"The international community," says our Foreign Minister, David Andrews, "has a duty and obligation to convince the Indonesian authorities that a peacekeeping force should be allowed [into East Timor] as measure of extreme urgency to stop the medieval brutality that is ongoing."
Grand stuff altogether; nothing quite like meaningless words about meaningless concepts such as "international community", especially from a Minister of a State which is so militarily negligent that it has as much power to impose its will upon a hermit on Rockall as it has on the moons of Uranus.
Though to be sure, it's jolly nice when other people pay for our defences. We journalists know the principle well, only we call it freeloading, and those who engage in it should have one thing in common with the practitioners of costless defence, namely silence.
Pious homilies
Freeloading journalists should not lecture politicians on their little freebies: and elected politicians of states which do not pay the full cost of their own defence should not issue pious homilies about how "the international community" - e.g., other countries which are protecting them - should behave.
In any other sense, the "international community" is a fiction.
There are states with certain clear interests and there are military alliances which are an expression of shared interests. The citizens of these states pay high taxes in order to support the military establishments which enable them to project their political will by means of armed might. We pay high taxes, to be sure - not to support our scandalously underfunded Defence Forces but to maintain a vast public service in the style to which it has become accustomed.
Of course, it is not just us who have enjoyed subsidised defence. Western Europe generally was defended by the US from the Soviet Union for the best part of half-a-century. Why did Uncle Sam do this? Because he loves democracy, and is passionately dedicated to guarding it in the continent where the racial and cultural roots of most of his people may be found? Or because it was in his interest to ensure that the Soviet Union did not have a submarine base in Killala fjord, and that Tupolev Bears based in Shannon did not appear as blips on radar screens in Virginia?
The latter, of course, but much sweetened by contemplation of the former. Few things are quite as agreeable as the ruthless pursuit of self-interest masquerading as high-mindedness. Nonetheless, to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, great empires do not have permanent friends, they merely have permanent interests. Strip the sugar coating of public virtue from the pill of self-interest, and the decision-makers of empire are still able to swallow the pill with remarkable ease.
"Special relationship"
The US long ago threw in its lot with whatever sympathetic junta was running Greater Java; so much so that, in the early 1960s, the Pentagon was training "Indonesian" soldiers - in reality, soldiers of the Javanese empire - during General Sukarno's expansionist war (called a "confrontation") with Malaysia, which was in turn supported by Britain. British troops were killed defending Malaysia, essentially by allies of the, US which poured $100 million into Indonesia. There was little mention made then of a "special relationship" between Britain and the UK.
When Sukarno - who spoke seven languages and was mad - then launched a communist-backed internal coup in Indonesia, the CIA backed a countercoup led by General Suharto in which 300,000 "communists" were murdered. No talk now of friendship, morality or demcracy: this was the naked pursuit of US interests in all its undiluted ferocity. The US has switched horses again: now it appears to back the latest Javanese military empire-maker, General Wiranto. What are we in Ireland realistically going to do about him and his murder-gangs? What can we do to prevent the casually methodical murder of East Timorese? Probably as much as we did to help the Kosovans in 1999, the Marsh Arabs in 1991, the socialists of the Javanese empire in 1966 or the Poles of 1939.
Moral high ground
So for whom are all these observations about the duties of "the international community" designed? For the Javanese imperialists (who have the tacit support of both the US and China and who might, unbelievably, not even be aware of David Andrews's existence)? Or for that eternal, internal feelgood constituency, which wants endless reassurance that Ireland as ever is on the moral high ground, denouncing whomever for not doing abroad what we cannot even do within our own borders: asserting political will by force of arms?
The UN can no longer intervene in serious conflicts, its will broken in Mogadishu and Srebenice; yet it was still vain enough to think it could meddle in East Timor, though without any other military muscle to enforce its will. Its palsied intervention, its querulously provocative yet toothless piety, served merely to provoke Javanese killer squads, even as they intensified the hopes and then the unspeakable sorrows of the extraordinarily brave and longsuffering people there. So please, no more talk of that which does not exist: the international community.