Vietnam's 'Dark Years'
John Kerry was wrong. The Vietnamese do understand democracy.

BY BRENDAN MINITER
Friday, June 22, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

In March, Le Quoc Quan returned to his native Vietnam after finishing a fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. He was promptly arrested and charged with planning to overthrow the government. The charges make sense in the communist country: His fellowship focused on how to peacefully spread democracy. Under pressure from the U.S. he was released on Saturday.

Today, President Bush will meet with the president of Vietnam, Nguyen Van Dai, at the White House. High on the agenda will be the Southeast Asian nation's record on human rights. America's military efforts to stop the communist takeover of South Vietnam ended in defeat more than 30 years ago. The result was what many Vietnamese call the "dark years," a period of oppression and economic stagnation that lasted until the mid-1980s. But now something interesting is happening. America is once again waging a campaign for freedom in Vietnam, only this time with "soft power" and bipartisan support.

In recent weeks President Bush met with Vietnamese human rights advocates. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself met with Diem Do, chairman of the Vietnam Reform Party, this week. Other Democrats have spoken out too, including former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who called for Mr. Quan's release earlier this year.

In 1971, John Kerry told a Senate committee that "We found [in Vietnam that] most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy." Now it is accepted on both sides of the aisle that the Vietnamese desire and deserve political freedom. There is bipartisan recognition that freedom is a universal human aspiration.

But, of course, this consensus is flourishing even as the parties are sharply divided over another war. And if abandoned now, Iraq would almost certainly be doomed to its own dark years, just as Vietnam was. That's a cost many Americans and the Democratic Party's leadership seem willing to incur, notwithstanding that with decades of hindsight, a decision to leave Iraq will likely haunt this nation.

Back in 1995, President Bill Clinton demonstrated remarkable foresight when it came to Vietnam. He opened an American embassy in Hanoi that year, would later become the first post-war president to visit the country, and unleashed what wasn't possible before--a torrent of trade. Today trade stands at $9.7 billion a year between the U.S. and Vietnam, more than a five-fold increase since Mr. Clinton left office. The U.S. has also grown to be the eighth largest investor in Vietnam, with more than 1,000 American businesses operating there.

In the coming years, Vietnam will likely become an even stronger trading partner. It joined the World Trade Organization in January and is now looking to outfit its national airline with a fleet of Boeing planes capable of making nonstop flights to the U.S. And as the economy grows, there will likely be more pressure to grant economic and political freedoms.

Increasing such pressure is in America's national interest. The U.S. will need new allies in Asia to help manage China and isolate North Korea. But going back to Vietnam isn't entirely about finding new markets or old-fashion geopolitical positioning. In 2000, Sen. John McCain demonstrated as much in making an emotional return trip to the country that had imprisoned and tortured him for more than five years. Many other veterans of the war have made similar trips back. For Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat who represents a large Vietnamese-American community in Orange County, Calif., it's not about economics either. She sees the old flag of South Vietnam flown by her constituents and knows that there is still a moral fight that needs to be won. She often delivers speeches about Vietnam's human rights record and points out that Mr. Quan isn't the only example of recent abuse. To cite just one more, Father Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest in Vietnam, was recently sentenced to eight years in prison.

Perhaps Americans need the distance of a few decades to see the full cost of leaving a battlefield uncontested to an oppressive ideology. Or perhaps the nation needs to spend a few decades with those who were able to flee that ideology. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, there was a massive outpouring of refugees, many of whom ended up in the U.S. Today this country is home to the largest community of ethnic Vietnamese--1.1 million--outside of Vietnam itself. Mr. Quan saw this as evidence that this nation is a beacon of freedom for the 80 million people who live in Vietnam now.

Thirty years on, will we be haunted by a similar history in the case of Iraq? That will depend on how many on Capitol Hill remember what we left behind in Vietnam and resolve not to leave something similar behind again. In the coming months, we'll likely see who has learned from our history and who seems to want to repeat it.

Ellie