Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post
Newsgroups: americast.wpost
From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com
Organization: American Cybercasting
Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com
Subject: MIA Disclosures=
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 92 04:42:49 EST
Message-ID: <9.1992Nov24.044249@AmeriCast.com>
Lines: 47

MIA Disclosures=

 THERE IS a bittersweet quality to Vietnam's latest disclosures
of personal materials taken from American MIAs and of its own of-
ficial photographs and files on them. Americans can be deeply
pleased by Hanoi's new cooperation in the nearly 20-year search
for information bearing on the 2,265 Americans still listed as
unaccounted for. But it is sobering to consider that presumably
Hanoi has possessed these articles and documents for years and
that it could have turned them over at any time during the long
stretch when it was saying it had nothing further to impart.

 These disclosures create their own embarrassments. Not to be
ungracious, but the fact is that everyone now knows that a cer-
tain number of the American MIA families were strung along and
deprived of what comfort the earlier provision of information
might have brought. Everyone also knows that the disclosures by
which the Vietnamese government now moves to repair its interna-
tional position call into question its good faith in the past.
This is a difficult but necessary hurdle to overcome as the two
governments move toward a more normal relationship.

  Vietnam's readiness to cooperate on MIAs has been explained as
a response to an urgent national need to break the economic em-
bargo imposed by the United States. But that need has been urgent
for years. Every day that Hanoi delayed in resolving the MIA im-
passe cut across this supposedly overriding need. It withheld
when it was in its evident interest to divulge and when it knew
that there would be a cost to tardy divulgence. Its record does
not make it easy for American supporters of early normalization
to claim that Vietnam has always done its full share.

  Still, there is no good reason to allow normalization, a gen-
eration in the coming, to be hung up indefinitely on a suspicion
- inevitably an ineradicable suspicion - that Hanoi is still
holding back. At a certain point a national judgment has to be
made to move on. The forthcoming report of the Senate MIA commit-
tee should contribute to this judgment.

02:06 11-24C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor-
poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)