WikiLeaks latest: embarrassing and undermining trust

We are all busy people and few of us have time even to read the Guardian summary of WikiLeaks latest splurge – let alone the thing itself, if we are honest about it. So what matters? As ever: policy, in a word.

What made their Iraq leaks so deeply damaging was that they revealed elements of US policy in that country hitherto long suspected – but actually not proven as policy. After those leaks we learned that every time an American official stood up to utter those words: “We do not keep a body count in Iraq”, they were lying.

And there was more. We learned that the Pentagon advice to US forces in the field was that you could not – in law – surrender to an American helicopter. So people got blasted to pieces from Apaches on direct legal advice from Washington and we saw it all happening in real time from the cockpit videos.

More damaging than both the above, I suspect, was the written Military Order stating that if no US forces were involved in the torture and ill-treatment of people in Iraq then Uncle Sam was not going to investigate it.

Only this morning on the radio I have been listening to various US voices telling the world that America does not support or condone torture. Well thanks to WikiLeaks the record states otherwise; that – if not overtly condoning torture – then the USA believes that a blind eye should be turned and no questions asked.

Now a lawyer will of course argue that turning blind eyes and condoning torture are not the same thing at all. That is not how most people will see it.

So the question today is: are we seeing the same calibre of revelations from all these diplomatic missives?

So far the answer has to be no. Policy is not revealed. Embarrassment is let slip in glorious abundance from Nicolas Sarkozy to Valdimir Putin and beyond.

US diplomats – it is reported – thought Putin was “an alpha dog”, a British Royal was “boorish”, a Labour Minister “a hound-dog with women” and so it goes on and on. All of it amusing. None of it surprising.

But critically little of it reveals real policy issues and positions in contrast to previous leaks. To that end much can and will be dismissed along that lines of: “This is the view of an individual diplomat – it does not represent the views or policies of the US State Department.”

Yet, the get-out-of-jail card is not all-powerful here.

All of this cumulative embarrassment does matter of course and will impact on the ability of the US to conduct itself abroad. Grave issues of trust have been eroded – not least the trust of, say, the King of Saudi Arabia, that he can suggest the US bombs Iran, safe in the knowledge that lines of communication are secure when they are not.

And here too we come to policy and potential real damage. Because – unlike the USA – in Saudi Arabia we can safely take the view of the king as a policy position of his country and that has been duly revealed.