Rich Lowry: Assange the Anti-American
[Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.]
If electing a black president with the middle name Hussein was supposed to assuage anti-Americanism around the world, Julian Assange didn’t get the message.
The first batch of WikiLeaks documents undermined the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, violent conflicts started by the hated, warmongering Bush administration. The latest batch undermines American diplomacy, the soft art of international bargaining and persuasion as practiced by the highly anticipated, engagement-loving Obama administration.
Assange is an equal-opportunity America hater. It doesn’t matter if our president is black or white, left or right, with the middle name Hussein or Walker, so long as he’s leader of the country Assange perversely calls a threat to democracy, even as he provides aid and comfort to our violent, undemocratic enemies overseas.
The classic justification for a leak is to expose malfeasance. In all his tens of thousands of released documents, Assange has exposed none, despite his typically delusional boast that the first dump revealed “thousands” of possible war crimes. Assange’s goal is wanton destruction, pure and simple.
He wants to expose to retribution those who cooperate with us on the ground in war zones. He wants to undercut domestic support for our wars. He wants to embarrass our foreign allies and exact a price for their trust in us. He wants to complicate sensitive operations like securing nuclear material in Pakistan and attacking terrorists with missiles in Yemen.
Assange is Noam Chomsky with a knack for computers and a determination to do the “American empire” more harm than just lashing out against it in feverish books gobbled up by college sophomores...
Read entire article at National Review
If electing a black president with the middle name Hussein was supposed to assuage anti-Americanism around the world, Julian Assange didn’t get the message.
The first batch of WikiLeaks documents undermined the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, violent conflicts started by the hated, warmongering Bush administration. The latest batch undermines American diplomacy, the soft art of international bargaining and persuasion as practiced by the highly anticipated, engagement-loving Obama administration.
Assange is an equal-opportunity America hater. It doesn’t matter if our president is black or white, left or right, with the middle name Hussein or Walker, so long as he’s leader of the country Assange perversely calls a threat to democracy, even as he provides aid and comfort to our violent, undemocratic enemies overseas.
The classic justification for a leak is to expose malfeasance. In all his tens of thousands of released documents, Assange has exposed none, despite his typically delusional boast that the first dump revealed “thousands” of possible war crimes. Assange’s goal is wanton destruction, pure and simple.
He wants to expose to retribution those who cooperate with us on the ground in war zones. He wants to undercut domestic support for our wars. He wants to embarrass our foreign allies and exact a price for their trust in us. He wants to complicate sensitive operations like securing nuclear material in Pakistan and attacking terrorists with missiles in Yemen.
Assange is Noam Chomsky with a knack for computers and a determination to do the “American empire” more harm than just lashing out against it in feverish books gobbled up by college sophomores...