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Fears of another failure inhibit legislators
Sunday, April 30, 2000
By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Twenty-five years after the fall of Saigon and the chaotic U.S. evacuation, memories and lessons of the U.S. experience in Vietnam remain near the surface.
Colleges now offer courses on the Vietnam War, sorting and resorting the pages of that dark period. Hundreds of books have been written in an effort to make sense of what happened. Movies have probed the still-tender emotions the war evoked. There are more than 75,000 Web sites related to the Vietnam War.
The imposing, stark, black face of The Wall, the Vietnam War Memorial, draws thousands of quiet, sober-faced visitors to Washington every year. Medals, teddy bears, footballs and tear-stained letters still are reverently placed under the names engraved on its facade, collected and stored by the government.
The families of the more than 1,000 Americans still missing from the war haunt the State Department, which succeeds, every once in a while, in getting a few more remains returned in flag-draped caskets.
President Clinton has mentioned the Vietnam War in nearly 40 speeches over the past four months. Last year, as the United States considered sending ground troops to fight in Kosovo, legislators invoked the "quagmire" of Vietnam to warn against it. The other day, police in Washington coped with thousands of demonstrators protesting financial globalization using tactics refined during years of often violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
The glaring statistics of the war still chill, and the war's lessons for today still prompt heated debate.
To some, the United States remains a villain for fighting an "unwinnable" war, naively choosing sides in another country's civil war. To others, the United States lost a war for the first time only because it was hamstrung by media and politicians and didn't throw everything at the North Vietnamese.
Fifty-eight thousand Americans and 3 million Vietnamese died during the American phase of the Vietnam War.
Henry Kissinger was national security adviser to former President Gerald Ford as Americans pulled out of Saigon and left thousands of South Vietnamese allies to be killed or tortured. He contends that the fear of casualties has tied succeeding administrations' hands in foreign policy.
U.S. tolerance of Iraq's ejection of U.N. arms inspectors in the wake of the Persian Gulf War and the 78-day U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia last year both reflect Vietnam, Kissinger argues.
"In each case, the conduct of operations was undertaken with a reluctance to accept casualties that ultimately conveyed to the American public, and to our adversaries, the absence of any vital interest," he wrote in Newsweek. "Yet paradoxically, the fear of domestic convulsions and ambivalence about the decisive use of American power end up making crises more frequent and more difficult to resolve. That is perhaps why the Clinton administration has been drawn into more inconclusive military operations than any previous administration."
Princeton University politics professor Fred Greenstein, author of "The Presidential Difference," a new book on presidential leadership, documented that Hubert Humphrey, while Lyndon Johnson's vice president, tried repeatedly to keep Johnson from getting militarily involved in Vietnam, preferring a diplomatic solution. Johnson responded by barring Humphrey from meetings about Vietnam.
Robert McNamara, defense secretary during the Johnson administration, argued passionately that if all of Vietnam became a communist bulwark, the rest of Southeast Asia would be swept by a communist tide, like dominoes. Now, he says, "We were wrong."
Humphrey's argument--and that of thousands of peace demonstrators--was that there was no overriding U.S. strategic interest in pursuing a war in Vietnam. Humphrey argued that unless the U.S. public was prepared for war and supported it, the outcome would be disaster.
In the wake of the consuming uproar over the unpopular Vietnam War, former President George Bush, when he decided to turn back Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, sought to prepare the public before undertaking war in the Persian Gulf. Bush and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who had served under Kissinger and attended most crucial meetings during the fateful withdrawal from Saigon, made the Iraq issue an emotional one. They vilified Saddam Hussein and warned of the risk to oil supplies vital to the United States. They sought and achieved clear congressional approval for military action.
In February 1994, nearly 20 years after the fall of Saigon, Clinton ended the economic embargo against Vietnam. In July 1995, he restored diplomatic relations.
Clinton was supported by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whom the North Vietnamese had held captive as a prisoner of war for 51/2 years. In a trip back to Vietnam last week, McCain said he had no bitterness toward the country or its people, except for the brutality of his captors.
Winston Lord, a former State Department official and ambassador to China, said after relations with Vietnam were normalized: "Asia is a very dynamic region. We have tremendous security and economic interests in the region. We think one of the benefits of this move will be to forward those interests."
State Department officials, arguing for permanent trade relations with China, say Vietnam offers a lesson in reconciliation. Since 1995, more remains of MIAs have been returned to the United States, as trade, tourism and goodwill have grown between the two countries. The communist regime maintains tight political control, but people are freer to speak out and make personal choices.
The military has largely accepted the argument. In 1995, when relations with Vietnam were normalized, the Joint Chiefs of Staff voted unanimously in favor, despite vivid memories of the war's carnage.
On the other hand, Pentagon officials were the most reluctant to go into Bosnia and Kosovo, where U.S. troops serve as peacekeepers.
At the moment there is no broad-based call to bring home the troops. But then there was no hue and cry to return troops from Somalia until Americans were killed and one serviceman was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
Men pray for fallen soldiers at the War Memorial Cemetary near Cu Chi, Vietnam. More than 10,000 people who died during the war are buried there. (Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette) 