The Washington Examiner’s Mark Hemingway wrote earlier about how Wikileaks is helping the bloodthirsty dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, hunt that country’s democratic opposition by publicly leaking its leader’s pleas for help to American diplomats and his request that they keep in place sanctions against the thugs who control Zimbabwe’s security apparatus. “Where Mugabe's strong-arming, torture and assassination attempts have failed to eliminate the leading figure of Zimbabwe's democratic opposition, WikiLeaks may yet succeed.”

A Washington Post column similarly notes that Wikileaks has given “dangerous ammunition to a tyrant.” As it notes, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s purported devotion to transparency is selective.  It “is not directed at revealing the secrets of the United Nations . . .It is guided by antipathy for America. The United States, in Assange's view, is an ‘authoritarian conspiracy’ that should be crippled by disrupting its flow of information. It doesn't matter if American methods are martial or diplomatic, since its purposes are inherently imperialistic and colonial. In this belief, Assange counts at least one strong supporter. Mugabe not only shares it; it is the main message of his propaganda.”

 This is not the first time that politically-correct ideology has had tragic consequences for Zimbabwe.

In 1979, Zimbabwe had a democratically-elected government. But then-president Jimmy Carter undermined it with sanctions, helping bring to power the bloody insurgent leader, Robert Mugabe (who had received aid from communist countries). Carter was angry that the country’s white elite had been able to cede power peacefully to a democratically-elected president, the black nationalist bishop Abel Muzorewa, rather than to the uncompromising Mugabe, who had waged a lengthy guerrilla war against the white elite. Carter’s UN Ambassador, Andrew Young, effusively praised Mugabe as “incorruptible” and claimed that the stoutly-democratic Muzorewa was a fascist. Blinded by ideology, Carter effectively condemned thousands of people in Zimbabwe to death and misery. Aided by U.S. sanctions, Mugabe soon took over the country, jailing Bishop Muzorewa. His North Korean-trained security forces then killed thousands of minority Ndebele tribesmen, forcing torture victims to sing praises to Mugabe, even as they were savagely tortured, and forcing people to torture their own families.

Mugabe then turned Zimbabwe, once a prosperous breadbasket, into one of the world’s poorest and most malnourished countries. Dissidents’ wives and children were tortured and murdered, orphans were beaten, and schools converted into torture chambers, while aid agencies that had fed thousands of starving people were kicked out of Zimbabwe.

Since then, liberal politicians have continued to engage in counterproductive meddling in Africa. Obama went to Kenya in 2006 and supported the candidacy of a socialist rabble-rouser (a distant, distant kinsman of Obama) who incited ethnic cleansing after the disputed election of December 2007, until the pro-western president was forced to name him prime minister to end the bloodshed.