City Talk; Ambassador Richard Murphy

Hello, I'm Doug Museo, this is City Talk. Well, not exactly, in fact, not at all. Today, it's U.S. foreign policy and international relations talk. And the talk in the United States and throughout the world since November 28th has focused on the release of some of the 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables by wickieleaks.org to major newspapers in the United States and Europe. The reaction, shocking, global diplomatic catastrophe, a new Pentagon papers, a new world disorder or overblown and actually helping the United States. Well, it's too early to determine the breadth and depth of the wickieleaks release.

It's never too soon to talk with Richard Murphy. Richard Murphy is the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Syria, the Philippines, and Mauritania. He has served as U.S. Secretary of State for New Year Eastern and Asian Affairs, named Career Ambassador, and has served as senior fellow for the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ambassador Murphy is a frequent TV commentator and widely consulted expert. Welcome back, always a pleasure, always a learning experience. Let's start with Julian Assange. What's he all about? How do you read him? I think he believes that by exposing everything, you will somehow bring truth to the people of the world of what the American role has been, and you will compel the American government to, what's the term, compartmentalize its reporting and the sharing of its intelligence

so it becomes less efficient and somehow weakens it as a global power. Okay. Let me read stuff from wickieleaks itself and you respond to it. The heading is why the media and particularly wickieleaks is important, quote, publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people. Better scrutiny leads to reduced corruption and stronger democracies in all society's institutions. Your response. I think there's a limit to the transparency you can have in diplomacy as there is in preparing for a business merger or for a divorce action, all of these things require a degree of understanding that there's a need to keep your mouth shut in the process of working out a new arrangement. Is it all conceivable to have sort of the open diplomacy that he's interested in or seeks

to produce? I mean, that's Wilson, open covenants, openly arrived at, it works. It doesn't work or hasn't worked over the centuries that leaders have been trying to communicate with each other and countries to relate to each other. There's always been an assumption that there has to be some confidentiality, some respect for privacy as you work for open agreements and the usual way has been let's have them secretly arrived at. And that's, it's very hard to come down certainly on how much secrecy there should be. There may be some benefit we can talk about, but WikiLeaks has done. But the basic challenge, I think, is frankly foolish that you can destroy confidentiality and somehow benefit the public.

Okay. So what have we got here, what are these documents, some of the 251,000 state department cables in this? I guess this is the second major release of WikiLeaks documents after the Iraq and Afghanistan documents? Well, it's a release of a quarter of a million documents from confidential to secret. It apparently doesn't include top secret, doesn't include what we call code word or particularly sensitive documents relating to nuclear issues. At least we don't think they have them, but, you know, time will tell on that, they may surprise. So you read them, what's been released, what was your reaction, both as a professional diplomat and now sort of as an outside analyst and observer? What did you feel? Well, I didn't feel much surprised, frankly, because, look, we've got the benefit and the curse of an able and aggressive press and a very close relationship between diplomats

and the press overseas, in particular, where they have access to certain individuals that we can't officially be in touch with and they have insights. And there's a back and forth with a general understanding that keep my name out of this, but what can you tell me? How can you enlighten me on this? So there is a sharing, and I think if you had tracked issues such as Syria, Saudi Arabia and attitudes towards given issues in the times and other journals, you wouldn't have been surprised by what you read in the cables. Yeah, that was part of the, one of the responses, for example, Peanut Binerton, the daily beast, says, why the WikiLeaks drama is overblown and he makes the same argument what you do. There are basically eight or nine bullet points, Pakistan, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, but anybody who read basically the times and a couple of blogs knew this before.

