When white Europeans are dying, the Clinton administration acts. When black Africans are dying, Washington talks. Such is the hypocritical cynicism that passes for U.S. foreign policy today.
So shameless is U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's ritualistic incantation of the "international community" that United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan recently chided the U.S. "Washington will not put an American officer on the ground" in Sierra Leone, he complained.
The administration's reluctance to act is extraordinary, given Clinton's promise, offered barely a year ago when he visited the Balkans, to stop ethnic cleansing anywhere in the world. But residents of East Timor soon learned what frightened civilians in Sierra Leone are realizing today: Clinton was only kidding.