‘CRY, THE ABANDONED COUNTRY’: SENATE VOTE TO LIFT EMBARGO WILL PERPETUATE BRUTAL, MANIPULATIVE VIETNAMESE REGIME

(Washington, D.C.): To paraphrase
Franklin Roosevelt, yesterday was a day
that will live in infamy. For on that
day, the United States Senate adopted a
“sense of the Senate”
resolution encouraging President Clinton
to act “expeditiously” to lift
the embargo against communist Vietnam.

The 62-38 vote in favor of this
technically non-binding, but politically
decisive, resolution came after some
eight hours of often impassioned
speech-making and debate. In the end, the
outcome was decided by several factors:

Political Fireproofing —
Six of the eight sitting Senators who
served in the Vietnam war — including,
notably, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who was
a prisoner of war in Hanoi for six years,
and Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE), who lost a
leg in combat in Vietnam — strongly
supported the resolution. They provided
critical political cover for colleagues
who might otherwise have been reluctant
to buck the strong opposition of the
veterans and POW-MIA families’
organizations forcefully represented by
another Vietnam vet, Sen. Robert Smith
(R-NH).

The ‘Appeasement Will Increase
Leverage’ Line — Seemingly
without exception, those Senators who
spoke in favor of this amendment to the
State Department authorization bill made
a key assertion: The adoption of the
resolution, and subsequent lifting of the
trade embargo against Vietnam that it
urges, would improve the prospects for
obtaining the fullest possible accounting
of former comrades-in-arms unaccounted
for at war’s end. In so doing, they
generally cited as expert testimony the
supportive statements of senior military
officers like Gen. John Vessey, Adm.
Charles Larson and Maj. Gen. Thomas
Needham.

At no point, however, was this
testimony challenged on the grounds that
these individuals may have, as a result
of their respective responsibilities, a vested
interest in maintaining cordial
relations with the Vietnamese⁽¹⁾.
This syndrome — called
“clientitis” when it manifests
itself at the State Department — is all
too common among diplomats and those with
similar duties.

Worse yet, the central question
“Will Vietnam be more, or less,
forthcoming after the embargo is
lifted?” — is not one that those
with military service, even that as
distinguished as General Vessey’s, are
better qualified to answer than are those
from other disciplines. In fact,
independence and common sense are more
likely to produce an objective answer
than is to be expected from people
trained to follow orders and remain
subordinate to a Commander in Chief, in
this case Bill Clinton whose clear desire
to normalize relations with Vietnam is
well known to Messers. Vessey, Larson and
Needham.

From the Folks Who Brought Us
Jane Fonda — A substantial
number of the Senators urging an end to
the embargo had been recent beneficiaries
of Hanoi’s hospitality. To varying
degrees, they have subsequently; enthused
over the “cooperation” Vietnam
has been providing in recent months to
joint efforts to recover the remains of
U.S. servicemen; remarked at the
eagerness for the Vietnamese government
to have the embargo lifted; and warned
about the economic penalties likely to be
paid by U.S. companies if further denied
an opportunity to compete in Vietnam.

These often somewhat romanticized
accounts — so reminiscent of the
communists’ successes twenty-five years
ago in cultivating and exploiting
influential Americans as purveyors of
Hanoi’s propaganda — are substantially
misleading. The truth of the matter is:

• Vietnam’s cooperation continues
  to be selective, enough as to
  allow the Clinton Administration
  and like-minded Senators to claim
  “progress,” but far
  short of full transparency. The
  National League of Families —
  a group that closely monitors actual
  progress toward resolving POW-MIA
  cases — has, for example,
  responded to such claims of
  progress by describing
  last year as the worst year in
  recent memory. Moreover,
  U.S. forensic analysis has
  concluded that fully 85% of the
  remains handed over by Hanoi are
  not American. And in those cases
  that are judged to be American
  remains there have been numerous
  instances where deaths have been
  determined on the basis of very
  fragmentary evidence. For
  example, numerous POW-MIA
  families have protested the
  determination of death upon
  finding one or two teeth.
• It stands to reason that — if,
  as claimed — Hanoi is so
  interested in ending the embargo,
  the United States will enjoy
  greater leverage to achieve full
  accounting or other objectives before
  it is lifted than afterwards.
  Furthermore, by all indications,
  it is the U.S. “Good
  Housekeeping Seal of
  Approval” in which Vietnam
  is most interested. As a result,
  the contention is nonsensical
  that leverage will be retained
  even after the embargo is lifted
  since the United States can
  continue to deny Hanoi normalized
  relations, full diplomatic
  missions, etc.⁽²⁾
• Finally, the national
  economic interest (not to be
  confused with narrower corporate
  interests) is not likely to be
  well-served by opening up yet
  another Asian cheap labor pool.
  Manufacturing jobs — not
  appreciable quantities of U.S.
  goods and services — will
  probably prove to be the
  principal American exports to a
  Vietnam whose people have no
  disposable incomes but can be
  exploited at near slave-labor
  wages. The predictable result
  will be one more deficit trade
  relationship for the United
  States, on top of those it is
  already experiencing with other
  Pacific Rim nations (notably,
  Japan, China, South Korea,
  Taiwan, etc.)

