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There is a scandal buried in the latest round of leaks, just not the kind the WikiLeaks leftists intended to reveal. The real scandal is what the diplomatic cables reveal about the hostile actions of the two remaining states that George Bush identified as charter members of the Axis of Evil—Iran and North Korea—and our government's failure to do anything to stop them.
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There were a few interesting revelations in the State Department cables, such as an indication that the administration's lackadaisical response to last year's mass protests against the Iranian regime may have partly been because the State Department was suckered by a premature report that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was on death's door and would be replaced by a "moderate" leader more sympathetic to Iran's liberals—none of which happened, of course.
But the big story from the cables is their discussion of new evidence that North Korea has been selling a sophisticated Russian-designed intermediate-range ballistic missile to Iran. The significance of this is not just the expanded capability of Iran's missiles but the depth of cooperation this reveals between Iran and North Korea in their nuclear weapons programs.
George Bush was right. There is an Axis of Evil, and we've only taken out one of its members.
The other big piece of evidence—which was reported in the regular newspapers—is North Korea's construction of a vast new facility for enriching weapons-grade nuclear materials.
Jack Wakeland sent me a note describing the implications of this news:
"Given the failure of the West to militarily confront North Korea's military partner, Iran, the North Koreans have become convinced that they're immune from military intervention. The result? They have built a modern uranium hexafluoride centrifugal enrichment plant, out in the open and above ground.
"In a nation as small and miserably poor (starving, actually) as North Korea, one has to ask from where the resources for this gleaming new facility come? The answer must be: Iran. If the assumption in that question is correct, the next question immediately follows: What did Iran get in return for helping North Korea build this new UF-6 centrifuge enrichment facility?
"The joint Iranian-North Korea nuclear weapons program is gearing up to add dozens of fission bombs to its current inventory of—perhaps—four or five. We can expect this two-nation 'Axis of Evil' to have a dozen nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in two to three years.
"Stephen Bosworth, President Obama's special envoy to North Korea, told the press, 'This is not a crisis.' I can't argue with that assessment. This is a slow-moving catastrophe for our national security that has been building since the late 80s and early 90s."
This, plus preparation in North Korea for the succession of one of Kim Jong-Il's sons to the throne—Communism in its old age has reverted to a form of hereditary monarchy—has emboldened the North Koreans to launch an exercise in pre-emptive belligerence, shelling a South Korean island near the border. This is a reminder to the South Koreans of the North's big threat: that large swaths of the South are within range of extensive Northern artillery installations. This is the primary deterrent to any direct attempt to topple the regime or bomb its nuclear facilities.
So the Obama administration has been reduced to asking the Chinese for help in restraining North Korea—despite the fact that North Korea's threats against US allies and interests are part of the reason China supports them.
There are some whispers in the newly leaked cables that the Chinese might accept a North Korean collapse and its re-unification with a US-allied South Korea. But I'll believe that when I see it.
The Obama administration—like the Bush administration before it—has been acting with equal helplessness against Iran. And let's be honest: that's where the real threat lies. North Korea by itself is too small and poor, and given its strategic neighbor, wedged up against the Chinese superpower, the main use for its nuclear weapons is just to deter South Korea. It is the regime's weapons-development alliance with Iran that makes North Korea really dangerous, providing Iran with weapons and missiles that can be used to attack Israel, threaten Europe, offer the protection of a nuclear deterrent for Hezbollah and Hamas, and Finlandize the Arab states on the other side of the Persian Gulf.
None of this is news we couldn't have gotten from reading the newspapers, but the leaked diplomatic cables offer some interesting new details, particularly about panicked demands by the Arabs for US strikes against Iran. One cable reveals this eloquent line:
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah asked the US repeatedly to attack Iran and destroy its nuclear program, and in 2008 the monarchy's envoy to Washington told US Gen. David Petraeus to "cut off the head of the snake."
Moreover, "leaders in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt referred to Iran as 'evil,' an 'existential threat' and a power that 'is going to take us to war.'"
No wonder the Jerusalem Post is crowing that the Arabs have privately been even more hawkish against Iran than Israel is.
And the cables contain other details about the extent and brazenness of the Iranian threat, including details about its arming of Hezbollah, including the use of vehicles from the Red Crescent—the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross—to smuggle weapons.
And in the face of all of this, what is the Obama administration doing? Preparing for another round of talks with the Iranians, which have produced precisely zero results over the past decade.
Fortunately, there are always new indications that the fragile Iranian regime—deprived since the summer of 2009 of the last vestige of consent from the governed—has many problems of its own. The Wall Street Journal reports on an attempt by Iran's parliament to impeach President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This is part of an internal power struggle in which Ahmadinejad is attempting to bypass the authority of the legislature in appointing officials and setting policy. From its inception, Iran has been a mixed system, a theocratic dictatorship with an element of representative government. Since last year's rigged election, Ahmadinejad—with Khamenei's backing—has been transforming the country into an outright military dictatorship, in which the parliament is being shoved aside in favor of direct rule by the Supreme Leader and his clique. Hence the new round of political turmoil.
The New York Times adds a report on a TV station in Dubai, part owned by Rupert Murdoch, that has quickly become the most popular channel in Iran and is being accused by the regime of waging a "soft cultural war" against the dictator—including by broadcasting episodes of the American counter-terrorism drama "24."
Then there is the recent cyber-attack on Iran's nuclear program, by way of an Internet "worm" that targets the software used to run centrifuges for Uranium enrichment—and does so in a way that can destroy the centrifuges by causing them to spin at excessively high speeds.
And finally there is a more old-fashioned form of covert action, of a type the Israelis are known to use: bomb attacks that killed one top Iranian nuclear scientist and seriously injured another.
These covert actions may buy us a little time against the Iranian-North Korean joint weapons program, and the internal turmoil in Iran could solve the problem in the long run by precipitating the collapse of an illegitimate regime. Iran is weak and ready to be knocked over by the first hard shove. But the WikiLeaks documents offer further confirmation that the US is largely a spectator in this drama and is taking no significant action to secure our interests.
Against Julian Assange's intentions, that is the real scandal in the latest WikiLeaks revelations—though we hardly needed Assange's help to figure it out.
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