Julian Assange: Neocon Tool?

These include many of the relationships that the neoconservatives who shaped Bush’s foreign policy were most willing to risk. Neocons have often encouraged policies and utterances that threatened relations with Russia and Turkey, as well as China, Iran and so on. Indeed, neoconservatism sometimes seems devoted to exacerbating the world’s major geopolitical fault lines. And now WikiLeaks has advanced the exacerbation. Maybe Assange, when he has time for some fresh conspiracy theorizing, can look into the possibility that neocons have implanted electrodes in his brain.

I don’t know if this change of course would make up for the considerable short-term damage wrought by WikiLeaks — the harm done to fragile and crucial relations with other states, the blowback that even now is starting to well up in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere. But if it does, then Assange’s initially pro-neocon impact could be dwarfed by his longer-term, more benign influence. And his karma, as I calculate it, would move into positive territory.