The photo in the Sunday paper caught my eye. It was of Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was reviewing a military honor guard. In Ho Chi Minh City.
It was a reminder that we do, indeed, have normalized relations with Vietnam, a country we’ve been to war with. A war that cost us nearly 60,000 American lives and generationally divided a nation.
Gen. Dempsey was there to grease the skids for the ending of the lethal weapons embargo that is still on the books. Seems that Vietnam might be able to help us out in offsetting the power of China. Besides, those could be weapons they would no longer need to buy from the Russians.
Meanwhile, there’s that other embargo that periodically makes the news involving a near-by country we’ve only been to Cold War with–and counterproductively hurts us economically and geopolitically.
The irony still abounds.