The Manning leaks helped spawn the Arab Spring for a set of upside down reasons. Manning had no understanding of what he was doing, nor could anyone expect the

The Manning leaks helped spawn the Arab Spring for a set of upside down reasons. Manning had no understanding of what he was doing, nor could anyone expect the outcome. Moroever, the leaks did not show the Americans 'being evil' to the world, in fact, just the opposite: the leaks showed thousands of professional diplomats doing their mundane jobs in a difficult and complicated world. Given how many cables were leaked, and that nothing explosive came out of that making the Americans look particularly evil is a real testament to the professionalism of the American diplomatic corps. What the cables did however - was demonstrate to regular Arabs how deeply corrupt their own leaders were. Basically, they saw the Americans trying to appease, nudge, console, 'do the best they could' with some corrupt folks. I'm sorry to not have direct sources, it was years ago when I was abroad, paying attention to all of this. Edit: I added a couple of sources below, it's not a conspiratorial view.