But what is the value added of these pieces? Well, I don't see it because you, I mean, I don't see the great value added. I'm not defending secrecy for secrecy's sake, but I just say it is the way the world functions and you have to respect the other parties, desire for private conversations and expect them to respect, you know, the confidentiality of something you're saying, maybe testing out an idea and you're not seeing something like the Pentagon papers worked. Talk to that. Okay, Pentagon papers were a dissection of the planning at the top levels of the American government to carry on the Vietnamese war. These are not that. These are the documents from the field as the embassies relate to their contacts, discuss issues under instructions or from Washington or exploring

with the other officials of other governments issues that are on their minds. It doesn't represent the critical decision point when a policymaker, such as the Secretary of State, the President, will say, all right, we're going this way or we're going that way. Basically it seems to me that it's basic war almost information and this war information doesn't necessarily get into the discussions of decision makers, let alone the decisions themselves. What's, you've been there, what is, what are we talking about here? Describe what you would do as ambassador in Saudi Arabia, Syria, or the Philippines in terms of communication. All right, this goes back a while, back to the, well it's 30 years now, to Syria. This was 1976 when Syria had been asked to help the Lebanese in their struggles with the Palestinians with the then PLO militias, and the question was could Syria send its troops

across the border into Lebanon, and they were very cautious about this. They did not want to do anything that would get them caught up in a war with Israel, and there's always been high level of suspicion on both sides in Damascus and Jerusalem about the other's intentions. So we were, if you will, the middle man explaining the red lines that you should not cross if you send your troops into Syria. Now there's been a reference to the red lines in various historical reviews of that period, but it was kept very quiet at the time because it just wasn't considered useful by Israel, by the Lebanese, the Syrians, or ourselves. So it looks like what you just described and the cables, at least, that I've been able to look at and through secondary sources.

This looks like what's been going on with diplomats and, you know, wax seals. This is, you know, several centuries long, no? Oh yeah, so time immemorial. Looking at the cables themselves, I mean, they, the one one commentate, I guess Leslie Gelb argued that it's actually good for U.S. foreign policy. It's been good for the United States, and so far as that it shows that our diplomats are honest, candid, and even funny, I mean, there's some really interesting stuff. I mean, one picture is that you folks, the professional diplomats are really smart, really hardworking, and some of them are novelists. Well, novelists, not in the sense of creating fiction, but in terms of the oddest person themselves. The invested to Russia burns is some of his descriptions of the autocrats in the various standards. Unbelievable. Well, they don't go out of their way at the State Department to hire stupid people or illiterate people, so I'm sorry if I implied that.

But no, they write in, again, an influence of journalism. You've got to catch your audience's attention up front, and in order to get your message across, so it helps to have a sense of humor, or a little bit. But the restrictions of gold plated handguns in the back pockets of central Asian dictators was just priceless. Talk about the charge that diplomats are becoming spies, that this Clinton memorandum suggests that diplomats do things that diplomats haven't done, shouldn't do, talk. Well, diplomats around the world are often considered spies. They're government officials openly sent to other countries to be the instrument of explaining our policies and getting reactions back to Washington to explain theirs and see where there's generally speaking common ground that can be built upon and expanded.

The latest that they were supposed to be, what, picking up credit card numbers and frequent flyer numbers is something that really does belong to the CIA. It's not a state. It's useful. I mean, I can imagine it's useful in the right hands at some point in time, but it's not something that diplomats would expect to be able to check that credit card numbers. I mean, how would you have reacted to a memo on it? I'm a little too near-sighted to get away with that, you know, if you really write down here. Okay, so I mean, okay, the physical handicaps, you know, help. You in an earlier conversation said that these cables and their release validated the belief that Americans can't keep their mouths shut. What did you mean by that? Well, we're pretty well known for being blabramiles and blabramiles in what sense? Well, we can't keep a confidence that if, you know, well, when I was in the State Department,

it was kind of a maxim, don't put down something on paper that you don't want to see one day in the New York Times. Well, that horror has come to pass now, and there's a great pile of stuff that was not designed for publication, although we always knew there's an automatic release of the vast bulk of confidential reporting. I think it's starting 10 years and 20 years, 30 years after, depending on how sensitive it's judged to be. But many of these 250,000 documents, at least according to WikiLeaks themselves, are unclassified documents anyway that would have been eligible for release. What specifically in the documents that you looked at or reported on that you can begin to make a judgment on their potential impacts? What's your assessment overall of the impact on U.S. foreign policy and international

