Advancing peace?

A great argument is being fought out in The New Republic regarding Wikileaks. On the one side we have a partial defence of wikileaks from John B. Judis "A Defense of Wikileaks: How it could actually improve U.S. foreign policy."

"Should this kind of information be known to the public? The administration says it should not. Referring to the leak about China and proliferation, a “senior administration official” told the Washington Post, “Clearly, you don’t want any information like this leaked illegally and disseminated to the public.” But I beg to differ. I think the public has a right to know about China’s willingness to arm Iran and North Korea. And I applaud Wikileaks for making this kind of material public. I would feel the same way if an enterprising reporter unearthed the relevant documents and published them in The New York Times. If Wikileaks is doing a disservice by indiscriminately airing classified dirty laundry, the U.S. government is doing its public a disservice by keeping this kind of information about China or Iran or about Afghanistan’s government secret."

On the other hand James P. Rubin points out in " The Irony of Wikileaks" points out that Wikileaks seems to have hurt their hard left ideological goals:

"By and large, the hard left in America and around the world would prefer to see the peaceful resolution of disputes rather than the use of military force. World peace, however, is a lot harder to achieve if the U.S. State Department is cut off at the knees. And that is exactly what this mass revelation of documents is going to do. The essential tool of State Department diplomacy is trust between American officials and their foreign counterparts. Unlike the Pentagon which has military forces, or the Treasury Department which has financial tools, the State Department functions mainly by winning the trust of foreign officials, sharing information, and persuading. Those discussions have to be confidential to be successful. Destroying confidentiality means destroying diplomacy. "

Tablet Magazine in a recent piece "Deadly Fictions" as well as Blogger/Atlantic editor Jeffery Goldberg (in every blog of his for the last 4-5 days) have pointed out that the leaks so far seem to prove that the right wing has had the far better grasp of the political situation in the Middle-East then the left. The Leaks so far have shown, that it is not the Israel Lobby pushing for a war on Iran - it is the Arab lobby which is pushing that agenda the hardest. 

So to sum it up. Wikileaks which is led by openly extreme left wing administration has made the likelihood of war that much higher. They have both destroyed or at least harmed the current Left Wing claims about the Middle-East and irrevocably harmed the one peaceful tool that is meant to prevent war. It seems the hard left is less concerned with peace, and more with undermining the United States.