From: davidto@fxgrp.fx.com (David M To)
Subject: [COMMENTARY] WHAT DO THE AMERICANS WANT?
Organization: FXD/Telerate, Mountain View, CA
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 21:03:43 GMT

[Poster note:  This article appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, Sunday,
April 12, 1992, in the Perspective section reserved for Analysis, Commentary, 
and Editorials.  I encourage all netters to send commentary, if any, to 
the SJ Mercury News editor.]  

Letters must bear the writer's signature, printed or typed name, address and 
daytime phone number.  The San Jose Mercury News routinely condense letters. 
Write to:

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	by fax  (408) 288-8060        


[ Reprinted with permission from the San Jose Mercury News Editorial Staff ]

[Ed. note: T.T. Nhu writes a weekly column appearing each Friday on the 
Mercury News Feature Page.]
[Poster note: T.T. Nhu is a journalist at the SJ Mercury News.  She regularly 
writes commentary about Vietnam among her range of issues.]




		"WHAT DO THE AMERICANS WANT?"

   "U.S. policy is strangling hopes of 67 million Vietnamese"

by T.T. NHU


    One evening after dinner, I walked Nguyen thi Binh back to her room.
The Regency Hotel in Nadi, Fiji, had a series of elaborate intersecting 
walkways that connected hundreds of rooms and were baffling in the dark.  
In the humid, velvety night, Binh laughed as she took my arm and we plunged 
into a dark passage: "Now, let us descend into the labyrinth.  Ever since I 
have been negotiating with Americans, it's been impossible to figure out what 
they want.  Tell me, what do Americans want?"

    Were both attending the Aspen Institute's third annual American-Vietnamese
Dialogue in Fiji last month.  I had trouble recognizing Binh at first.  
Instead of the pale, austere woman with hair pulled back in a simple bun, she 
now has a perm and is plump and serene.  My mother told me in 1968 that Binh's 
role as the chief negotiator at the Paris Peace Talks was highly symbolic 
because she is the granddaughter of one of Vietnam's greatest anti-colonial 
patriots, Phan Chu Trinh, who has a street named after him in almost every 
town in Vietnam.  Binh has been dealing with Americans for the past 25 years, 
and she's still puzzling over the contortions the United States has convoluted 
into policy in order to rationalize the war and its aftermath.

    Seventeen years after the end of the war in Vietnam, the light is still 
at the end of the tunnel.  Only this time it is Vietnam that is seeking to 
get out of the tunnel, and the United States is bloking the exit.  The Bush 
administration is not ready to end the de facto economic war - the embargo - 
which has put the squeeze on Vietnam since 1975, making it one of the poorest 
countries in the world.

    Invited this year as a Vietnamese-American participant, I studied the 
agenda gloomily before going.  It was the third such conference organized by 
former Iowa Sen. Dick Clark, who has a long-time interest in Africa, Asia and 
the former Soviet Union.  The topic was approaches to normalization, which is 
tantamount to arguing about angels on the head of a pin.  Because it's 
impossible to prove a negative - that is, the Vietnamese are no longer holding
any live POW or MIA remains - the discussion chased around this fruitless 
hypothesis over four days, with the Vietnamese maintaining they were doing all 
that was humanly possible to find the remains of the missing, and U.S. 
representatives complaining the Vietnamese needed to be "more forthcoming and 
cooperative, and to quit stalling."

    In the past, when there were no other pressing global issues, Vietnam has 
come to the surface for possible resolution.  But when the United States became
involved in other conflicts, Vietnam was put on the back burner. 

    In 1990, there were indications that the United States was considering 
renewing relations with Vietnam.  I was invited to the White House in May that 
year along with two dozen other Vietnamese-Americans to discuss the 
implications of normalization among the Vietnamese in America.  It seemed 
fairly certain at the time that the administration intended to move in that 
direction and was putting the Vietnamese-American community on notice.  
Although publicly there was opposition to normalization, privately many 
Vietnamese were relieved.  There was a feeling that ending Vietnam's isolation 
would open up more possibilities for democracy and begin to resolve the 
desperate poverty that is strangling the nearly 67 million people of Vietnam.

    In September 1990, Secretary of State James Baker met with then Vietnamese
Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach at the United Nations for the first time. 
"Baker is a man we can talk to," Thach said.  "He doesn't have a complex about
Vietnam."

