Just for giggles, let's compare the effectiveness of foreign policy of the current and former administrations with what Bradley Manning has (allegedly) accomplished.
The Big Serious People of the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations started wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, there have been deaths in the six figures, and there's now a shaky truce between three hostile factions. We're reducing our overt military presence there, but to a large extent we're substituting unaccountable mercenaries such as Blackwater. If we were truly to remove our military influence there, a three way civil war seems more likely than a functioning government that all three factions would accept.
In Afghanistan, we never caught Osama bin Laden, and we're withdrawing from the countryside to an enclave in Kabul. Afghanistan is a modern state only in the sense of being a 'buffer state' since at least the nineteenth century. Back then it served as a buffer between Russia and British interests in India. The British learned not to bother trying to control the place in time for Rudyard Kipling to write a poem that ends:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,The Soviet Union may not have come up with poems about what they learned from trying to occupy and control Afghanistan after 1979, but they got out in 1988.
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
http://www.daypoems.net/...
We can probably keep troops in Kabul as long as we feel like paying to supply them, but the rest of what's called Afghanistan on maps seems more a group of tribes, each controlling its own valley, frequently at low-level war with each other. The area was the power base of the Persian empire that Alexander the Great conquered, but since then the only thing that unites those tribes is foreign occupation. They unite to drive out the foreigners. The main exports of "Afghanistan" are opium and chaos.
So what did the Big Serious People accomplish? There's an unstable government in Iraq. It wants to break into three or more pieces, and only a lot of our money and troops seem able to hold that centrifugal force in check. In Afghanistan, there's a puppet government in Kabul, again kept in place with lots of our money and troops. So the Big Serious People managed to dig two holes that we pour money into. And blood.
Meanwhile, let's look at what Bradley Manning accomplished, if the allegations are true:
He helped inspire an almost bloodless popular revolution in Tunisia that has greatly increased freedom there. It may lead to a government most people there actually accept rather than suffer to be imposed on them. He did that by letting the world read and take action on our own diplomatic cables. If anybody back home at the State Department bothered to read those cables, they didn't lead to any action. And the cables, by and large, REFLECT WELL on the junior folks in the Foreign Service who wrote them. They just don't reflect that well on the higher up folks, the Big Serious People, who ignored them.
The same goes for Egypt -- another almost bloodless popular revolution, inspired by the leaked cables and by Tunisia's example. In both Tunisia and Egypt, there has been 'regime change' -- one of our alleged goals in Iraq.
Things started out the same way in Libya. There it's starting to turn into a bloody mess. But at least our fingerprints aren't all over the mess there.
And Bradley Manning [allegedly] managed to do this, all while lip-syncing Lady Gaga, or lying around in a brig with no pillow, or standing at attention naked. He used maybe a dollar's worth of blank CD-ROM's and internet access time.
So the way I'd score it is:
Big, Serious People -- Two bloody messes, costing at least a trillion dollars before they're finished.Bradley Manning -- Two hopeful situations and one result on the way to becoming a bloody mess, costing maybe a dollar.
Maybe we should thank PFC Manning.