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WikiLeaks:

Arab leaders urged US to bomb Iran

Key points so far from the biggest, most embarrassing WikiLeaks release ever

By Tim Edwards

LAST UPDATED 8:02 AM, NOVEMBER 29, 2010

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has made its biggest and potentially most embarrassing release yet, with the leak of 251,287 United States embassy cables.

Release of the documents began yesterday and will continue over the coming months. They include cables dated as recently as February 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions.

Here are the world leaders likely to be most infuriated by what the US – and even their neighbours – really think of them:

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD OF IRANArab leaders have continually urged the US to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Kingh Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked at a meeting in 2008 that the US "cut off the head of the snake". He told an official: "May God prevent us from falling victim to [Iran’s] evil. We have had correct relations over the years, but the bottom line is that they cannot be trusted."

An Omani minister believes Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar would be in favour of an attack. Qatari prime minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani puts it bluntly: "They will keep you working on a deal and then start from scratch with a new interlocutor. Iran will make no deal. Iran wants nuclear weapons."

In 2009, Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa told the US commander in Afghanistan General Petraeus: "That [nuclear] program must be stopped. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it."

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is compared to Adolf Hitler by US officials while Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak sees his Iranian counterpart as an extremist who “does not think rationally”. He told a US Senator visiting Egypt that he was not against Washington talking with the Iranians, as long as "you don't believe a word they say".

PRESIDENT MUGABE OF ZIMBABWEIn an overly optimistic cable dated August 13, 2007, with the subject "The end is nigh", the US embassy in Harare explains that "Robert Mugabe has survived for so long because he is more clever and more ruthless than any other politician in Zimbabwe".

However, he is hampered by several factors, including "his ego and belief in his own infallibility, his obsessive focus on the past as a justification for everything in the present and future and deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics, including supply and demand)".

PRINCE ANDREWThe Guardian reports the Duke of York "made inappropriate remarks about a UK law enforcement agency and a foreign country". No further details are currently available.

COL GADAFFI OF LIBYAAn adviser to the Sultan of Oman believes Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gadaffi is “just strange”, while a Ukrainian official says that he travels everywhere with a team of Ukrainian nurses.

He "relies heavily on his long-time Ukrainian nurse, Galyna Kolotnytska, who has been described as a 'voluptuous blonde'," according to a 2009 cable from the embassy in Tripoli. It adds: "Some embassy contacts have claimed that Gaddafi and the 38 year-old Kolotnytska have a romantic relationship."

PUTIN AND MEDVEDEV OF RUSSIAIn 2008, the US embassy in Moscow was blunt in its description of the relationship between President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Medvedev, it says, is "pale and hesitant" and "plays Robin to Putin's Batman". Putin, meanwhile, is an "alpha-dog".

PRESIDENT BERLUSCONI OF ITALYThe US charge d'affaires in Rome describes Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi as "feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader". He is "physically and politically weak" while "frequent late nights and penchant for partying hard mean he does not get sufficient rest".

Berlusconi's relationship with Russia is under suspicion. Cables talk of lavish gifts and energy contracts and a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italian fixer. Berlusconi "appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin".

PRESIDENT KARZAI OF AFGHANISTANHamid Karzai is "an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts but was instead easily swayed by anyone who came to report even the most bizarre stories or plots against him", according to a cable from the US embassy in Kabul.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Hamid Karzai, is a corrupt drugs baron, but his position as a powerful figure in the southern province of Kandahar means he is untouchable. In September 2009, a cable read: "While we must deal with AWK as the head of the provincial council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker."

A SENIOR MEMBER OF CHINA'S POLITBUROA senior member of China's politburo launched a cyber attack on Google after discovering material that was critical of him when he Googled himself, according to a Chinese contact quoted by the US embassy in Beijing. The politburo directed "a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government".

It is part of a cyber warfare campaign dating back to at least 2002 aimed at the US, its allies and the Dalai Lama.

PRESIDENT SARKOZY OF FRANCEFrench President Nicolas Sarkozy is "an emperor with no clothes" who has a "thin-skinned and authoritarian personal style".