    Indeed Baker is the only postwar secretary of state who does not have a 
history with Vietnam.  A diplomatic pragmatist, he had no ax to grind, having 
never been involved in the U.S. defeat in Indochina as a member of the 
government or military during the war.

    Then the gulf war intervened, and the question of Vietnam sank to the 
lowest priority.  It was revived one year later at the Paris peace conference 
on Cambodia in October 1991, when Baker said formal negotiations on 
normalization with Vietnam would begin within a month.

    The United States eased travel restrictions on Vietnamese diplomats in the 
United States and allowed Americans to travel to Vietnam on educational and 
cultural tours.  This was the first step in the "road map" timetable devised 
by the State Department that outlines the steps toward normalization.  The 
second step calls for the United States to partially lift its trade embargo 
once the U.N. peacekeepers are established in Cambodia. The third step would 
bring the final lifting of the embargo and an exchange of diplomatic missions 
six months after the United Nations is in Cambodia.  Then by 1993, after 
elections in Cambodia, the fourth and last phase, full diplomatic and economic 
relations would be restored.

    The Vietnamese correctly view the road map as a U.S. policy statement.  
"It is an instrument of consensus and practical tool to reconcile the 
differing flanks in the U.S. government," said an articulate journalist from 
Hanoi.  Some private American citizens, by contrast, saw it as unrealistic and 
a road map to nowhere.  They said the United States imposed a road map that 
wasn't fair, since it held the Vietnamese government hostage to a scenario it 
couldn't control, mainly Cambodia.  An American participant compared the 
conditions set by the road map to a situation where Vietnam was a mere 
hitchhiker at the mercy of a "moody and unpredictable driver - the U.S."  His 
company is anxious to do business in Vietnam, which is seen as having greater 
economic potential that [sic] any other Southeast Asian country.  Frustrated 
at the administration policy, he exclaimed: "If anything, this proves that 
capitalists do not run the United States, otherwise the embargo would have 
been lifted long ago."

    The issue of the remains of 2,273 unaccounted-for Americans is what blocks 
the normalization process.  This stumbling block is bewildering to the 
Vietnamese, who have more than 300,000 MIAs of their own and have spent 
600,000 working days in efforts to recover American MIAs.  What they cannot 
grasp is why US policy seems to be driven by a matter that they claim could be 
resolved with cooperation from both sides, instead of the endless 
recrimination.  The Vietnamese desperately want to resolve the issue and are 
acutely aware that the POW/MIA issue will continue to be used to humiliate 
them until the United States considers it politically expedient to end the 
punishment.

    Meanwhile Vietnam is determined to end its economic isolation and has 
embarked on a crash plan to transform its centralized economy into an exuberant
free market.  As I listened to a professor of economics from the Hanoi Marxist-
Leninist Institute outline sweeping changes, I wondered whether the institute 
ought not change its name to the Milton Friedman-Ayn Rand Corporation of 
Objective Capitalism.

    An American businessman at the conference said he found it ironic that the 
administration, which prides itself in not allowing living American hostages to
shape its Mideast policy, has allowed the absent ashes of Indochina servicemen 
to dictate its Indochina policy. This administration, despite its protests, 
is still very much haunted by the Vietnam syndrome while Vietnam, thoroughly 
exhausted by decades of war, wants to jump-start its moribund economy and 
forget about the war.

    For Hanoi, lifting economic sanctions so that Vietnam can rejoin the 
international market is the top priority.  Whether the US decides to resume 
diplomatic relations is not all that urgent.  "All we would like is for the US 
to remove the impediments which prevent the international banks from lending 
us money and other countries from trade investments which could revive us," 
said Binh.  "Let us breathe."

    Whether it is a question of 2,273 missing persons or one, the POW/MIA 
issue is really a poor excuse not to recognize Vietnam.  Almost everyone 
except Jesse Helms and a few others agree that re-establishing ties would 
improve the chances to resolve the MIA issue and other matters such as 
refugees and humanitarian concerns more directly.  But the Bush administration, 
facing a tough re-election campaign, swamped by economic woes and nervously 
reacting whenever the Republican right wing says "boo," is too timid to 
normalize relations with Vietnam and risk losing more votes.

    So the question of normalization must wait until after the November 
elections.  A Democratic president would have no qualms about bringing the 
Vietnam War to a close in the spring of 1993, 47 years after the United States 
first became involved in Vietnam by trying to help the French regain the 
colonial empire they lost in World War II.

-- end of article