Alex Johnson – Journalist at Large

The life of a reporter: I’m posting this late because I was on vacation when it actually ran on msnbc.com (in fact, I finished writing it on the plane to Georgia) and it slipped my mind.

Classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks paint a picture of an Iran with few friends in the Mideast, even among nations that speak more accommodatingly in public for political reasons. The documents show that the Iranian leadership is not united behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that the United States and its European allies must lean heavily on the government of Turkey for its limited insight into the affairs of Tehran, despite what they see as the erratic unreliability of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)