UN GENERAL SECRETARY BAN KI-MOONDirectives signed by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and her Predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, have ordered US diplomats to collect intelligence information on UN leaders, including biometric details for Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

Diplomats were instructed to help crack UN leaders' communications systems by providing information on "private VIP networks used for official communication, to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys".

Other information requested included, in the case of the central African countries DR Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, details on military installations and weapons.

WikiLeaks released the US embassy cables to five news organisations. They are the Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde.

Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/72115,news-comment,news-politics,wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-round-up-arab-leaders-urged-us-to-bomb-iran?DCMP=NLC-daily#ixzz16fnR1bUH

US mistrusts its friends almost as much as its foes

Robert Fox: Leaked cables offer insight into US thinking - and

suggest new conflict in the Middle East

By Robert Fox

LAST UPDATED 10:22 AM, NOVEMBER 29, 2010

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The last big dump of intelligence reports by WikiLeaks was described as an embarrassment of riches for journalists and historians. This second mega-avalanche of a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables is a plain embarrassment.

We learn not so much what the Americans think, but how they think. It shows the US administrations of George W Bush and Barack Obama in far less control of their destiny than they would like us to imagine. They appear to mistrust their allies almost as much they do their acknowledged foes. There isn’t a good word for anyone who isn’t wrapped in the star-spangled banner.

Leaving aside the personal stuff – and, let’s face it, that is the only bit of fun in these often turgid missives – there are some points of real concern. The broad conclusion from the exchanges over the Middle East, North Korea and Afghanistan, is that we face a scenario of worsening or even new conflict in 2011.

The exchanges on Iran suggest that the US has all but accepted that Iran will have a workable nuclear weapon within months. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to be wildly unpredictable. The new development is that Iran seems to be well on the way to acquiring a new set of intermediate and long-range missiles from North Korea, and, yes, some of these could hit parts of Mediterranean and Eastern Europe.

This explains why almost everyone at the Nato Lisbon summit signed up with such alacrity to the anti-missile shield. This includes the Russians, who are using the shield as a way of re-engaging with Nato and its senior European and north American partners.

Linking the nuclear initiatives of North Korea and Iran is the shadow of the A Q Khan network, which delivered a nuclear arsenal to Pakistan. The cables reveal that since 2007 the US has been working strenuously to get highly enriched uranium away from Pakistan’s nuclear plants for fear of it getting into the hands of terrorist groups, or being traded to them by organised crime.

So far we have only heard of the private requests of Saudi Arabia to try to destroy the Iranian nuclear industry, by military force if necessary, at the earliest opportunity. We haven’t yet heard the assessment of Israel’s role in the worsening tensions with Tehran.

But there is some explicit reporting about the role of Syria in arming Iran’s natural ally and proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. This contributes to the growing fear that a serious attack by Hezbollah and its Hamas ally against Israel is shifting from the possible to the highly probable in 2011.

On Afghanistan there is a dismal familiarity to the various comments from US diplomats. President Karzai is described as “locked in paranoia”. His brother Ahmed Walid, the power broker in Kandahar, is assessed as “deceitful” and not to be trusted – despite his protestations of support for the activities of the CIA.

You can almost sense the shrug of the diplomatic shoulders in the report that the Drug Enforcement Agency discovered a recent vice-president of Afghanistan was carrying $52 million on his visit to the UAE. Ahmad Zia Massoud denied he was trying to take funds out of the country and was “ultimately allowed to keep [the money] without revealing its origins or destinatio..”

The mistrust of the Karzai clan and the Kabul regime underlines the folly of trying to build up counter-insurgency and reconstruction when you cannot trust the resident regime you are supposed to be backing: it is the fable of Vietnam all over again.

The big question all this poses for the US is one of trust and credibility. If everything is seen through the ‘made in the USA’ lens, why should we like them if they don’t like us?

Machiavelli teased that a strong ruler should prefer to be feared than loved. With the slipping of the mask by WikiLeaks, the US may be regarded as worthy of neither fear nor love, by enemies or friends.

The danger is that the US has lost respect and trust – the two commodities Machiavelli regarded as most politically precious

Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/72124,news-comment,news-politics,us-mistrusts-its-friends-almost-as-much-as-its-foes-,2#ixzz16foFoYuu