Blame the Warmongers, Not Clinton : We had POWs and MIAs because feckless ‘leaders’ sent them to a stupid war.

Bill Clinton was right to oppose the war in Vietnam back in his college days, and he is right to lift the trade embargo now. If more people had shared his convictions then, the war, which was absurd from its inception, would not have escalated and most of the servicemen missing in action would be alive in fact and not just in the desperate hopes of their families.

Why should Clinton, who opposed the war, now feel the wrath of these families, rather than the leaders who sent their loved ones off to die in a war that, as the record of the Pentagon Papers shows, was irrational from the start?

What a strange moral twist it is to hang responsibility for the residue of that war on those who opposed it, rather than on the mindless cheerleaders of the effort to save the Vietnamese from themselves.

Yes, we owe it to those who were used as cannon fodder in the disparate schemes of “leaders” who should have known better to find out as much as possible about what happened to them. The experience with Russia and China has demonstrated that we learn a great deal more when closed societies are at last opened to the outside world. But at some point it is simply cruel to continue to stoke the hopes of families whose lives have been torn up by a history that is irreversible.

Tragically, war produces death and MIAs, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of Vietnamese MIAs lost in their own country whom we rarely hear about.

Despite the fullest cooperation of the Japanese and the Germans, 80,000 Americans who fought in World War II are still unaccounted for. That did not stop us from financing the rebirth of the two nations that had done so much to obliterate the line between war and genocide. What about the thousands of U.S. MIAs still unaccounted for from the Korean War, fought primarily against Chinese communist troops? Yet we normalized relations with Beijing.

Normalization of relations with Vietnam makes sense for the same reasons that the war didn’t. The people whom we called our enemy, and now seek to trade with, were always nationalists who paid only lip service to any internationalist commitments to spread communism.

Six years after the United States “lost” Vietnam to communism, “red” China attacked Vietnam. Both sides invoked notions of patriotism that had caused them to fight for thousands of years before there was a communism or a United States. Communism as an ideology turned out to be far more nationalist than internationalist and far less resistant to international capital markets than demanded by the primitive theory that drove the Cold War.

Nor did those red leaders have to be overthrown as a precondition for the restoration of capitalism. Instead, they were seduced by the siren calls of consumerism and the money markets. Pepsi turned out to be a better weapon for the West than the M-16.

Yes, the leadership of China and Vietnam remains authoritarian, but unfortunately that has been the norm in many of the countries with which we have maintained friendly relations. The Communist Party of China has opened the country’s doors to foreign capital like never before and the Vietnamese now seem poised to do the same. Which, of course, is why we are now so eager to invest and trade.

What should be controversial about lifting the embargo is why it took so long. That, and why the embargo on trade with Cuba remains after three decades. Cuba has no missing POWs or MIAs and clearly can no longer be considered as representing an extension of Soviet power, yet the embargo has been recently tightened by an act of Congress.

Political cynicism can be the only explanation for this obvious paradox. The Cuban exile community is far more powerful and embittered than its Vietnamese counterpart. More important, the business community in this country, eager to ride the emerging tiger of the Vietnamese economy, formed a powerful lobby for normalization. Cuba does not represent nearly as attractive a market for U.S. goods and investment, but should that be the sole basis of foreign policy?

What odd notion of national security would continue to brand it a crime to buy a cigar made in Cuba or to send medicine to the many people in need there? As far as I know, Clinton did not avoid participation in the Bay of Pigs invasion, so perhaps he will also find the courage to bring Cuba policy in line with the new world order.