You know what really grinds my gears?

WikiLeaks.

What follows is an annotated guide to one dude's thoughts on the latest WikiLeaks installment and the NY Times report on the leak. Phil is right, read the article.

They weren’t even that badass this time…
90% of the documents are unclassified.

And cheers to the Times for showing some restraint…
The Times, after consultations with the State Department, has withheld from articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts. While the White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public “several hundred thousand” cables Sunday night, the organization posted only 220 released and redacted by The Times and several European publications.

This f’ing guy…
Likewise, press reports detailed the unhappiness of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, when he was not permitted to set up his tent in Manhattan or to visit ground zero during a United Nations session last year.
But the cables add a touch of scandal and alarm to the tale. They describe the volatile Libyan leader as rarely without the companionship of “his senior Ukrainian nurse,” described as “a voluptuous blonde.”

I mean, with hyperinflation like theirs…
As he left Zimbabwe in 2007 after three years as ambassador, Christopher W. Dell wrote a sardonic account of Robert Mugabe, that country’s aging and erratic leader. The cable called him “a brilliant tactician” but mocked “his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics).”

A rant follows…
The voluminous traffic of more recent years — well over half of the quarter-million cables date from 2007 or later — show American officials struggling with events whose outcomes are far from sure. To read through them is to become a global voyeur, immersed in the jawboning, inducements and penalties the United States wields in trying to have its way with a recalcitrant world.

Is it the US trying to have its way with a recalcitrant world, or the US trying to ensure freedom the world over? Or is one somehow now embedded with the other so much so that they are considered one in the same? Because that would be bad. Yes, America in idea is meant to represent freedom and liberty, but that doesn’t mean that America in practice is exactly that. After all, no one is perfect. But I will argue in favor of America’s effort to represent and spread the idea of freedom and liberty forever, and I think there are hundreds of millions of individuals and families who came to this country for that precise reason and would argue vociferously in favor of what America is and means to the rest of the world. This should be especially true relative to the country or situation that so many Americans or their descendants fled at some point to get here. And if you don’t like this country, you can leave and go back. Seriously. That said, I don’t disagree that our brand is right for everyone (and perhaps, sometimes, even for our own country) or that we use questionable tactics in achieving global freedom.

Everyone should take a class in negotiation…
But the drama in the cables often comes from diplomats’ narratives of meetings with foreign figures, games of diplomatic poker in which each side is sizing up the other and neither is showing all its cards.

And the ending to it all is just too good and so Cold War/Felix Leiter (007 reference)…
In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.

“The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the happy couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.”

“After the dancing and a quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove off back to Chechnya,” the diplomat reported to Washington. “We asked why Ramzan did not spend the night in Makhachkala, and were told, ‘Ramzan never spends the night anywhere.’ ”