Prisoners out of our past - failure of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to address the real issues of missing US soldiers from the Vietnamese conflict - Editorial

National Review, Feb 1, 1993

THE SENATE Select Committee on POWMIA Affairs has disgorged its final report--or rather, a jumble of separate opinions. They will please no one. The majority's conclusions about the unlikelihood of any POWs being still alive will displease many who (perhaps wrongly) continue to hold onto hope; the report's many criticisms of U.S. Government incompetence over the years will only fuel the emotions the Committee was established to dampen.

The more insidious part of Chairman John Kerry's version of events is his masterpiece of liberal revisionism about the Vietnam War. Mr. Kerry, an authentic hero in that war, turned into an anti-war activist in 1971 and, as such, contributed to the pressures which undercut U.S. negotiating leverage. In the 1973 Paris Agreement the North Vietnamese committed themselves in very precise terms to see to the freeing of all POWs in Indochina and to account for all MIAs. They failed utterly to live up to those obligations. Their treachery was unwittingly encouraged by those in the U.S. Congress who prohibited any U.S. military action to enforce the Agreement and strangled South Vietnamese resistance to a Communist takeover.

On May 31, 1973, for example, when the Democratic Senate was legislating an unconditional unilateral halt to U.S. military actions, Senator Robert Dole offered an amendment to condition the halt on Hanoi's compliance with its commitment on our POWs and MIAs. The Dole Amendment was soundly defeated, 56 to 25. Yet the Kerry report of 1993 would have it that the problems with North Vietnamese behavior were due to failures by U.S. negotiators-men who were struggling to pin the North Vietnamese down while Mr. Kerry and his ilk were pulling the rug out from under them at every turn. The report is a blatant cover-up of the role of Congress and the anti-war movement in creating, or at the very least prolonging, the MIA problem. For anti-war Democrats to suggest, twenty years later, that Nixon and Kissinger weren't tough enough on Hanoi is hypocrisy of nauseating proportions.