Last week, I criticized Rep. Peter King’s proposal to list Wikileaks as a terrorist organization, but who knew I’d get a rebuttal from — Wikileaks?

The Daily Caller says Wikileaks is now “actively taunting” the US over its leaks, but that’s really just whistling in the wind.  The US hasn’t yet indicted Assange, so it has no brief to arrest him.  However, Interpol still wants him over rape charges being considered by Sweden, which is why Assange is on the run at the moment.  However, unlike Osama bin Laden, Assange is still trying to conduct interviews and push publicity for his website, which means that any serious effort to find him would likely succeed in short order.  OBL at least was smart enough to head to Pakistan and hide in the mountains, a place where Assange would last all of about five minutes.

Besides, as David Burchell reports in today’s edition of The Australian, the bigger problem is the lack of exercise of American power where it’s most needed:

These past two years it has become received wisdom in influential sections of the foreign policy community that, in the wake of the Bush administration’s foreign policy excesses and errors, the chief imperative of US foreign policy is to avoid any further foreign entanglements. In the pursuit of this shimmering transcendent goal, however, it soon enough becomes necessary to use any and every argument that comes to hand, no matter how implausible.

Thus Iran-apologists such as former State Department officials Floyd and Hillary Leverett – who holidayed in Tehran’s best uptown hotels while, downtown, protesters were seized at random off the streets and beaten into a state of permanent incapacity, or sexually violated with broken bottles – are associated with prestigious progressive think-tanks, and invited to speak at respectable gatherings of international relations scholars. And their considered view that the Iranian regime is a victim of unrestrained US aggression is taken as a mainstream scholarly opinion.

Yet these are the same Leveretts who insisted, 18 months ago in The Washington Post, that Iran’s elections were not only free and fair, but actually freer and fairer than those of their own country. Even though, as the WikiLeaks cables have now clarified, US diplomats knew all along that the result was fixed; and further knew that the actual election figures were very similar to those revealed by a brave young official in the Iranian Information Ministry, Mohammad Asghari, who paid for this act of heroism with his life, only to have his information greeted with pure white silence in Washington. …

Take this assessment relayed from Amman by ambassador Stephen Beecroft, two months before Obama’s soaring and eloquent, if foolish and empty, Cairo peroration: “Jordanian leaders’ comments betray a powerful undercurrent of doubt that the US knows how to deal effectively with Iran. Foreign Minister Nasser Joudeh has suggested the Iranians would be happy to let talks with the US continue for 10 years without moving them forward, believing that they can benefit from perceived acceptance after years of isolation without paying a price.”

Or take this honest but doomed communication from Timothy Richardson, acting director of America’s Iran Regional Presence Office in Dubai: “Any US effort to engage the current Iranian government will be perceived by a wide spectrum of Arabs as accommodation with [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad.” Isn’t this what any moderately informed, intelligent Western observer would also have concluded, had political affections not required them to pretend otherwise?

Maybe Assange feels that he can make these boasts because the current administration isn’t as focused on confronting threats as it is on apologizing for the use of American power, even its legitimate uses.  And if Assange feels that sanguine about it, how do our enemies perceive us?

Update: Sweden has not yet filed the rape charges, but they have an arrest warrant out for Assange to question him, which is what Interpol will enforce if given the opportunity.  My post erroneously stated that those charges had been filed; thanks to Mark Jaquith for the heads-up.