The New York Times columnist really doesn't like the latest Wikileaks dump, fretting that it "will probably damage the global conversation." (An editorial in the Wall Street Journal goes so far as to suggest the death penalty for the leaker.) My main reaction is that it's outrageous that the American government was keeping a lot of this stuff secret from the public in the first place.
It's not just a foreign policy question.I think Mr. Brooks is on to something when he views Wikileaks as an attack on authority. I just think that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Mr. Brooks writes: "The fact that we live our lives amid order and not chaos is the great achievement of civilization. This order should not be taken for granted."
Into which category — order or chaos? — would Mr. Brooks place the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? The Boston Tea Party? The Soviet Communist regime?
And how does the secret world the Wikileaks describe — North Korea sending powerful missiles to Iran, Iran using Red Crescent ambulances to transfer arms to Hezbollah — amount to order, rather than an illusion of order?
And what about the possibility of spontaneous order rather than central-government-authority-imposed order? It's paradoxical, but accepting a certain level of chaos (let everyone set their own prices) often ultimately leads to more order than trying to impose an order (government price setting), which often creates chaos (shortages).
