Mallick: WikiLeaks sends U.S. to its room with no dinner

[CHIMO]

“You don’t understand me!”

It’s the eternal cry of teenagers but as the latest WikiLeaks instalment reveals, it is also that of the American diplomat.

Both are wrong. I understand you perfectly. A young person tattoos an amphibian on her leg for the same reason the U.S. invaded Iraq, the former because she thinks leg skin doesn’t shrivel with age and the latter because Washington thinks it will never grow poor and powerless as China becomes rich and implacable.

Americans are famous for their insularity; it’s why so few of them have passports. But as these delicious information-rich comestibles are served on a plate by the suave Julian Assange, it becomes clear that the American problem is not that it can’t understand the world. It’s that it can’t understand itself. It repeatedly fails to grasp that foreigners are born not taking the American view. That’s what makes them foreign.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/899385--mallick-wikileaks-sends-u-s-to-its-room-with-no-dinner