Diplomatic cable leaks have been quite informative in some aspects. Today let me talk about the lessons I have learned from this incident.

The first lesson is for Turkey. The Wikileaks-diplomatic cable leak is not a conspiracy organized exclusively against Turkey. I believe this is the first lesson to be extracted. I personally think that we make too much of ourselves. We think that the world turns only around us. Yet this is not the reality. At this point my favorite argument was "they have written even rumors."  What else were they supposed to do? Should they have collected evidence and tested the reality before communicating it? You've got to be kidding!

The more you read, the better you understand the global scale of the issue. And I guess this is the main point the television channels neglect: reading. In this context for instance, I read a cable that explained the reasons for the wide scale electricity cut in Brazil a couple of years ago. The cable was quite technical, but useful. It talked about the process of the deactivation of a power distribution unit in Rio. We should not read cables as diplomatic rumors. They were definitely informative.

The day before that, for instance, I came across a cable pages long which contained the assessments of US diplomats who had attended a wedding ceremony in Dagestan. While I was reading I thought that the piece could be useful to learn anthropological as much as diplomatic lessons. In fact, this was one of the rare diplomatic cables of which I saved a copy. The authors were observing and noting down the behavior codes of the "natives," a completely unfamiliar life form, as if they were from another planet living outside that specific reality. When explaining why the Caucasus cannot have democracy, the participants of the wedding ceremony stressed, "we are a family." The authors concluded the observations with a solid citation from Friedrich Hayek, letting the readers interpret what they had read: "If you run a family as you do a state, you destroy the family. Running a state as you do a family destroys the state: ties of kinship and friendship always will trump the rule of law." To be honest, just as Timothy Garton Ash from The Guardian wrote the day before, after reading the diplomatic cables my respect for the US diplomacy was not damaged, but reinforced. And this is the second lesson I learned from this.

If you ask what the diplomatic cable leaks do not have, I would say that the leaks do not have the United States of America as an actor. American diplomats punctiliously compile data in a crazy world in the middle of strange cultures and corrupt leaders and the monkey business in each capital city. And they do nothing else. It is in some aspect like the "Star Trek": They duly refrain from intervening in the course of strange cultures. What they do is to observe only. This is the picture illustrated in my mind after reading the documents: A Star Trek episode. The same curiosity, the same sense of devotedness and the same excitement. I do not know if I am right, but this is precisely the image in my mind. And let this be the third point to underline.

Then, do you think this is the reality? You've got to be kidding me!

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 04.12.2010