The assertion of such a baldly hypocritical standard in assessing China as compared with Vietnam makes a total mockery of U.S. protestations of concern about human rights. Better to just shut up about human rights than to drag this noble cause through the lowest shoals of political opportunism. What arrogance for a U.S. secretary of state, who herself once strongly supported the war in Vietnam, to lecture a people about the rights of humans after we killed more than 3 million of them in a war that we now concede was a mistake. Albright was a protege of Zbigniew Brzezinski and worked for him on the National Security Council staff when this country made its secret deal with China to bring the genocidal Khmer Rouge into a coalition to regain power in Cambodia after the Vietnamese had thrown them out. Albright long has been a strong believer in applying a double standard to human rights issues.
China is a world power. . . .
Cuba is an embarrassment to the Western Hemisphere. It is the Clinton administration that is a continuing embarrassment in playing the human rights card as an electoral trick. Cuba policy is driven by the need to carry Florida. Evidently Albright was moved by her visit to a facility near Ho Chi Minh City, that is still fitting amputees, that lingering legacy of the U.S. intervention, with prosthetic devices. She used the photo op to seize credit for the tiny amount of U.S. aid that supports a few rehabilitation programs in a country we devastated.