Pepe Escobar : The naked emperor

[unhappycamper]

The naked emperor
By Pepe Escobar
Dec 1, 2010

Whatever the spin, the fact is that 1.6 gigabytes of text files on a memory stick spanning 251,287 leaked United States State Department cables from more than 250 embassies and consulates are not exactly bound to provoke "a political meltdown" - as German magazine Der Spiegel has put it - concerning the foreign policy of the world's declining hyperpower.

Behind the multiple, hypocritical layers of spin served to the frantic 24/7 news cycle, politics is mostly a tacky reality show. And that's what the latest WikiLeaks show graphically lays bare. A Muammar Gaddafi that applies botox and just can't get enough of his sexy Ukrainian nurse belongs to the realm of Big Brother.

Although it would all make for great TV, it's hardly a scoop that for US diplomats Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is "Hitler", Afghan President Hamid Karzai is "paranoid", French President Nicolas Sarkozy is an "emperor with no clothes", "vain and feckless" Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is fond of "wild parties", German Chancellor Angela Merkel is "rarely creative", Russian President Dmitry Medvedev "plays Robin to Putin's Batman" or North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is a "flabby old chap" suffering from "physical and psychological trauma".

But to believe, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton does, that these disclosures constitute "an attack not only on American foreign policy interests but on the international community"; or that WikiLeaks, as President Barack Obama has put it, committed a serious crime, is to display nothing but tacky imperial arrogance. As if the world didn't have the right to gorge itself on the kind of political junk food served to a few consumers inside the Washington palaces of power.

Clinton must have sensed that the overall sentiment after reading these cables is of a Washington suffering a nervous breakdown worthy of an Almodovar flick. For instance, a key US ally such as Berlusconi, defined as "vainglorious", "indifferent to the fate of Europe" and dangerously close to Putin, of which he seems to be "the spokesperson", can be regarded as a threat equal to Ahmadinejad. How paranoid can you get? The US Embassy in Moscow, by the way, describes Putin as an "alpha-dog" ruling over a Russia that is virtually "a Mafia state"; cynics would say this also applied to former vice president Dick Cheney during the George "Dubya" Bush era.