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By Tom Masland
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As a candidate, Bill Clinton had to fight the Vietnam issue-the fact that he avoided the draft and opposed the war. Now he's caught in a new Vietnam war-the struggle between big businesses desperate to trade with Hanoi and the network of activists and politicians who want to punish Vietnam until it accounts for every missing U.S. serviceman. The administration had been moving cautiously toward lifting the 18-year-old trade embargo on Vietnam. But that quiet initiative died last week when the MIA issue came back to life. Says a Democratic Senate aide: "It is politically impossible for the administration to move forward even if it wanted to."
The roadblock was a 1972 "Dear Comrades" letter a Harvard researcher said he stumbled upon in the Soviet Communist Party archives in Moscow. In the letter, a top North Vietnamese commander, Gen. Tran Van Quang, purportedly revealed to his Politburo that Vietnam was secretly holding 1,205 Americans-not just the 591 freed the next year under terms of the Paris peace accords. The Pentagon now lists only 135 "discrepancy cases"-Americans classified as "last known alive" who never came home. Could there be 479 more? The MIA lobby didn't need convincing. "The road map for normalization of relations with Vietnam should be rolled up, put on a dark shelf and forgotten," said American Legion spokesman Richard Christian. And Ross Perot, one of the few public figures who believe Americans are still held captive in Southeast Asia, said he would campaign to thwart normalization of relations with Vietnam unless Clinton first obtains full Vietnamese disclosure on the missing (box). "Will I [block a lifting of the embargo] if I have to? Yes," he said. ". . . You don't leave a single person behind."
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Outside the MIA movement, many experts were dubious about the Soviet document. U.S. government specialists said the letter appears to be authentic, but that the information it contains is wildly inaccurate-"totally, totally implausible," as one Capitol Hill aide put it. Some suggested that whoever translated the document from Vietnamese to Russian might have confused the term for Asian commandos captured fighting with U.S. forces, my/nguy, or American puppet, with the term for American, my. Eventually these guys [the Asians] were left there to rot," concedes a Senate Democratic aide. But Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national-security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, speculated that the Vietnamese had indeed lied about the number of U.S. POWs they held and simply massacred hundreds of American servicemen after the war. Retired Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., already scheduled to visit Vietnam for Clinton this week to gauge Hanoi's cooperation in resolving MIA cases, was ordered to confront officials there about the report.
Unless the Vietnamese are extraordinarily forthcoming, U.S. business leaders may have lost the initiative in their battle to join the boom in Vietnam, a country they compare with southern China in its potential for development. Since December, U.S. firms have been permitted to open offices in Vietnam and sign contracts in preparation for the lifting of sanctions. In January a 17-month Senate investigation concluded "no compelling evidence" indicates that U.S. servicemen remain alive in Southeast Asia. Vessey's current trip had been expected to clear the way for U.S. acquiescence late this month to a French plan to pay off Vietnam's $141 million debt to international lending agencies-making the country eligible for new loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Then, the administration would have to lift or modify the embargo or be in the untenable position of lending Vietnam development money but forbidding U.S. firms from bidding on the contracts. "Last week I would have guessed that the United States would ... let the vote go forward," said Virginia B. Foote, director of the U.S.-Vietnam Trade Council, a lobbying group. "This week we haven't a clue."
Frustrated business leaders are losing their reticence about speaking out against the trade embargo. Foreign investment in Vietnam already totals more than $5 billion. "We're late to the party and a lot of the dishes have already been consumed," says Mark Van Fleet of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "For an administration emphasizing our need to be successful global competitors," says William Beddow, a Washington manager for Caterpillar Inc., "maintaining an embargo in a major international marketplace is simply inconsistent." When America renewed relations with China in 1978 "we didn't try to solve the unsolvable," says Jerome Cohen, a New York University law professor who represents U.S. firms cutting deals with the Vietnamese. But he worries that Clinton, a consensus-builder with little foreign-policy experience, "is badly placed to lead on this question." Indeed, this president can't afford the price of appearing to break faith with those who did go to Vietnam.
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