Bush Praises Vietnam’s Rise
November 18, 2006
By DAVID E. SANGER and HELENE COOPER
nytimes.com
HANOI, Vietnam, Saturday, Nov. 18 — President Bush, visiting a country that forced the United States into a humiliating withdrawal three decades ago, declared Friday that Vietnam’s transition to a modern, growing economy gave him hope about what could be rebuilt from the ruins of Iraq. But he added that the lesson he drew from the bitter American experience here was that “we’ll succeed unless we quit.”
After lunch here with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, Mr. Bush said, “We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while.”
Carefully avoiding any direct mention of how the Vietnam War ended for the United States, Mr. Bush instead focused on the deepening — if still wary — economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries.
“History has a long march to it,” Mr. Bush said in response to a question about how he felt about arriving here, the second American president to visit since the war’s end. “Societies change and relationships can constantly be altered to the good.”
During an early meeting on Saturday, President Bush was unable to get President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea to agree to intercept ships suspected of carrying supplies for North Korea’s nuclear program. American officials have been trying to get South Korea to fully carry out United Nations sanctions imposed on North Korea after the North conducted a nuclear test in October.
While Mr. Roh said he supported “the principles” of the intercept program, he continued to decline to take part in the voluntary program to stop ships suspected of carrying weapons. American officials who witnessed the session said that they believed that if hard intelligence emerged of a North Korean shipment, the South Koreans would be cooperative, but so far there has been no test of the South Koreans’ willingness to toughen its sanctions. Mr. Roh’s tenuous hold on Parliament has given him little room to join in tough sanctions, much less in active interception.
The tension between Mr. Bush and Mr. Roh has been palpable for more than a year, and the two men went out of their way Saturday to stick to broad generalities about the need to eliminate nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, because both knew that any discussion of the specifics would reveal the large gap between the allies.
White House officials knew that Mr. Bush’s arrival, for an economic summit meeting that is to start Saturday, would prompt all kinds of comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, and Mr. Bush seemed determined not to get drawn into that discussion. Instead he talked about modern Vietnam as a place that is putting its economic future in order, an example of “how people can reconcile and move beyond past differences.”
Still, the day was filled with jarring imagery. When Mr. Bush spoke of driving by the lake where Senator John McCain’s plane crashed nearly 40 years ago, he focused less on Mr. McCain’s imprisonment than on the circumstances of his capture.
“He was, literally, saved, in one way, by the people pulling him out,” Mr. Bush said. He noted that the children of Vietnam’s prime minister had been educated in the United States.
But maintaining a positive tone required the president to say little, at least in public, about one-party Communist Party rule here or the treatment of dissidents. Nor did he try to argue that promoting economic ties with Vietnam would gradually loosen the party’s grip. That was the argument that President Clinton made for engagement with China in the 1990s and with Vietnam when he visited six years ago.
But it was the Iraq comparisons that were the most difficult, because they required Mr. Bush to argue two seemingly contradictory threads: that Vietnam turned out well despite America’s withdrawal, but that the situation in Iraq was so much more complicated that retreat was not an option.
“The Maliki government is going to make it unless the coalition leaves before they have a chance to make it,” he said of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Turning to Mr. Howard, who sent Australian troops early into the Iraq conflict, he said, “And that’s why I assured the prime minister we’ll get the job done.”
In their first trip out of the country since Republicans lost the House and the Senate last week, Mr. Bush and his top aides have found themselves on the defensive, parrying questions about whether Mr. Bush is still in charge back home. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an interview on CNBC in Hanoi on Friday, characterized the election results as “not at all unusual.”
“I would hope that people would realize the United States of course is a great democracy and it goes through these changes in government actually fairly frequently,” Ms. Rice said. “Ronald Reagan lost the Senate in his sixth year. It’s not at all unusual for presidents to lose seats in Congress in their sixth year. But they are then still president of the United States.”
Administration officials searching for a bright light in American foreign policy were able to seize on two: the Senate’s passage of a nuclear deal with India and a United Nations-brokered pact in which Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, agreed in principle to allow a joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force into the war-stricken Darfur region.
Mr. Bashir’s earlier resistance vexed the Bush administration, which for months had been leaning on Sudanese officials to accept a United Nations force, but to no avail. It remains unclear what exactly changed his mind, and two major issues remain to be worked out: the number of troops and how the commander will be selected.
Still, Ms. Rice said, “I think it certainly is a real opportunity to resolve what is an extremely difficult problem and to get back on a road where innocent people can be protected and the Sudanese government has a chance to make right with the international system.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company |