relations? I think it probably in some cases, hopefully few very few, puts the individual who made in discrete comments to us about the policies of his government, their attitudes, and I'm towards third governments, and I'm thinking in this case of a message relating to a conversation not in China, but involving a Chinese representative discussing North Korea. Well, was that licensed by Beijing that he speak to the Americans that way, or did it just just happen? It was a very unusual suggestion that I think it was that China would find acceptable a unification of the Korea's with South Korea in charge. If that wasn't licensed, that man is going to be out of a job and maybe locked up as

we speak. So I mean, there were at least those dangers on the other side of the discussion. There is that danger. No, it's easy perhaps to exaggerate it, and I think it was Secretary Gates, Secretary of Defense, who said that he thought the impact on diplomacy was going to be fairly modest, and I'm closer to that. It's going to make certain relationships that have been created between individual diplomats and their host government difficult. And that I would presume that that means that there's got to be movement of diplomats around. Well, diplomats move around. There generally it's a three-year tour, almost no other way to do that. But just with accelerated now? It could. It could, yeah. I mean, if the host government just says, I am not going to talk to you again, as an ambassador, you can't serve in that. Now, Secretary of State Clinton is out of the country. She's going to the Gulf, I believe, at some point, and she's been there.

How much of American foreign policy, particularly in that region, is now deflected by this attention on, you know, smoothing over, you know, rough spots that have been caused by the leaks? I mean, it's got to have slowed down, for example, the Arab-Palestinian discussions, no? Well, it doesn't help, and I think it's, frankly, it's been misinterpreted. Some of these leaks have been misinterpreted in Israel, for instance, saying that this proves that the Arabs care only for the danger that Iran constitutes. They don't really get that worked up over Palestinian issues. And at least from the cables that have been released, which is a small number, that seems to be the case. That seems to be the case if an ambassador is talking with a certain set of foreign leaders. That does not reflect the concerns that the public, public, done with the seven or eight different Arab countries, shows that there's still a very strong and passionate conviction

on the part of the Arab publics that the Palestinian issue is key to regional security and stability. Let's move to the region more specifically. Let's start with Saudi Arabia. In many ways, some of the most interesting revelations have been around Saudi Arabia, particularly King Abdullah's saying to American policymakers, cut off the head of the snake, meaning Iran, talk about the Saudis' role in this, and talk about the nature of the emerging politics in the region. That particular quote, as I recall, it was made by his ambassador in Washington. Was it a literal quote or was it an interpretation, I don't know? No one in Washington is surprised by the doubts that the King of Saudi Arabia has about Iran's leadership.

And the doubts he's had about the political leadership in Iraq, he's been uncomfortable about it, and he's refused to see even to receive the prime minister of Iraq. He should be uncomfortable. I mean, clearly, I mean, we've talked about this many times. The Shia Sunni split and Iraq now controlled by Shia's and Iran controlled by Shia's. Many Sunni Gulf states, they're in trouble, possibly. And Iraq was under Sunni control for centuries, and suddenly the invasion happened, Saddam is gone, and the Americans come in and say, all right, it's one man, one vote, there are more Shia than there are Sunni. So there is a Sunni government today. And this has been hard to digest in parts of the Arab world, no question. Does it mean Iran is suddenly in charge of Iraq? No, they're fencing, they're maneuvering to try to play their role.

And they'd like to be number one foreign influence on Iraq. There is Iraqi nationalism that they have to contend with, as well as other outsiders hoping to play their role in Iraq. One of the things that struck me is that the Gulf states were particularly willing to have the United States take out the Iranian nuclear facilities in a sense while they held our coats. That said, they don't want to see, in my reading, is they don't want to see a war which could blow back on them, given their relationship with the states. They are concerned about being caught up swept up into the chaos that a war could create in the region. So yeah, stop them, but don't do it in a way that's going to hurt us is the message.

