Julian Assange's goal in leaking hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables was to embarrass the U.S. government. But many of his WikiLeaks cables revealed American diplomats to be deeply engaged and hard-hitting in their missives home. And the missives themselves led to unintended positive consequences, from helping to topple a dictatorship to giving an early glimpse into Muammar al-Qaddafi's madness. Five bylines stood out in particular:
Gene Cretz, who in 2007 was named the first U.S. ambassador to Libya since 1972, wrote numerous, highly prescient cables describing Qaddafi as increasingly cut off from reality by a tight group of confidants (not to mention his "voluptuous blonde" Ukrainian nurse). Cretz was forced to leave Libya in January following the release of the cables but has since returned in the wake of Qaddafi's downfall.
Elizabeth Dibble, now a deputy assistant secretary of state, was no less withering -- or accurate -- when she described Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in her previous job as deputy chief of mission in Rome, as "feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader."
Robert Godec, former U.S. ambassador to Tunisia and now a State Department counterterrorism official, portrayed the family of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali as a mafia-like cartel and the president himself as having "lost touch with the Tunisian people." The revelation that America had no illusions about Ben Ali undeniably played a galvanizing role in shifting elite opinion in Tunis during the revolution.
Carlos Pascual -- an academic expert on state failure -- was a controversial ambassador to Mexico to begin with. But unsparing cables noting the Mexican government's "inability to halt the escalating numbers of narco-related homicides" proved too much, and Pascual was forced to step down.
Anne Patterson -- now posted to Egypt -- offered an early warning of the deterioration in U.S.-Pakistan relations, writing in 2009 that Washington's policy toward Islamabad risked "destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and the military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis" -- which sounds disturbingly close to the current reality.
CRETZ
Muse Optimism.
Stimulus or austerity? Stimulus.
America or China? America.
Arab Spring or Arab Winter? Spring.
Reading list In the Garden of the Beasts, by Erik Larson; The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee; Empire: The Novel of Imperial Rome, by Steven Saylor.
Best idea Stanford Institute of Design's Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability project.
Worst idea PajamaJeans.
PATTERSON
Stimulus or austerity? Stimulus.
America or China? America.
Arab Spring or Arab Winter? Both, depending on the country.
Reading list In the Graveyard of Empires, by Seth G. Jones; The Big Short, by Michael Lewis; How Pakistan Negotiates with the United States, by Howard B. Schaffer and Teresita C. Schaffer.
Best idea Ambitious trade visions like the Silk Road for South Asia.
Worst idea Protectionism, particularly in the U.S.
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