Snow Is Falling All Over Europe While Wikileaks Sings

It's snowing just about everywhere in Europe and has been since yesterday. Roads are impassable, autoroutes are closed to truck traffic and most news programs are focused on cleaning up the white stuff, providing shelter for the homeless and giving us pretty photos of villages in the snow. Colmar in the French Alsace region, where there is a famous Christmas Market that's more than 500 years old, had snow the day after it opened and the TV shots looked like a winter fairytale. Even London is covered with snow, something that doesn't happen very often.
Here on Lac Leman it started to snow yesterday about 3 p.m. and it's still snowing 24 hours later. Geneva airport is closed and most schools are not providing bus service. So, children are getting the treat they love - staying home and playing in the snow.
That's not to say that less bucolic things are not also happening.
Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for the president of Wikileaks. He seems to be in hiding but is busy preparing his next attack on western societies in the form of releases about a large American bank. I watched a Charlie Rose program on Bloomberg last night that had two reporters and a former Clinton security advisor as guest experts. It was surprising that the journalists thought they were performing a public service in summarizing and "putting into context" the diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks. The former Clinton official was more circumspect, saying that no permanent damage had been done but that it would take some time to re-establish the trust other countries had in American diplomacy.
Perhaps the most interesting comment was that the cables, taken as a whole, reflect the fact that America is one of the few countries that says publicly what it says and does privately in diplomatic circles. That is to say, the United States' foreign policy is not one thing for public consumption and another for diplomatic purposes. The obvious opposite was pointed out as the example of Arab states which take a neutral position vis-à-vis terrorism and Iran publicly while supporting the US privately.
I suppose what is now even more clear is that we live in a complex and dangerous world where all states walk a fine line between their own need to survive and their desire for a more sane world order.
Adding to this, as I talked about several blogs ago, is the looming question of nuclear military power in the hands of North Korea and Iran. If the Wikileaks disclosures have done one thing positive, it may be that the world's leaders will now focus even more intently on working together at least semi-publicly to eliminate this doomsday threat that menaces every one of us.