Of US President Bill Clinton's many objectives in visiting Vietnam, a key one is to try to dispel the ugly images of the Vietnam War and to offer Americans a new vision of the country that defeated them.
For many Americans, the Vietnam war is summarized by a few awful pictures: a Vietnamese girl burned by napalm running naked and screaming down a village road or helicopters packed to the gills as they abandoned Saigon in 1975.
PHOTO: AFP
Clinton, the first US president to visit Vietnam since the war ended a quarter century ago, has sought to bring to light another reality: a burgeoning country of people most of whom are too young to remember the conflict.
"Finally, America is coming to see Vietnam as your people have asked for years -- as a country, not a war," he told student's at Hanoi University on Friday in an unprecedented live televised address to the Vietnamese people.
Clinton has himself tried to get a taste of Vietnam, spending close to an hour in a tiny Hanoi art gallery on Saturday and emerging to cries of wonder and delight from throngs of Vietnamese packed into a narrow shopping street.
"The old images of the war are never going to disappear. They are part of our history and should not disappear," said Mitchell Hall, a professor of history at Central Michigan University.
"But just as we have been able to shed our wartime attitudes toward Great Britain, Mexico, Germany and Japan, I think it is also possible and I would argue necessary for us to move beyond our wartime attitude toward Vietnam," he said.
Clinton, who opposed and avoided the Vietnam War, has taken dramatic steps to reconcile with the country, ending the punitive US trade embargo in 1994 and normalizing ties a year later.
Historians and political analysts said that, to persuade the American people to support the policy, he needed to try to exorcise the war's demons from their minds.
"One of the difficulties is that the average [American] has no current perception of Vietnam," said Jeff Kaplan, an international affairs fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
"You had the war ... but so far there hasn't been any new engagement to replace those images from the past," he added.
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