Wrong Time, Wrong Man to Lift Embargo : The Vietnam War is still an open wound. The only way to heal it is to account for all the POWs and MIAs.

I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it, I simply can’t believe it. I am talking about President Clinton’s decision to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam. With 2,200 servicemen still officially listed as missing in action, how dare we as a nation even think about doing business with a country that has refused to turn over all the information concerning prisoners of war and MIAs?

Before Clinton’s decision, the Senate voted 62-38 to recommend that the President lift the 19-year-old trade embargo. An anonymous congressional source stated, “A lot of people just seem to be getting tired of this issue.” What a cruel, thoughtless statement. Many of us can remember that Congress had no trouble, in the 1960s and ‘70s, in sending our boys over to Vietnam and asking them to give their lives and limbs. But now that the war is over and a supposedly appropriate amount of time has passed, it’s back to business as usual. And business as usual is placing corporate profit over the value of human life.

I am so sick and tired of certain politicians who would never put their ethically decaying bodies on the front line, but are willing to abandon the men who did. If members of Congress wanted the embargo lifted, then why didn’t they ask President Bush--a war hero whose actions would not have been questioned by the country--to do it? But for a man who dodged the draft, then lied about his draft-dodging antics, a man who shamefully demonstrated against his country on foreign soil while his peers were dying in Vietnam, a man who was given a tour through Russia by the communists during that sensitive time to be the one to lift the trade embargo is adding cruel insult to 20 years of pain.

I, too, was opposed to the war in Vietnam. It was indeed a divisive and controversial time. Good people supported the war and good people opposed it, but opposing the war and flirting with America’s foreign enemies are two very different things. This cowardly, draft-dodging stranger to truth is once again betraying his country. Since when has Bill Clinton ever cared about corporate profit and promoting capitalism? The man never even held a real job. He has spent his entire career on public payrolls, yet suddenly we are to believe he is reborn and supposedly buckling under to the pressures of big business. I don’t think so.

Which leads me to suspect that Clinton’s contempt for the military and the Vietnam War runs so deep that he is actually willing to abandon the families of POW/MIAs who have waited for years to be given that final word. There is something immoral and disgusting about opening up trade with a country that continually refuses to give us simple human-rights information. The last bargaining chip we as a nation held with Vietnam was the trade embargo, and now this President has foolishly given that away.

I am truly surprised that Clinton was willing to touch an issue dealing with Vietnam, since he is so vulnerable on this topic. Is it ironic or perhaps consistent that the man who turned on his country 25 years ago is the very one to reopen trade with a conquered country today? As Rep. Robert Dornan, (R-Garden Grove) put it, “We know Clinton was missing from Vietnam, but we need to find out what happened to the others who were actually there.”

Some day, the time will come to put the war behind us, to let go, to heal deep wounds, but now is neither the time nor the right President. You cannot heal open wounds without proper treatment, and the only treatment that is proper is the full release of all information concerning our missing in action.

Listen to Albro Lundy III of Beverly Hills, whose father is still listed as missing: “My father risked his life every day by flying search and rescue behind enemy lines . . . Now Clinton won’t even bring him home.

“I don’t believe for a moment that corporate profit is driving Clinton. I believe instead that his deep disdain for those who fought and served in the Vietnam War is so ingrained that he has finally discovered the ultimate way to punish them--total abandonment.”