O.C. Congressional Delegation Assails Clinton : Reaction: Dornan is harshest critic of move toward normal relations. But Ferguson welcomes it, saying capitalism will help.

President Clinton’s apparent decision to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam was harshly protested and ridiculed Wednesday by most of Orange County’s Republican congressmen, who claimed Clinton is forsaking the families of missing American servicemen and the campaign for human rights in Vietnam.

While California businesses are considered best positioned for renewed trade with Vietnam, members of the local congressional delegation said the Administration is bowing to business interests and should not lift the sanctions until the POW/MIA issue is resolved and democratic rights are restored in that country.

Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), who has previously assailed Clinton for avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War, said: “We know Clinton was missing from Vietnam, but we need to find out what happened to the others who were actually there.”

A strong counterpoint came from state Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), a former Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who served three tours in Vietnam, and one who welcomes signs of a complete thaw in relations.

Ferguson noted that capitalism would do what guns and bullets couldn’t. “Coca-Cola is much more effective than an AK-47,” Ferguson said. “When people get a taste of our good materialistic life, they don’t want to fight.”

Although he sees the nagging MIA issue as “a drawback” in the quest for normalization, Ferguson said the public must recognize that soldiers have been left missing in action from all wars.

“Things are different today,” Ferguson said. “We didn’t have this outcry when the North Koreans did almost the same things. They killed them, they hid them. We never knew what happened to many of our soldiers. This happens in every war.”

Of the five out of six Orange County congressmen who commented on the expected reconciliation with Vietnam, Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad) was the least critical.

He said that while lifting the trade embargo should be accompanied by human rights guarantees, he expected that free trade would speed up the release of information on the POW/MIA issue.

“I just returned from a rather extensive trip to China and I got the feeling that the more presence the U.S. has there, the more able we would be to encourage human rights in that country. I think the same thing applies to Vietnam. I don’t think it’s a good tactic to keep the embargo in place,” Packard said.

But the general criticism from Orange County’s congressmen seemed to conflict with their own party’s leadership.

House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) strongly favored easing the trade restrictions, saying, “We ought to look . . . at the potential market. To delay and delay and delay, we’re simply going to be preempted by others.”

Meanwhile, Dornan, who is president of the American chapter of the International Committee for a Free Vietnam, reiterated his opposition Wednesday in a letter to the White House, in which he stated that the embargo “has yielded cooperation and information that otherwise we would not have attained.”

Other local representatives agreed the embargo is the best tool the United States has to pressure the Vietnamese government to provide POW/MIA information and the political guarantees the United States is seeking.

“At the very least, we should try to make free elections a provision” before lifting the embargo, said Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), a member of the House Asian and Pacific Affairs Committee.

The decision to resume trade with Vietnam before missing U.S. servicemen are accounted for is “totally premature,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach). “There’s a lot of information that needs to be released. They have not, for example, provided the records from the prisons in which our own prisoners were kept.”

Rohrabacher said the Clinton Administration should also force the Vietnamese government to release its own political prisoners before the trade restrictions are lifted.

Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) said that while the move will create new business ventures for American firms, including many in California, the United States will have many opportunities to trade with Vietnam, but only this one chance to strike a good deal to achieve more freedom for the Vietnamese people.

Cox cited recent studies showing that Vietnam is one of the world’s worst violators of human rights.

“The reversal (in America’s policy toward Vietnam) is essentially free to the government of Vietnam. They have not even been asked to change their human rights policy. We are simply ignoring the human rights dimension of a healthy foreign policy,” Cox said.

Of the six congressmen who represent Orange County, only Rep. Jay C. Kim (R-Diamond Bar) did not respond to a request for comment.

The President’s message to the veterans’ groups and the Vietnamese-American community, Dornan claimed, is, “Drop dead!”

“Bill Clinton was wrong about Vietnam in 1969, and he’s wrong about Vietnam now,” Dornan said. “I guess Clinton still whistles to himself ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.’ ”

Cox also said that by initiating free trade with Vietnam, “the Clinton Administration has seemingly turned a deaf ear to the concerns of California’s Vietnamese community.”

Proponents of the trade agreement argue that in addition to new business opportunities, America needs to close the book on its involvement in the war that caused bitterness at home and abroad.

“It’s time for us to close this chapter in American history and in America’s relations with Vietnam, no doubt about it,” Rohrabacher said. “But before you close this chapter, we have to write the final paragraphs, and the Vietnamese are withholding information.”

Times staff writer Eric Bailey contributed to this report.