Desperate East Timorese Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta arrived in Washington last week to plead the case that the United States should do something to defend his countrymen from the Indonesian soldiers who have been on a murderous rampage against civilians in East Timor ever since they had the temerity to vote for independence in an August 30 referendum.
Ramos-Horta's pleas induced a different sort of desperation in the Clinton foreign-policy apparat, which has long maintained cordial relations with the thugs of Jakarta: How to stiff the Nobel Prize winner and not look bad in the process? This was a particularly delicate task given the expansive promises the administration made during NATO's Kosovo offensive that it would never again turn its back on slaughter of the sort now being visited on the Timorese.
Needless to say, it was not the Clinton team's finest hour. First, secretary of defense William Cohen reached for the hoariest cliche in the American foreign-policy playbook: We "cannot be and should not be viewed as [yes, he really said this] the policeman of the world." Cohen's rhetoric was Churchillian, though, compared with that of national security adviser Samuel Berger, who wanted to clear up any confusion about American willingness to respond to humanitarian outrages: "You know, my daughter has a very messy apartment up in college," said Berger sarcastically; "maybe I shouldn't intervene to have that cleaned up." Thus the limits of power, according to Sandy Berger: Don't bother us with dirty laundry, or dead Timorese.