in Russia” is alive and well.

Akunin has penned an article, translated here in the Guardian, on the trial of former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the unlikelihood of him receiving justice as we know it.

Akunin’s two forces are those of the idealistic “aristocracy” (in the intellectual sense) and the “arrest-ocracy,” which is about the denial of freedom and the silencing of free speech.

As he tells it, Khodorkovsky is an unlikely successor to Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn but well deserves the description.

Another interesting take on Russia and a further victim of the “arrest-ocracy” comes from Denis MacShane, the maverick British MP and former Labour minister of state for Europe.

His observations on Russia’s legal system, and in particular the case of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died from 12 months of mistreatment in a Moscow jail, are recommended reading.

At the other end of the spectrum, we learn Anna Chapman has surfaced again, this time at a science park in Moscow, while Putin’s "mistress" has set tongues wagging for appearing on the cover of Russian Vogue’s January edition.