If it is then it will be a most impressive piece of manipulation by the U.S.
Wikileaks a U.S. plot, says Ahmadinejad
By Damien McElroy, The Daily TelegraphNovember 29, 2010 7:03 PM
Iran's president has labelled WikiLeaks disclosures that Arab states demanded that the United States attack his country as an orchestrated attempt by Washington to destabilize the Middle East.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has led Tehran's resistance to sanctions against its nuclear program, suggested that WikiLeaks was an American tool to plant misinformation around the world.
Reports that the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states had repeatedly pressed U.S. officials to strike against Iran were ridiculed as an effort to pit the country against its "Arab brothers".
"Let me first correct you. The material was not leaked, but rather released in an organized way," Mr Ahmadinejad told a press conference.
"We don't give any value to these documents. It's without legal value. Iran and regional states are friends. Such acts of mischief have no impact on relations between nations."
According to the documents, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged America to "cut the head of the snake", while the leaders of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates also urged a military solution. The Sunni Muslim monarchies fear that a nuclear-capable Shia Muslim state would wield supremacy in the Middle East.
Stung by the leaking of the revelations, their governments maintained a wall of silence Monday, fearful of a backlash for advocating military action in a region still resentful of the U.S. war in Iraq.
However, analysts said the reported comments were a true gauge of anxiety over a strong Iran.
"I think it confirms that the [Gulf] states are all more united on the anti-Iranian front than previously disclosed," said Theodore Karasik, a Dubai-based analyst.
Khaled al-Dakhil, a Saudi security expert, said Iran should take the revelations as a warning that its neighbours were exhausted by its aggressive foreign policy. "I don't think Iran takes at face value public declarations coming from the Gulf, whether for a war or not - just as Gulf leaders do not believe declarations about how peaceful the Iranian nuclear program is," he said.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, was one of the few government leaders to discuss the detail of the leaks, warning that U.S. diplomatic exchanges with allies including Israel could be scaled back as a result of the leak.
He anticipated potential embarrassment for Arab leadership. "There is usually a gap between what is said in public and what is said in private. In Israel, the gaps aren't so large, but in some of the other countries in the region the gaps are very large," Mr Netanyahu said. "Leaders should be ready to tell their people the truth."
But Israel also expressed satisfaction that its position on Iran had been vindicated. "We come out looking very good," a senior government official. "They [the leaked documents] confirm that the whole Middle East is terrified by the prospect of a nuclear Iran."
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