The recent Wikileaks diplomatic disclosure is like getting a shot at the doctor's office: the needle hurts going in, and there are a few days of arm pain, but its better for you (and everyone else) in the long term.
Against its will, the US government just went through a baptism of radical transparency. Were there revelations of skulduggery? Not quite: the cables instead have revealed broad, earnest, and frank diplomacy -- the kind we should want.
As Timothy Ash recently wrote in the Guardian: "A diplomat's nightmare is a historian's dream." And yes, the disclosures were somewhat embarrassing, and there is some broken glass to pick up. But as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday, diplomacy is all about real politik anyway, a few awkward moments be damned.
So why so newsworthy? Because for the average person Wikileaks lifts the veil -- we don't get to read what Robert Gates does. I can put it no better than Will Wilkinson recently wrote in The Economist (via the NYT):
"To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it’s important to distinguish between the government—the temporary, elected authors of national policy—and the state—the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America’s intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America’s unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.
… If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents. I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy.
Some have said that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." But sometimes sunlight also reveals frank and affirming truths that actually build trust. For many across the globe, the disclosures may have the unintended and positive consequence of representing the best evidence that the US is not run by a cabal of out-of-touch plutocrats.
We should all want a government, should its innermost workings be exposed to sunlight, to stand up under close scrutiny. And that is largely what we've got. If not for Wikileaks, where would this sunlight come from?