So but at the same time, these leaks suggest that the Saudis are either the governmentally or through private movements of money, funding terror networks. So I mean, the Saudis present an interesting dilemma for U.S. foreign policy, both in terms of we need them as an ally in the region, but at the same time, they're funding terror. Well, you got to be careful when you say they are funding terror, who is it? There's no evidence to my knowledge that the Saudi government is funding, okay, is funding any of these groups. They are ourselves on targets as a regime, they are a target of and have been over some of them in Latin for the last 15 years. Okay, there are vast private fortunes in the country, and they have been slower than we would have liked to control them.

I love your diplomatic way of thinking. You've balanced approach to these things. Well, it's no restructure news rather sensible. Well, diplomats can be sensible. You've got to look at the situation, can they control the flow of private funds? Can it be placed outside Saudi Arabia? The answer is it has been, and they are doing more to control it than they were a decade ago, but has it been linked as a problem, no? Also the Saudi problem is not only direct financial aid, but they are support for a real fundamentalist form of Islam through their mosques and other things, so it may not be direct funding of terror, but clearly it's creating a culture and an infrastructure that can allow it to exist. Well, I think that's a fair point, and they themselves have said, look, they're clearing out some dead wood in their educational system, they're trying to reform, but it's going

to take time. Okay, let's move a little bit, let's move a little bit East, I guess, and talk about Syria. Syria, it seems from both the cables and other news reports, seems to have, they're sort of breaking out of a period of constraint, containment, and beginning to flex some regional muscle and certainly in Lebanon, but in the region itself? Well, you know, I first went to Syria back in 1960 to Aleppo, and then went back as an ambassador in the – our ambassador in the mid-70s, and the Syrians do feel constrained. They have long felt that they are the leading – the beating hard as they like to say of Arab nationalism, and the trouble is that a lot of the other Arabs say, you know, that's all very fine, but you're one country among many.

Historically, they were the center of the Islamic world in the first century of Islam, but that's back in the 7th and 8th centuries. Power moved to Baghdad later, power moved around, and Syria does feel that it was badly hurt by the division of the Arab world, by the British and the French after the First World War, and that they continued to lose territory as late as the – I think it was the French deal with the Turks to take a province away from northern Syria during the Second War. So they do feel that they should be recognized as much more influential and much more leader and representative of Arab opinion than they are. And they seem to be increased – increasing or re-establishing their control of Lebanese politics, particularly with their relation to Hezbollah.

Yeah. I mean, that's been a constant ebb and flow, you might say. They overstayed the – it was mentioning the entry of their military force in 1976. They stayed too long, and they became very burdensome on the Lebanese political system, and when the assassination of the Prime Minister of Khiriri took place, there was this outpouring of sentiment, get the Syrians out of our country. And it happened. They pulled the troops out. Today the – are they active in Lebanon, yes? The ties of history, the ties of families, of business, of culture are very strong, and they are the immediate neighbor. So they feel, again, they have a role in Lebanon, and they hear Americans say, stay out of Lebanon, and they just smile. What are you talking about?

Is it your backyard? It's our backyard. Two quick questions in the last minute. Any surprises for you in the leaked documents – did you sit there and say, mmm? No surprises on the area that I've worked in over the years on the Middle Eastern news. I mentioned the surprise that the Chinese might be amenable to some new arrangements in Korea, but I don't track that issue all that closely. What could be forthcoming? Speculate. Next round of – the next batch of cables. Well, unless they have access to issues covered by code word, top secret material, I expect more of the same – the daily business of an embassy, of diplomacy, conducting our affairs, explaining our positions, trying to understand these, and trying to move our position ahead. Okay.

My thanks to Ambassador Richard Murphy, who never fails to enlighten. Next week, my guest will be Michael Myers, president and executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. Let us know what you think about this show. You can reach us at cuny.tv. When you get there, click on the board that says contact us and send your email. Whatever it is. Thanks. No thanks. I'm not just do it. Send it.