Modern Vietnam is proof U.S. might can't remake nations

By Daniel Sneider

IMAGES of the Vietnam War seem to be flooding into our lives lately. Footage of a young naval Lt. John Kerry, in fatigues, carrying an M-16, patrolling the Mekong Delta. President Bush, in an eerie echo of a previous president from Texas, vowing never to retreat in the face of aggression.
Yet sitting recently in the Cafe Au Lac on a tree-lined street in Hanoi's old quarter, opposite the elegantly restored French- era Hotel Metropole, it was hard to remember why we fought that war.

In the charged rhetoric of the Cold War, we were told the United States was confronting "the deepening shadow of communist China' that allegedly stood behind Vietnam. Dominoes would topple across Asia if Vietnam fell, and millions would lose their freedom.

In a famous speech in April 1965, Lyndon Baines Johnson evoked the metaphor of appeasement at Munich.

"The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next.'

When I first visited Vietnam in 1981, there were reminders of that ideological struggle. Hanoi was the austere and exhausted capital of a communist state, still digesting its victory in the long-fought Vietnamese civil war. The city was filled with the rubbery hum of bicycles from dawn till night. A handful of Swedish aid workers and Eastern European comrades occupied the shabby rooms of the old Metropole. Sandbagged anti- aircraft batteries still surrounded the airport.

Little of that remains. Today the Vietnamese capital is buzzing with people doing business from street vendors to the owners of fashion boutiques. The avenues of this charming city are clogged with puttering motor scooters, weaving around the growing number of late- model sedans. Outside the city, industrial parks spring up like rice shoots, filled with assembly plants with names like Canon and Samsung.

Vietnam's communist rulers now plot ways to encourage foreign investors and keep growth rates booming. The Vietnamese defense minister eagerly walked the halls of the Pentagon some months ago. And coming later this year direct flights from San Francisco to Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon is called.

America's national interests could be well served by Vietnam. It is a growing economic partner, a force for stability and regional cooperation in Southeast Asia. Rather than the first domino, Vietnam serves as a counter-balance to the rising power of communist China.

Certainly Vietnam does not embody American values. The communists, like their cousins in China, cling to a monopoly on political power, buying time for their rule by opening the doors of economic freedom. Human rights are abused and dissidence often rewarded with repression. Nor is it easy to forget the hundreds of thousands who greatly suffered, including death, in the aftermath of the communist victory over the South.

But what we see today is evidence that neither the American intervention nor the triumph of the communists could really alter the character of this nation. It remains one of Asia's most entrepreneurial, proud, hard-working and creative cultures.

Today, the rhetoric surrounding the decision to invade Iraq seems torn from the pages of the Vietnam book. The consequences of a failure to intervene were equally overdrawn. And the damage is no less consequential not so much in the number of lives lost but in the loss of American influence and the division at home.

Iraq, like Vietnam, is proving to be a nation with an indelible character shaped by its own history and culture. Even a military victory of the type that eluded us in Vietnam will not change that. In 10 or 20 years, if we are lucky, Iraq will resemble the other Arab states that surround it. At the worst, our intervention will yield a fragmented, failed state or a bastion of Islamic radicalism.

If we are going to spend the next months reliving Vietnam, let us finally grasp the lesson of imperial hubris taught to us in that Southeast Asian land. Despite the might the United States commands, it cannot, in the end, use that power to remake other nations.

Daniel Sneider is foreign affairs columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Readers may write to him at: San Jose Mercury News, 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, Calif. 95190-0001, or e- mail him at dsneidermercurynews.com .

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Ellie