Are the Wikileaks as bad as the Pentagon Papers or Climategate?
I would think they will have a similar effect. Certainly Climategate did for Global Warming what the Pentagon Papers did for the perception of the Vietnam War in the USA: it decisively changed the narrative of the debate. The Wikileaks are the record of a messy, incoherent struggle in which it is impossible to say whose side the local players are on. It reinforces the perception of ordinary British and Americans voters that the Bush-Blair combo landed their sons in a never-ending, hopeless, quagmire. They win endless firefights but achieve nothing because there is no credible political structure in sight and the Karzai regime is irredeemably corrupt and incompetent. The leaks have at least put paid to the arrant nonsense Gordon Brown talked about making safe the streets of London but they also leave our exit policy in tatters. The revelations that the Pakistan army is openly supporting the Taliban have trashed the hopes of Obama and Cameron that they could stabilise the region and brin
