Assange was accused of four offenses. Assange appealed in both Sweden and the UK, and courts ruled that all four of the alleged offenses are violations of the laws of both countries.
You claim that Assange was not accused of committing sexual assault. To defend this claim, you would have to make the case than none of the four offenses qualified as sexual assault. But you only mention one of the four offenses (specifically, number 2).
Furthermore, offense 2 is sexual assault under British law. You claim, without evidence, that offense 2 would not be prosecutable in most countries, but even if that's true I don't seen the relevance.
It's hard to see how this news is a “victory” for Assange unless it means that Assange has succeeded in committing sexual assault without facing any legal penalty. If Assange leaves the embassy now, he faces an open-and-shut case against him for jumping bail. After that, there are possible charges in the United States. The Obama Administration wasn't able to find a solution to the "New York Times problem"--namely, how to convict Assange with a crime without setting a precedent that could be used to prosecute a New York Times reporter. The Trump Administration is indicating that it won't let that stop them.
This strikes me as a better explanation for Israeli "failing nationalism syndrome" than Cole's assertion that, "It is not plausible that the Israelis will be allowed to keep the Palestinians stateless and without, ultimately, any real rights, forever." Forever is a long time, but I think the Israeli's can maintain the status quo more or less indefinitely, if they want to.
"Was going there in the style it was done after 9/11 ever justified in the first place?"
In my view, no. I don't think the United States should start a war unless we are determined to win it. That determination was not present in the Bush Administration, which was more concerned with Iraq than Afghanistan. And there was no broad public support for doing what was necessary the war in Afghanistan. In particular, Bush's obsession with Iraq was shared pretty much universally by people on the political right. To mention one specific, we had only a limited number of special forces who could speak Arabic. Since winning the war in Afghanistan was not considered to be a vital national interest, those special forces were pulled out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq. Or consider the problem of development aid. One of the advantages the United States had in Afghanistan is that the tremendous disparity in wealth is that we could afford to effectively buy off the Afghan people. So how much effort did the Bush Administration put into figuring out how to do this effectively, which is *not* easy? The fact that the Bush Administration forgot to include any development aid for Afghanistan in its 2003 budget request provides a clue.
In 2009, the leaked McCrystal report made clear that the window of opportunity for us to achieve victory in Afghanistan had passed. McCrystal came up with a plan to delay defeat and hope that the Afghan government would use the delay to step up to the plate and win the war for us, but he didn't cite any evidence that that would happen. Obama agreed, and that's a defensible decision even though it amounts to gambling on a long shot. The odds are, though, that it won't pay off. The fact of the matter is that (as folks on the right used to like to remind us), elections have consequences. We can't simply decided to undo all the decisions of the the Bush years, however attractive that might be.
Assange was accused of four offenses. Assange appealed in both Sweden and the UK, and courts ruled that all four of the alleged offenses are violations of the laws of both countries.
You claim that Assange was not accused of committing sexual assault. To defend this claim, you would have to make the case than none of the four offenses qualified as sexual assault. But you only mention one of the four offenses (specifically, number 2).
Furthermore, offense 2 is sexual assault under British law. You claim, without evidence, that offense 2 would not be prosecutable in most countries, but even if that's true I don't seen the relevance.
It's hard to see how this news is a “victory” for Assange unless it means that Assange has succeeded in committing sexual assault without facing any legal penalty. If Assange leaves the embassy now, he faces an open-and-shut case against him for jumping bail. After that, there are possible charges in the United States. The Obama Administration wasn't able to find a solution to the "New York Times problem"--namely, how to convict Assange with a crime without setting a precedent that could be used to prosecute a New York Times reporter. The Trump Administration is indicating that it won't let that stop them.
This strikes me as a better explanation for Israeli "failing nationalism syndrome" than Cole's assertion that, "It is not plausible that the Israelis will be allowed to keep the Palestinians stateless and without, ultimately, any real rights, forever." Forever is a long time, but I think the Israeli's can maintain the status quo more or less indefinitely, if they want to.
"Was going there in the style it was done after 9/11 ever justified in the first place?"
In my view, no. I don't think the United States should start a war unless we are determined to win it. That determination was not present in the Bush Administration, which was more concerned with Iraq than Afghanistan. And there was no broad public support for doing what was necessary the war in Afghanistan. In particular, Bush's obsession with Iraq was shared pretty much universally by people on the political right. To mention one specific, we had only a limited number of special forces who could speak Arabic. Since winning the war in Afghanistan was not considered to be a vital national interest, those special forces were pulled out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq. Or consider the problem of development aid. One of the advantages the United States had in Afghanistan is that the tremendous disparity in wealth is that we could afford to effectively buy off the Afghan people. So how much effort did the Bush Administration put into figuring out how to do this effectively, which is *not* easy? The fact that the Bush Administration forgot to include any development aid for Afghanistan in its 2003 budget request provides a clue.
In 2009, the leaked McCrystal report made clear that the window of opportunity for us to achieve victory in Afghanistan had passed. McCrystal came up with a plan to delay defeat and hope that the Afghan government would use the delay to step up to the plate and win the war for us, but he didn't cite any evidence that that would happen. Obama agreed, and that's a defensible decision even though it amounts to gambling on a long shot. The odds are, though, that it won't pay off. The fact of the matter is that (as folks on the right used to like to remind us), elections have consequences. We can't simply decided to undo all the decisions of the the Bush years, however attractive that might be.