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PEACE IS AT HAND ROADMAPS, ROADBLOCKS, AND ONE-WAY STREETS, 1990–1995 Throughout the Gulf War of 1990–1991, the administration of George H. W. Bush made clear that the United States was not simply at war with Iraq; it was at war with the memory of the war in Vietnam . While much of this rhetoric was to be expected—all U.S. military adventures since 1975 had been viewed though the lens of the Vietnam War—the Bush White House seemed almost singularly obsessed with “curing” what had become known as America’s Vietnam “syndrome.”1 In his inaugural address three years earlier, Bush became only the second U.S. president ever to use the word “Vietnam” in that forum, declaring, “the final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.”2 On November 30, with over 300,000 American troops already assembled in the Persian Gulf region, Bush assured the nation that this war would “not be another Vietnam.” After the end of hostilities, the president famously declared, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”3 In his testimony to a Senate panel the following month, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Solomon opened by telling the committee, “Let me begin by saying the war is over. As the President has said, our Vietnam syndrome is behind us.”4 It was unclear to which war the secretary was referring; for the White House, the war with Vietnam and the war with Iraq had become one and the same. Mary McGrory pointed out in her Washington Post column shortly after the end of the Gulf War that if Bush wished to “formalize the defeat of the ‘Vietnam syndrome,’” he could begin by normalizing relations with the nation of Vietnam, and certainly by lifting the trade embargo that was nearing its fifteenth anniversary. As McGrory noted, America was ready for such a step forward. The president was enjoying a 90 percent approval rating at the time, and polls showed that, although Americans were less infive peace is at hand 163 clined to support full recognition of Vietnam, 70 percent favored lifting the embargo.5 With the cold war nearly over, the syndrome apparently cured, nearly all of the Vietnamese troops gone from Cambodia (an estimated five thousand “advisors” remained at the time), continued progress being made on the POW/MIA issue as a result of the Vessey Mission, and American business interests clamoring for access to the Vietnamese market, the time certainly appeared right to end the sanctions program.6 Although many policymakers during this period became fond of describing the transition of “Vietnam” in American culture from signifying a war to referring to a nation, this only masks the construction that was most important to the shift in policy: Vietnam as market. Ironically, this final shift in the way in which Americans talked, wrote, and debated about Vietnam returned U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia to where it had been fifty years earlier at the dawn of the cold war, when the American architects of the postwar world sought to develop the region as a market in raw materials , labor, and finished consumer goods, tied to Japan. By the end of the twentieth century Vietnam would come nearly full circle in the designs of the United States: from market to nation to war to cultural construct, and back, finally, to market. the “roadmap” On the heels of its victory in the Gulf, the Bush administration was moving forward with normalization plans in the spring of 1991. At the United Nations on April 9, Solomon met with Vietnamese diplomat Trinh Xuan Lang, presenting him with the Bush administration’s four-step “roadmap” to gradually normalized relations. The steps all hinged upon a final settlement in Cambodia and Vietnamese “cooperation” on the POW/MIA issue. Phase one consisted of a final peace agreement with Cambodia and accelerated progress on the POW/MIA issue, in exchange for the easing of U.S. travel restrictions on American citizens. Phase two included a lasting Cambodian ceasefire and more progress on POW/MIAs, in exchange for a partial lifting of the American trade embargo. In phase three, to be completed after a United Nations peacekeeping force had been in Cambodia for at least six months, there would be continued progress on the POW/MIA issue, a full end to the American embargo, the establishment of diplomatic offices in each country...

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