
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 12, 1995                   TAG: 9507120049
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AN END, FINALLY, TO THE VIETNAM WAR

FOR BILL Clinton politically, full diplomatic relations with Vietnam carries more risk than prospect of reward. Even before Tuesday's formal announcement, the decision to normalize relations had reminded critics of Clinton's evasion of the draft during the Vietnam era. The president has been known to vacillate, to put it mildly, and could have finessed this one until after the '96 election.

But he didn't, and that's good for America - for reasons economic, strategic and emotional.

The immediate impetus for normalizing relations is economic.

Though Vietnam is a poor country, the result both of decades of war and of the economic failures typical of communism, the country is changing rapidly. It is the world's No. 2 rice exporter; the literacy rate is nearly 90 percent; since 1991 its economy has grown 8 percent annually; market reforms are in advance of, say, China's; Vietnam's population of 77 million makes it the world's 13th largest country.

Foreign investment in Vietnam is booming. In the year since Clinton lifted America's trade embargo, a small slice of that investment has been American. Full recognition would allow the tax, trade, insurance and finance agreements necessary for U.S. business to join investors from countries like Japan and Australia as a genuine player in a burgeoning Vietnam.

Accompanying the profit motive are strategic considerations. The main one is how to hold an ambitious and potentially aggressive China in check in the absence of the old Soviet Union as a countervailing power,

A relatively strong and prosperous Vietnam would help. Acceptance this month of former enemy Vietnam into the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), America's fifth-largest trading partner, is evidence of the importance attached by China's other neighbors to the integration of Vietnam into the region's economic and political life.

On top of the realpolitik grounds of economic and strategic interests, there's a less tangible reason for normalizing relations: America's emotional need for closure on a sad, dark chapter of history.

By many measures, the Vietnamese suffered far more than the Americans from the war and its aftermath. But 20 years after the fall of Saigon, closure seems to have come easier for them than for us. What Americans think of as the Vietnam War was for the Vietnamese one of several conflicts in a series that continued for half a century: against Japan, France, the United States, the Khmer Rouge, the Chinese. The Vietnam War divided Americans and fed corrosive cynicism. America is unaccustomed to not winning its wars.

Over the years, families' understandable longing for information about the fate of Americans missing in action has been abusively manipulated both by Hanoi and by some U.S. politicians. But since the lifting of the trade embargo, Hanoi has ceased the exploitation. By virtually all accounts, including those of former Joint Chiefs Chairman John Vessey and Republican Sen. (and former prisoner of war) John McCain of Arizona, the cooperation of Vietnamese authorities is now excellent.

Normalization of relations with Vietnam should, if anything, speed efforts toward resolution of the MIA issue. Freedom from preoccupation with a war that ended two decades ago, in turn, will permit America to view Southeast Asia according to the realities of today and tomorrow rather than the sorrows of yesteryear.

by CNB