Wheelin', Dealin', and Leakin'

The NY Times has launched its WikiLeaks "Cablegate" story, and there's quite a bit of international silliness going on that reads more like high school than high diplomacy.  It's the kind of stuff you'd expect:  the US throwing its weight around with Germany on human rights, various strongmen dictators acting like spoiled brats, an odd friendship between Russia's Putin and Italy's Berlusconi, Syria selling weapons to Hezbollah, China trying to hack everybody, corruption in Afghanistan's government, and this little piece of well-timed face-palmage:

Gaming out an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States. 

Hey, there's even stuff in there about pre-revolution Tehran in '79 and Noriega before the US invasion of Panama in '89.  Best part so far that needs to end up in a James Bond film:

In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.

“The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the happy couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.” 

Beats an envelope of cash and a bread machine.