Hard to decide between the secret war in Yemen or the policy of fostering child rape in Afghanistan to get along with the locals.
Of course the problem with leakers is they are always by nature/dfinition cherry pickers...but the material they leak, true or not, is always received as if it is representative of the whole.
They never leak anything positive.
Who would risk their job to do that? Or risk exposing sources, methods or assets to do that?
They also never leak what we have discovered about our opponents and enemies, things so awful our press dos not report on either, because a story about a puppy rescue is worth more in ratings than one about American bodies strung up on a bridge or on about a few hundred Nigerian Christians being slaughtered by a bunch of muslim radicals...
And of course our enemies don’t have similar whistlebowers or leakers because the odds of being caught and killed are astronomical under their rule. But these same enemies don’t mind financing American media to smear opponents here, and don’t mind lobbying American pacifist politicians, or sponsoring protests and protestors here.
And of course leakers don’t leak about complaints that actually do get addressed. They don’t leak all the times
the system works and justice is served or there is success which does frequently happen in covert activity. Not everyone who fired up enough to do something about what they see as corruption is objective, not everyone is without and agenda or profit motive, and in cases where an agenda is present, which is frequent, or emotion is involved, which is always, the leaker can and will cherrypick to support their claims, discarding or intentionally overlooking evidence that is contrary to their desired outcomes. They can and will leak selectively, editing out video or text or simply failing to bring it up knowing the press is too lazy to question it or follow the money or the motivation of the leaker.
So our media, fed by leakers with unexpored agendas of their own, piles only on America, leading viewers and listeners to assume -since there is no balance whatsoever- that the corruption, real or not, is always endemic never sporadic, always endorsed from the top, even in cases where it is not but is done by rogues on their own.
In a world where only one country- ours- allows any of its dirty laundry to be aired, where only one country has such broad freedom of speech, and all of our enemies pay anarchists and malcontents to dig for as much of it as possible while their state-owned press reveals none of their own, is it no wonder we have children and young adults hating their own nation while embracing nations where corruption isn’t just on the part of the occasional deviant but is built in as a matter of policy and state endorsed?
Imagine trying to win WW2 under these conditions. Impossible.