For a time, the embargo was imposed to punish Vietnam for yet another crime: its assault against Pol Pot in response to murderous Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnamese border areas. The US had striven to normalize relations despite Vietnam's cruel treatment of us, Barbara Crossette reports under the heading “Indochina's Missing: An Issue That Refused to Die.” But, she continues, “President Carter's efforts to open links to Hanoi were thwarted by Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1978.” Naturally, the saintly moralist could not overlook unprovoked aggression; had George Bush been in charge, he doubtless would have sent Stormin' Norman to crush the aggressor (at least, if there had been a guarantee that no one would shoot back).
27
Carter's deep feelings about the war crime of aggression had been demonstrated for all to see by his reaction to Indonesia's invasion of East Timorâin this case, not terminating a murderous assault on the population but initiating a comparable one. As Indonesian violence approached genocidal levels in 1978 and its military supplies were running low, the Carter Administration sharply stepped up the flow of arms to its Indonesian ally, also sending jets via the Israeli connection to evade congressional restrictions; 90 percent of Indonesian arms were US-supplied, on the strict condition that they be used only for defensive purposes. From his moral pinnacle, Carter surveyed the Vietnamese crime of aggression and reluctantly terminated his efforts to bring Vietnam into the community of civilized nations, so we are instructed. The principled US opposition to the use of force in international affairs was revealed again through the 1980s; for example, by Washington's decisive support for Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the accompanying slaughter, the government-media reaction to the World Court judgment in 1986 ordering the US to desist from its “unlawful use of force” against Nicaragua, Bush's invasion of Panama to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War, and much else.
28
According to the USG-
Times
version, Washington “refused to normalize relations as long as a Vietnamese-backed Government in Cambodia resisted a negotiated settlement to its civil war” (Steven Greenhouse); that is, the conflict with the Khmer Rouge, supplied by China and Thailand (and, indirectly, the US and its allies), and attacking Cambodian rural areas from their Thai sanctuaries.
29
The reality is a bit different. The Carter Administration “[chose] not to accept the Vietnamese offer to reestablish relations,” Raymond Garthoff observes, impelled primarily by its early 1978 “tilt towards China” and, accordingly, toward China's Khmer Rouge ally, well before Vietnam invaded Cambodia. Pol Pot proceeded to carry out the worst atrocities of his reign, concealed by the CIA in its later demographic study, presumably because of the US connection. Unlike many European countries, the US did not abstain at the UN on the “legitimate” government of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge were expelled by the Vietnamese, but “joined China in supporting the Khmer Rouge” (Garthoff). The US backed China's invasion to “punish Vietnam,” and turned to supporting the Thai-based coalition in which the Khmer Rouge was the major military element. The US “encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot,” as Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later commented. Deng Xiaoping, a particular favorite of the Reagan-Bush Administrations, elaborated: “It is wise to force the Vietnamese to stay in Kampuchea because they will suffer more and will not be able to extend their hand to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore,” which they no doubt would have proceeded to conquer had they not been stopped in time. After helping to reconstruct Pol Pot's shattered forces, the US-China-Thailand coalition (and the West generally) lent its diplomatic support to Pol Pot; imposed an embargo on Cambodia and blocked aid from other sources, including humanitarian aid; and undermined any moves toward a negotiated settlement that did not offer the Khmer Rouge an influential role. The US even threatened Thailand with loss of trade privileges if it refused to support the Khmer Rouge, the
Far Eastern Economic Review
reported in 1989.
It was under the pressure of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council that “the Cambodians were forced...to accept the return of the Khmer Rouge,” Sihanouk pointed out in his first speech after his triumphant return to Cambodia in November 1991. A year earlier, he had informed US journalist T.D. Allman that “To save Cambodia...all you had to do [in 1979] was to let Pol Pot die. Pol Pot was dying and you brought him back to life.”
30
A more accurate rendering of
Times
-speak, then, is that Vietnam's efforts to restore relations were thwarted by the Carter Administration's turn towards China and the Khmer Rouge, that the US exploited the pretext of the invasion to punish the people of Vietnam and Cambodia as severely as possible, and that Washington refused to allow any diplomatic settlement that did not guarantee the Khmer Rouge a leading role.
By expelling this tacit US ally from Cambodia, bringing to an end atrocities that peaked after Carter's “tilt toward China” (hence toward Pol Pot), and then keeping him at bay, Vietnam “may have earned the thanks of most Cambodians,”
Globe
editor H.D.S. Greenway writes. But these actions “earned it the opprobrium of most of the rest of the world”ânotably, those parts of the world that follow US whims. But Vietnam's withdrawal from Cambodia eliminated this pretext for the embargo, leaving only Vietnam's mistreatment of us on the MIA issue. This continuing crime, US moralists in press and government explain, requires that we keep the embargo in force, thus depriving Vietnam of loans and investments from the international financial institutions that the US controls and the Europeans and Japanese, wary of stepping on the toes of their powerful and relentless ally.
31
The Pearl Harbor anniversary itself was marked by a
Washington Post
editorial noting that although Vietnam had made progress, “some MIA advocates” allege that it “is holding back remains.” “It will take considerable openness on Hanoi's part and diligent investigation on Washington's to clear up this question,” the editors sternly conclude. If the Vietnamese are willing to cooperate fully, we may allow them to join the world community, though we will never forgive them for the harm and pain they have inflicted upon us for over 40 years, any more than we can forget the Japanese infamy of just a few years earlier.
