Oops! Untimely Disclosures Of Secret Findings Threaten To Upset Clinton’s Foreign Applecarts

If a Republican filibuster in the Senate has brought to an early end President Clinton’s honeymoon on domestic policy, the Clinton ship of state has been no less severely rocked by two powerful mines struck while navigating the often-treacherous waters of international affairs. While at this point the full extent of the damage done to the Administration’s program by the recent revelation of two heretofore secret reports can only be surmised, its credibility concerning — and therefore the prospects for effectively managing — the crisis in Bosnia and U.S. policy toward Vietnam has unquestionably been seriously eroded.

Cover-up on Bosnia

The first report was one prepared at the Administration’s request by a 26-member government team. The group had been sent to Bosnia to evaluate what could be done swiftly to alleviate the suffering of innocent civilians there. Not surprisingly, the officials from the State, Defense and other departments concluded the obvious: It is not enough to provide food and medicine to the victims of Serbian aggression. What is killing and maiming them is artillery shells and other weapons fire, not malnutrition.

The report concludes, accordingly, that what is needed is "safe havens," which can of course only be made safe by deploying ground forces and air cover for protection. As this position is inconsistent with President Clinton’s current determination to avoid committing troops to the conflict in Bosnia, the Administration’s reluctance to disclose this finding is understandable.

What is not acceptable, however, is the fact that, when the fact-finding team was authorized to relay its conclusions to the Congress last week, the Clinton Administration instructed the briefers to delete any reference to their central recommendation. As a result, Members were given a seriously misleading picture of the situation on the ground and misinformed about the group’s assessment of the United States’ options.

Regrettably, this subterfuge seems of a piece with other recent Clinton decisions toward the former Yugoslavia — notably, his acquiescence to Russia’s insistence that further action on tightening the sanctions against Serbia, to say nothing of lifting the Bosnian arms embargo, be postponed until after April 25th (the date of Boris Yeltsin’s referendum). Such actions have the effect of signalling to Belgrade that its predations in Bosnia may continue unchecked; that there need be no fear of meaningful Western intervention to defend the innocent, let alone to punish the aggressor; and that Russia can easily manipulate the U.N. and prevent meaningful responses to Serbia’s aggression.

Hanoi’s POW Lies

The second report was discovered in February in the archives of the Soviet Union’s military intelligence unit, the GRU. It details a 1972 briefing by Gen. Tran Van Quang, the then-Deputy Chief of Staff of the North Vietnamese Army to his country’s Communist Party Politburo concerning the exact number of Americans captured by Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Gen. Quang helpfully breaks out the POWs by rank, by location of capture and by attitude toward the war — from "progressive" (that is, apologetic) to "reactionary" (read, defiantly supportive of the war effort).

Most importantly, the report confirms what many have long believed: Hanoi in 1972 held 1,205 American prisoners of war, three times the number it has previously disclosed and 614 more than it permitted to be repatriated at the end of the war. It is in the words of Stephen Morris, the Harvard researcher who discovered the document, the "smoking gun" long sought in connection with the POW-MIA issue.

Unfortunately for the Clinton Administration, as with the Bosnia report, the revelation of this explosive document comes at a particularly inopportune time. It had just announced that Gen. John Vessey, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been appointed President Bush’s special emissary to Vietnam, was going to return to Hanoi next week. The object of the Vessey trip was transparent: to finalize the whitewash of North Vietnam’s prevarications about American POWs and MIAs so as to clear the decks for normalized bilateral trade and diplomatic relations.

Now, we are told, the Quang report will be the first item discussed between Gen. Vessey and his Vietnamese interlocutors — presumably a short conversation since the latter have already denounced it as a fabrication. Doubtless, a concerted effort will be made by Hanoi and its friends in the United States to discredit this document. Indeed, its troubling disclosures will probably be swept under the same rug that Sen. John Kerry’s special committee on POW-MIA affairs and successive U.S. administrations have used to cover-up evidence of North Vietnamese bad faith and official American guilty knowledge of the same.

The Bottom Line — A Lost Moral Compass

Still, the existence of the Quang report — like the true character of the Bosnia study — should make it more difficult for the Clinton to perpetrate the appeasement policy it had in mind. The real question is this: Will President Clinton continue to ignore the commitments to democracy, to opposing totalitarian oppression and to resisting its aggression and genocide that he made repeatedly during the campaign?

If so, he will presumably persist in trying — despite these embarassing setbacks — to abandon those aspiring to peace and freedom in Bosnia, Vietnam and beyond. In the process, he will inevitably further desecrate the memory of those Americans and others who have not simply paid lip-service to such ideals but have given their lives to defend and promote them.