Obama weighs selling U.S. arms to Hanoi in bitter irony for Vietnam veterans
In a move that is raising concerns among some Vietnam War veterans, President Obama will discuss selling more U.S. arms to Hanoi during his visit to Vietnam that began Sunday night.
Top White House advisers said Mr. Obama hasn’t made a decision whether to lift the partial U.S. embargo on sending military equipment to Vietnam, where more than 58,200 U.S. soldiers were killed before the fall of Saigon in 1975. But the administration sees advantages in easing the embargo, both as a warning to expansionist China and as leverage to compel the communist regime in Hanoi to improve its record on human rights.
“We are thinking through how our evolving security cooperation [is] going to look moving forward,” said White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. “They regularly raise this issue with us. We are looking at, of course, how our broader relationship is evolving, including our continued commitment to support human rights in Vietnam.”
The notion of selling more lethal weaponry to Vietnam is a bitter irony to some veterans of the war and to some Vietnamese-Americans who fled the communists.
“They are still a communist country,” said retired Army Maj. Wulf Linden, a Georgia resident who served two tours in Vietnam. “If it’s the cream of our crop [of weapons systems], obviously that would be a bad mistake. It would be nice if we’re not selling to a regime that’s a documented communist regime. That’s my concern.”
Wild Thing’s comment.…………
This just seems so very wrong to me.
This is his way of slapping the face of Vietnam Veterans.