32
Turning again to the real world, it is largely US business interests that are complaining over the fanatical commitment to “bleed Vietnam”; they fear that they may be cut out of opportunities for profit by competitors abroad, that they may not get their “fair share of trade in Vietnam,” as one executive puts it. These considerations do provide some reason to rethink our stand. We might relent, the press reports, if Vietnam agrees to two years of excavations, takes steps to open our way to Laos and Cambodia, promises to turn over any remains that may ever be found, and grants us “immediate access to the Vietnamese countryside” and to military archives; as the aggrieved party, we meanwhile confine Vietnamese diplomats at the UN to the immediate vicinity, and as for military archives,...
33
“There are Vietnamese like Deputy Foreign Minister Le Mai, who âsays he understands the need of the American government to convince the American people on the MIAs',” Greenway writes. “The Vietnamese also understand that the issue of missing Americans is the single greatest barrier to lifting the American-imposed trade embargo, establishing diplomatic relations with the US, and rejoining the world community.” But, Greenway adds, “there are also Vietnamese who speak with great bitterness against what they see as America making a political issue of its own loss with a country that has 200,000 to 300,000 of its soldiers missing and unaccounted for.” One Vietnamese war veteran suggests that Americans “come back and tell us where Vietnamese are buried.” “What a task,” Greenway writes from ample direct experience as a war correspondent, “recalling long-suppressed memories of bulldozers shoveling Vietnamese corpses into pits and helicopter sling loads, with arms and legs protruding from the mesh, being carted off to some unmarked grave...”
34
Greenway deserves credit for this rare departure from the ranks, though we might take note of a few other problems that some might attribute to an agent who remains unnamed.
None of this, hardly a secret, stands in the way of allowing the US to “rejoin the world community,” or calls for
hansei
âwhether “remorse” or even “self-reflection”ânot to speak of reparations for ghastly crimes.
Other voices are too faint to penetrate our orgy of self-pity over the abuse we suffer; for example, the surgeon who carried out a delicate operation in February 1990 to remove a US-made shell from the arm of one of the many victims killed or maimed by unexploded ordnance after the fighting ended. The miserable Commies were berated with much scorn when they released maps of mines in Afghanistan so that civilians could be protected from the deadly legacy of their aggression. There were no such denunciations of the United States, for a simple reason: Washington refused to provide mine maps to civilian mine-deactivation teams in Indochina. As a Pentagon spokesman explained, “people should not live in those areas. They know the problem.” What is more, as a matter of elementary logic, no condemnation could be in order for seeding the countryside with mines or anti-personnel bomblets in “our excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence.”
35
Readers of the foreign press can hear the voice of 11-year-old Tran Viet Cuong in the city of Vinhâwhich had the misfortune of being “cursed by location,” as the
Times
thoughtfully explained (p. 333). His parents desperately want him to obtain an education, and since the town cannot afford schoolbooks, Tran must go without breakfast so that his parents can buy them (if he's lucky, his teacher will buy chalk out of a salary eked from two or three jobs). The local government also “cannot afford to repair many of the roads, hospitals and sewage drains destroyed 20 years ago by U.S. bombers,” John Stackhouse reports from the shattered city. In 1991, the children's hospital was forced to close 50 of 250 beds and to ask patients to provide medicines. Doctors perform surgical operations on a table donated by Poland, largely without equipment. At the Vinh Medical Center, where the hospital's pharmacy remains “a pile of rubble,” a doctor states the obvious: “the problems here are a consequence of the American war, and the embargo has made it worse.”
The embargo, Stackhouse notes, has “isolated Vietnam internationally, cutting it off from trade and aid flows,” blocking aid from development organizations where the US has “an effective veto,” including the Manila-based Asian Development Bank, which is prepared to lend $300 million, including funds for an irrigation project that could increase farm yields by one-third. Though Vietnam undertook the structural adjustment programs required by the official lenders well before Eastern Europe, it cannot receive any of the low-cost World Bank funds designed to ease the severe impact, thanks to the stern US veto. The result is that child deaths are two to three times higher than in Bangladesh, and the education system, “which once produced an overwhelmingly literate population,” has collapsed. Commercial banks and other donors and investors will not move until the US permits it, and foreign markets are largely closed, so there is no prospect for private sector jobs. Even a UNICEF appeal failed, because “No one wants to offend the U.S.” the director of UNICEF's Ho Chi Minh City office observes.
36
Readers of the foreign press may also hear the voices of mountain tribesmen in October 1991, as they “asked authorities for permission to shoot down a U.S. helicopter when they heard it was on the way to investigate evidence of U.S. soldiers missing in action.” “It is not difficult to uncover the source of the pent-up aggression” here, Canadian correspondent Philip Smucker reports: “It is only a matter of locating which village has had a child recently maimed or killed by a âbomblet,' a tiny bomb left hidden in the soil for the past 18 years” in a region where “carpet bombing and dioxin spraying by U.S. aircraft...devastated the forests, leaving much of the countryside looking like a mountainous moonscape perforated with craters the size of Cadillacs,” the soil “drenched with more than 200 litres [of chemical poisons] a square hectare,” so that “the number of deformed children is much higher here than in the North where there was no spraying.” In this isolated region alone, “more than 5,000 people have been injured and killed” from unexploded bombs since 1975. “I hate the man who dropped this bomb,” a peasant says “standing in front of a crater 10 times his size that is literally at his doorstep,” one of the relics of the B-52 carpet bombings that killed his wife in 1969. Another tells of his 8-year-old son, who had just been blown to pieces a few weeks earlier when he picked up a round metal object in the mud, another child's death that “will go unrecorded in the annals of the Vietnam War.”
37
Surely there is nothing here to trouble our unsullied conscience as we scrutinize the deformed minds of the perfidious Japanese and the psychic disorders that so puzzle and intrigue us. Those who have memorized the guiding doctrine of the 500-year conquest will have no difficulty perceiving the moral chasm that lies between us and the Japanese: Morality comes from the barrel of a gunâand we have the guns.