Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 23, 1995 TAG: 9507210068
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DON KIRK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's not just the private shops competing with such fury for your dollar. Nor is it the newsstands selling papers from every capitalist country in the region. It's the companies engaged in private real-estate deals and joint ventures for manufacturing, for oil prospecting. And it's the businessmen - from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore; from Western Europe, Australia and those newcomers to the scene, the United States - talking up the dreams, the opportunities for crossing new frontiers in a brand-new Asian market.
The possibilities for business in Vietnam, where we sank about $300 billion in a losing war, are why we had to do away with our embargo on trade with the country. The same possibilities are the underlying reason we have to swallow the past and open up diplomatic relations.
Vietnam is on the verge of joining the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as the only communist state within this intensely capitalist framework. It's a grouping that pits Vietnam against its onetime Vietnam war ally and historic foe, China.
In the process, Vietnam is opening up to trade with the world and to investment in its natural resources and industry on a scale its French colonizers never imagined. Then came the Americans, who believed freedom for Vietnam lay in snuffing out the nationalists' drive from the north.
You can't deal with such a vital entity without recognizing it diplomatically, by opening up an embassy and consular offices, and engaging in the normal give and take between nations. Fondness for the system or people with whom you are dealing is not a prerequisite for such relations. We had embassies from East Berlin to Moscow long before the Berlin Wall went down and the Soviet Union devolved into a commonwealth of states.
In fact, diplomatic relations provide a channel for conveying views at variance with the host country's. The argument that Vietnam has not come clean on the question of American MIAs and therefore does not deserve the favor of our diplomatic presence is absurd.
For one thing, we can press this point much more effectively from a diplomatic mission than from a suite of temporary MIA offices in Hanoi. For another, the Vietnamese, who are as factionalized and corrupt as they ever were, have probably told us about all they really know or will ever tell us. If any MIAs are really still alive, they're not coming home again just because Washington withheld diplomatic recognition from Hanoi.
The real point about the POW issue is that it's a sham, a pretext to cover revanchist aims. Opponents of recognition, such as Gen. William Westmoreland, can't accept the reality that our efforts were for nothing - that the bad guys won, and all their claims about kill ratios, body counts and a war of attrition were ridiculous.
Westmoreland & Co. don't just want to punish Hanoi for depriving them a place in a pantheon of American heroes; they want revenge. They want the old men in power in Hanoi to suffer for their wrongs. The POW-MIA issue merely provides the excuse.
That Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich oppose recognition only underscores the cynicism of American politics. As president, George Bush was on his way to recognizing Hanoi. Had he been re-elected, it's safe to say that, unfettered by accusations of draft-dodging, he would have done so sooner than Bill Clinton. It is also safe to say that the likes of Dole and Gingrich would have advocated whatever Bush did.
None of which means we have to kid ourselves about the Hanoi regime. From all I've heard on the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in recent years, the system remains repressive, quick to stamp out dissent. The leaders, however, have worked out a kind of compromise reflecting economic need.
The deal is this: People can try to make money any way they can, provided they pay homage to Hanoi and shut up politically. That's far from ideal, but for us it doesn't matter. We have to be there, representing our own interests in an intensifying regional and economic game among live rivals, not long-gone POWs. Otherwise we will lose the peace, just as we lost the war.
Don Kirk, who covered the Vietnam War for American newspapers and last visited the country in April, wrote this for Newsday.
- L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB