East Timor is the setting for one of the book’s sharpest contrasts between prolonged foreign support for violence and the sudden influence Washington could exert when it chose to act. The account traces Indonesian aggression, supported by the United States and Britain, through mass displacement and destruction, then turns to the 1999 withdrawal that followed a signal from the Clinton administration. For Noam Chomsky, that reversal demonstrates both the reach of American influence and the consequences of having withheld it for years.

Indonesian Assault and Foreign Support

The book describes the United States and Britain as continuing to support Indonesian forces in East Timor, even though Indonesian violence had already eliminated about a third of the population with decisive outside assistance. Support continued through the 1999 massacres. Thousands had been killed before fighting in early September drove 85 percent of the population from their homes and destroyed 70 percent of the country.

During this crisis, the Clinton administration maintained that responsibility rested with the Indonesian government and that Washington did not want to take that responsibility away from it. The formulation is set against the scale of displacement and destruction: non-interference in Indonesian responsibility, as presented here, accompanied continuing support for the aggressors rather than an effort to stop their actions.

The September 1999 Reversal

By September 8, the worst atrocities were known, and Clinton was facing intense pressure to intervene, particularly from Australia and also from people in the United States. A few days later, his administration communicated to Indonesian generals that the violence had to end. The generals reversed course immediately.

Their change was striking because they had repeatedly insisted they would never leave East Timor. They had also described themselves as defending Indonesian West Timor against a possible intervention force, using aircraft that Britain continued to supply. After Washington’s signal, however, they announced a withdrawal and allowed United Nations peacekeepers, led by Australians, to enter without opposition from the Indonesian military. The passage’s emphasis is on the speed of the reversal: declarations of intransigence gave way as soon as American policy changed.

Leverage, Responsibility, and Aftermath

Chomsky treats the withdrawal as evidence of Washington’s continuing, largely concealed power. If a signal from the Clinton administration could promptly change the generals’ conduct in 1999, he argues, the United States could have used its influence to prevent much of the preceding twenty-five years of violence. Instead, successive American administrations, joined by Britain and others, had supplied decisive military and diplomatic support to the perpetrators, including in 1978, at the height of the terror.

The Clinton administration’s description of President Suharto as “our friend” sharpens the contrast between official relationships and the violence they accompanied. The account locates responsibility not only in the immediate actions of Indonesian forces but also in the international support that helped make those actions possible. It identifies the violence as continuing in another form after the withdrawal: East Timorese people remained in impoverished refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor.

The Argument’s Wider Significance

The East Timor case also challenges the book’s presentation of Western appeals to humanitarian intervention. Chomsky argues that the shameful record of support for Indonesia was later praised as evidence of a new Western commitment to intervention, and used to justify NATO’s bombing of Serbia. The juxtaposition makes the claim of humanitarian consistency difficult to sustain: East Timor shows not simply a failure to intervene, but years of backing for violence followed by a rapid reversal once political pressure and American direction changed.

The episode therefore serves as a concrete illustration of the book’s broader argument about selective uses of power. The decisive change in 1999 makes earlier inaction harder to explain as an absence of leverage, while the continuing refugee crisis prevents withdrawal from standing as a complete resolution. East Timor’s significance lies in both parts of that record: the capacity to alter events quickly and the long history in which that capacity was not used to protect the population.