Suharto

Suharto appears in Chomsky’s account as a U.S.-backed ruler whose designation as an ally stood in sharp contrast to the mass violence committed under his government. The relationship becomes a test case for the book’s broader criticism of Western power: the support extended to Indonesia, Chomsky argues, helped sustain grave abuses and made later appeals to humanitarian intervention ring hollow.

Rule and Western Support

Chomsky identifies Indonesia as the world’s most populous Islamic state and says the United States came to favor it after Suharto took power in 1965. The army’s mass killings that accompanied his rise claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, mostly landless peasants; Chomsky says the United States assisted and Western opinion greeted the outcome enthusiastically. He also argues that this history was later pushed from public memory, an omission that made the country’s subsequent standing as a U.S. ally appear detached from the violence that had helped establish it.

The alliance continued despite the severity of Suharto’s record. Chomsky recounts that the Clinton administration called him “our friend” even as he presided over a record of killings, torture, and other abuses. The phrase, as Chomsky uses it, exposes the distance between the language of friendship and the political consequences of backing a government responsible for extensive violence.

East Timor and the Limits of Pressure

Chomsky connects Indonesia’s conduct in East Timor to the continuing support it received from the United States and Britain. He says Indonesian forces had already eliminated roughly a third of the population with decisive foreign assistance, and that Western support continued through the 1999 massacres. Before the battles of early September, thousands had been killed; the subsequent violence drove 85 percent of the population from their homes and destroyed 70 percent of the country.

On September 8, 1999, after the worst atrocities were known, the Clinton administration still maintained that responsibility belonged to the Indonesian government and that the United States did not want to take that responsibility away. Chomsky presents this position as a refusal to use Washington’s influence while the violence continued. He then describes a rapid reversal: following intense pressure, chiefly from Australia but also from Americans, the administration signaled the Indonesian generals that their actions had to stop. Within days, the generals announced a withdrawal and allowed Australian-led United Nations peacekeepers to enter without opposition.

For Chomsky, that change in course demonstrates the leverage Washington had retained. He argues that the influence used at the crisis’s end could have been used to prevent the preceding twenty-five years of near-genocide, including the renewed violence of 1999. Instead, successive U.S. administrations, alongside Britain and others, had given Indonesia decisive military and diplomatic support, including in 1978, at the height of the terror. The consequences, he adds, continued in impoverished refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor.

Political Friendship and Humanitarian Claims

Suharto’s status as a U.S. friend serves as more than a detail about bilateral relations: it anchors Chomsky’s challenge to the moral framing of Western policy. He argues that celebrating the East Timor record as evidence of a new commitment to humanitarian intervention obscures the earlier support given to the Indonesian government. He also contrasts that history with the use of NATO’s bombing of Serbia as a justification for intervention, asking readers to consider whose violence is condemned and whose is enabled.

The critique extends from Indonesia to Chomsky’s account of policy after September 11. He describes governments using the attacks to intensify repressive measures and argues that the U.S. government sought to use the crisis to advance militarization, weaken social programs, redirect public attention from domestic concerns, and reduce public debate. In this wider argument, Suharto’s alliance with Washington exemplifies a recurring pattern: strategic relationships can persist despite grave abuses, while the language of security and humanitarian action presents later policies as morally distinct from the record that preceded them.