More reasons why the Wikileaks fuss is not a very big deal

“Minister Schnappauf has received multiple death threats and calls for his resignation.” Why? A bear—a “problem bear.” It’s been a long—though rewarding—WikiLeaks week, with more to come, so let’s pause for a slight scene from the theatre of the diplomatic absurd: a diplomat’s dispatch on the question of Bruno, the first wild bear seen in Bavaria in many years, who was shot dead after, among other transgressions, being “seen sitting on the steps of a police station eating a guinea pig.” That is not a clever thing for a bear to do, in Germany or anywhere. (Thanks to Passport for pointing to this one.) The diplomat does have an alibi—a reference to attitudes about foreigners, the proffer of “a snippet of insight into German attitudes toward the environment.” But, really, it’s about a bear—one who is now stuffed and in a museum.

This is not to belittle the oddities in the cables. One sees a reference to, say, concerns about unsavory American characters on Canadian television shows, follows it, and finds an unattractive but illuminating discussion of the case of Omar Khadr: the Canadian spy chief telling one of our diplomats that a video of Khadr, then a teenage prisoner at Guantánamo, crying as he is interrogated by Canadian agents, might cause “paroxysms of moral outrage, a Canadian specialty.” (Not just Canadian, apparently: another cable shows that the French tried to get Hillary Clinton to do something about the Khadr case.) Then there is the cable about Karzai having dinner with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman, in December, 2008, and insulting the British. Karzai also told McCain that he really loved his concession speech, and that

I hope that if (Afghanistan’s) election results go a different way next year, I will have 20 percent of the guts you showed and be able to concede as graciously as you did.

Thanks to the fraud perpetrated on his behalf in that election, that was a test Karzai never had to take.