There are also practical ethical issues. After World War I there was ill-considered outrage over the fact that among the complex of reasons for the war were secret treaty provisions that pulled nations into the conflict. But the opposite is also true. Making diplomacy too open means that nations can’t be covertly honest with one another or work out their differences in secret. It politicizes diplomacy.

That’s particularly true in the Middle East. Israel and the various Arab countries have always had ‘back doors’ though which they communicate to prevent another bloody war. Exposed, radical Islamist groups could use the existence of those contacts to stir up violence and replace a tolerable government with something much worse.

No, in then end rhetoric about promoting “online democracy” is as silly as claiming that kings or dictatorship are ‘better’ than weak and divided democracies. Some horrors against humanity have been the responsibility of a closed elite that should be exposed. Other horrors are committed by angry and democratic masses of people who know or think they know too much. A lynch mob is a far more open, participatory democracy than any courtroom, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t evil.

That’s why AIR (All India Radio) wisely held back (censored) news of Gandhi’s assassination until they could report in the same newscast that his killer was a radical Hindu rather than a radical Muslim. The latter would have triggered riots in which tens of thousands of people might have been killed.

To get specific about these leaks, among other things, these leaks reveal that the leadership of Arab countries are every bit as hostile toward a nuclear Iran as Israel is. Everyone who understands Middle-eastern politics knows that, but revealing it in a way the infamously stupid “Arab street” can see could have disastrous results, particularly if somewhere in the cables are hints that Saudi Arabia and Syria were open to giving covert flyover rights to Israeli fighters.

And, I might add, given our current weak-kneed administration in the White House, I’m all for Arab countries pressuring a spineless U.S. to do something constructive to prevent a country, whose leaders are whacky even by Middle-eastern terms, from going nuclear. It’s interesting that in this matter the French government is displaying far more good sense and backbone than our own.

Leaks aren’t all bad. Specific and carefully targeted leaks can be good because they reveal something that needs to see the light of day. The Pentagon Papers, for instance, revealed just how ill-thought out and heavily politicized the Vietnam policy of JFK and LBJ had been. But massive dumps like this can’t help but do more harm than good. They’re less about informing than about a foul, smash-and-burn mindset, at Wikileaks.

“One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press, and so when I think of the most important journalistic endeavors in this country, I think of things like the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and publications like that,” Jobs replies. “And we all know what’s happened to the economics of those businesses. I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers. Anything that we can do to help the news-gathering organizations find new ways of expression so that they can afford to keep their news-gathering and editorial operations intact, I’m all for.”

– http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/#more-447