Condemning the People of
Vietnam to More Communist Repression

One of the high points of the Senate
debate came when Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE)
rose to endorse the resolution. In the
process, he delivered a passionate and
elegant denunciation of the communist
regime in Hanoi for its continuing,
brutal disregard for the basic human
rights of its people. Stating that
economic interests alone were no reason
to lift the embargo Sen. Kerrey said,
“I believe it would be a terrible
mistake and a real tragedy and a denial
of any purpose whatsoever of the war [in]
Vietnam, if, when we come back into
Vietnam all we care about and all we talk
about is making money.” However,
Sen. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona rightly
voted against the resolution, stating
that the U.S. Government must first gain
concessions from Hanoi, regarding
Democracy and human rights for all
Vietnamese people, before lifting the
trade embargo.

Unfortunately, in a phenomenon that is
increasingly common in Bill Clinton’s
Washington, it is permissible to take
actions utterly inconsistant with such
principled rhetoric as long as
appropriate lip-service is paid to
American ideals. In truth, by
failing to make free and fair elections
in Vietnam a precondition for
normalizing U.S. trade and other
relations with Hanoi — something which
was required of neighboring Cambodia —
the United States is not only providing
critical life-support for the communist
regime. America is also effectively
condemning a people it has ignominiously
abandoned once before to the prospect of
unending tyranny from that brutal
government.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy notes
with great regret that the Senate debate
on the resolution was largely bereft of
the evidence now coming into the public
domain that the United States government
has known more for decades than it has
chosen to reveal about POWs and MIAs left
behind at the end of the Vietnam war.
In the event, such information may not
have made a difference to the outcome of
this vote given the correlation of forces
currently arrayed in favor of lifting the
embargo.

Still, this data, including the
“Cold Spot Files⁽³⁾“
— which is increasingly being documented
as formerly classified materials are made
public — will ultimately show the
American people the truth about Hanoi’s
despicable manipulation of U.S. POW-MIAs
and their families. It will also reveal
Washington’s odious collusion in this
matter arising from systematic efforts to
conceal the facts and to debunk those,
like Sen. Smith, who have sought to bring
them to light.

As this case becomes ever more
indisputable, actions that have the
effect of propping up the Vietnamese
regime responsible for this travesty —
such as yesterday’s Senate vote — will
be seen for what they are: An
ignominious sell-out that not only
betrays anew the people of Vietnam; it
also besmirches the memory and sacrifice
for the more than 58,000 Americans who
died to spare them this fate and the
unknown number of U.S. servicemen who
survived the war but did not come home.

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1. Gen. Vessey , a
former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, has been a personal representative
to Hanoi for two U.S. presidents; Adm.
Larson is the present Commander-in-Chief,
Pacific and relevant theater commander;
and Gen. Needham is the commander of
Joint Task Force — Full Accounting, the
working group charged with carrying out
field investigations and other efforts to
clear up outstanding questions concerning
Vietnam-era POW-MIAs. None of these
officers or their subordinate office
chiefs stationed in Indochina have
backgrounds as professional
investigators, Vietnamese military
historians nor any language proficiency.
Worse, the most respected American
Investigator, Garnett Bell, was relieved
of his position as head of the Hanoi
investigation office after he testified
before Congress that Americans were
indeed held prisoner after the war ended.

2. There is as a
practical matter very little likelihood
that full diplomatic ties would be
withheld for very long once trade
relations are reestablished. After all,
the claim that appeared to be most
persuasive in the Senate debate — i.e.,
that lifting the embargo will give rise
to a greater American presence in Vietnam
and, therefore, greatly expanded
opportunities to ascertain the truth
about unaccounted for POW-MIAs — presumes
that a U.S. embassy will be established
there, creating new, official means for
penetrating Hanoi’s secrecy.

3. For more on the
explosive Cold Spot Files,See the Center
for Security Policy’s recent Decision
Brief, Putting Clinton’s Vietnam
Policy On The ‘Spot’: ‘Cold Spot’ Files
Cry Out For Inquiry On POW Cover-Up
(No. 94-D 07, 25
January 1994)