The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda

– By Christopher Hitchens, by way of Good Shit:

Julian Assange. Click image to expand.Julian AssangeIn my most recent book[1], I reprint some words from a British Embassy cable, sent from Baghdad to the Foreign Office in 1976. The subject is Iraq’s new leader. His quiet coup d’etat is reassuringly described as “the first smooth transfer of power since 1958.” It is added, as though understatement were an official stylistic requirement in official prose, that although “strong-arm methods may be needed to steady the ship, Saddam will not flinch.” Admittedly, these words were used before the “smooth transfer” had been extended to include Saddam’s personally supervised execution of half the membership of the Baath Party. But Saddam already had a well-established addiction to violence and repression.*[2]

I came across this cable after it had been declassified a few years ago, and I reprinted it because it very accurately reflected the tone of what I’d been told by British diplomats when I was visiting Iraq at the time. And I ask myself: What if I had been able to get my hands on that report when it was first written? Not only would I have had a scoop to my name, but I could have argued that I was exposing a political mentality that—not for the first time in the history of the British Foreign Office—chose to drape tyranny in the language of cliché and euphemism.

But what else, aside from this high-minded ambition (or ambitious high-mindedness), ought I to have considered? A democratically elected British Parliament had enacted an Official Secrets Act, which I could be held to have broken.

Would I bravely submit to prosecution for my principles? (I was later threatened with imprisonment for another breach of this repressive law, and it was one of the reasons I decided to emigrate to a country that had a First Amendment.) The moral “other half” of civil disobedience, as its historic heroes show, is that you stoically accept the consequences that come with it.

Then there is diplomacy itself.

One of civilization’s oldest and best ideas is that all countries establish tiny sovereign enclaves in each other’s capitals and invest these precious enclaves of peaceful resolution with special sorts of immunity.

That this necessarily includes a high degree of privacy goes without saying.

Even a single violation of this ancient tradition may have undesirable unintended consequences, and we rightly regard a serious breach of it with horror. We found out everything we would ever need to know about Ayatollah Khomeini and his ideology when he took diplomats as hostages[3].

The cunning of Julian Assange’s strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy. Unless you consider yourself bound by the hysterically stupid decision of the Obama administration to forbid all federal employees from downloading or viewing the WikiLeaks papers[4], you will at the very least have indulged in a certain amount of guilty pleasure.

In a couple of major instances, the disclosures are of great value to the regime-change die-hards among us. More Arab regimes want Washington to take on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and more urgently than anyone had guessed; I would very much rather know this now than 20 years later. Iran was able to acquire some missile capacity from North Korea; so would Saddam Hussein have been if we had left him in his so-called “box.”

We already know that his envoys were meeting North Korean missile dealers in Damascus before the threat of the coalition’s intervention caused the vendors to return hastily to Pyongyang. The latest leaks complete an important part of an important case.

(Continued)