U.S., Vietnamese defense chiefs to hold historic meeting Monday

WASHINGTON -- Symbolism and substance blend when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld meets Monday with his Vietnamese counterpart, the first defense minister from the communist country to visit the Pentagon since the war's end in 1975.

Some 30 years after America's defeat in Vietnam, Pham Van Tra is expected to talk with Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about lingering problems from the war and how the countries can become allies in the fight against terrorism.

"It's symbolic of a new stage in Vietnamese-American relations," which have been broadening slowly over the years, said Charles Morrison, president of the East-West Center in Honolulu.

The United States and communist Vietnam had no formal relations and limited contacts in the two decades after the last American combat troops left South Vietnam in 1973.

The first President Bush initiated cooperation in such areas as accounting for Americans missing in action. President Clinton lifted the trade embargo in 1994 and the next year established diplomatic relations.

Over time, Vietnam and the United States have developed trade ties and discussed issues such as U.S. misgivings about Vietnam's human rights record.

Slow pace

Recent developments in the relationship include last month's aviation agreement to begin direct fights between the two countries. A U.S. Navy ship will visit Ho Chi Minh City this month in the first such port call since the war.

"There's a pace in this thing," said Fred Brown, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer who spent decades in Asia and now is with Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. "It's like a dance -- one step forward, one step to the side, one step back, etc."

And it's slow.

The Pentagon visit has been especially long in coming. It reciprocates one to Hanoi more than 3 1/2 years ago by Clinton's defense secretary, William Cohen.

"This visit is a symbol that Vietnam and the United States are normalizing across a whole spectrum of activities -- economic, political," Morrison said. "This brings it into the military sphere, which probably was the most sensitive area of all."

Some 58,000 U.S. troops and 3 million Vietnamese military and civilians died in what the Vietnamese call the American War. The decade-long U.S. intervention in Vietnam's internal conflict caused deep divisions in American society.

What the United States wants most now from Vietnam, analysts say, is more cooperation in promoting security and stability in its part of Asia, where terrorism is a problem.

Vietnam sees the chance to exploit that, analysts said. Like other countries, Vietnam understands the value of better ties with the world's last remaining superpower.

Tra said his country will ask the United States to play a bigger role in helping those suffering from exposure to Agent Orange.

The Vietnamese defense chief also planned to ask the Bush administration to do more to help clear unexploded ordnance that continues to kill and maim dozens of people every year.

Tra, who also will meet with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, said he is prepared to discuss Vietnam's human rights record.

He said he will talk about MIAs, too. Since the end of the war, the United States has accounted for more than 700 Americans missing from the fighting, which also spread into Laos and Cambodia. More than 1,800 still are missing.

The Pentagon announced plans in September to hire retired senior Vietnamese intelligence officers to search classified Vietnamese government files, seeking to determine the fate of any American servicemen who may have been held captive after the war.

The unusual, if not unprecedented, arrangement has been approved by Vietnam and should get started within months.

Even with the two countries' outstanding issues, there are those who view closer U.S-Vietnam relations as relatively inconsequential in the scheme of things -- "a third-rank issue," said Johns Hopkins' Brown.

"This is not a fuzzy and warm relationship," he said. "It's practical."

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On the Net:

Library of Congress Vietnam country study: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/vntoc.html