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It's the top story around the world. A few of the cables and communications from the huge mass of information have been made public, and everyone with a keyboard and an interest is making pronouncements about the latest Wikileaks release of information. Some are praising this as a way of revealing the "truth." Others are saying that it will have "little effect" on anything. Some are celebrating the embarrassment the release is causing for the U.S. government. Others are claiming that heads will roll and people will die.
The reality is that nobody knows what the effect of the release of these documents will be. It's impossible to know, since we don't even know what's in the vast majority of the documents. We have a very limited subset to examine. It's far too early to assess the situation, but that doesn't stop people from making broad statements about what it all means.
On DU and on many other websites, the discussion is frantic. It will fade in a few weeks, at most - long before most of the documents are made public. We'll talk about a few of them and say, "This is awful" or "This is a great thing," and then we'll move on to other topics. We have very short attention spans and usually precious little expertise. Even in the major media outlets, we're seeing people writing and saying things based on almost no information whatsoever. What they're saying is largely based on the individual biases of the person writing or speaking. Not much information has been released, but that doesn't stop every media pundit from making broad pronouncements.
The real effects of the release of these cables and other documents will not be known for months or even years. The real effects will be caused by how the documents affect diplomatic negotiations now going on and in the future. Loss of trust caused by the public release of what is tacitly understood in diplomatic channels may well cost people jobs, derail delicate negotiations, and cause the breakdown of diplomatic progress all over the world. It doesn't just affect the United States. It affects most of the world. The results could affect many things, from military matter and political power in many countries to human rights issues and trade policies. For some, the loss of face caused by these revelations could mean that people in the middle of negotiations are suddenly removed, causing delays or failures of those negotiations.
Will it cost people's lives? I don't know, but if it does, it will probably be people's lives who have nothing to do with diplomacy at all. There are many ways these documents may affect people whose names are unknown to any of us, and whose lives may be altered due to fallout from other effects.
We'll see what happens - maybe. Some effects will just be invisible, since we'll never find out what they were. Some effects will be visible, but we probably will have forgotten about the whole business before they occur. It's far too early to tell. We haven't seen the documents, and we will only discuss a tiny fraction of them, even after they're all public. But, you can be assured that the people affected, in nations all over the world, will be studying the documents that relate to them. There will be repercussions from this, but we'll mostly be unaware of them, since we focus primarily on how things affect our country and our individual beliefs and political viewpoints.
We'll be moving on to some other topic soon, and the eventual effects of these leaked documents will go unnoticed or unrecognized by most of us. For many of us, we already know what we think about this. What actually occurs is irrelevant to many of us. I'm not in that group. It's not irrelevant to me, and I'll be following this for a long time, even when it's out of the news and out of most of our minds.
I hope the effects aren't too negative or too severe. We'll see.
Please see my disclaimer in the signature line below:
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