PNTR for Vietnam...

Photo above: the view from atop the Saigon Palace Hotel; I snapped this photo a couple of weeks ago just before jumping in the pool...


http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/
news_theswamp/2006/12/us_pacts_with_i.html

Excerpts on Vietnam only...



Originally posted: December 9, 2006
U.S. deals with India, Vietnam

Posted by Mark Silva at 10 am and updated at 12:30 pm CST

In a year marred by colossal failures of diplomacy, and at a juncture when President Bush is ceding control of Congress to the Democrats, the outgoing Republican-run Congress has handed Bush two going-away presents that represent dramatic diplomatic pivots with two erstwhile adversaries of the United States.

Congress early today approved legislation enabling the U.S. to assist India in the development of its civilian nuclear energy program – a controversial deal which Bush negotiated with the prime minister of India during a trip to New Delhi in March. And Congress has approved Permanent Normal Trade Relations with Vietnam, which Bush had hoped to deliver on his visit to Hanoi last month.

With both agreements, the U.S. effectively is bolstering the economies of two fast-growing Asian economies that serve as political counterweights to the dominance of the booming economy – and military aspirations – of China. And with both, the U.S. is setting aside history – having cut off support for India after nuclear testing in the late 1990s which provoked Pakistan to test its own device and threatened a regional conflagration, and having retreated from Vietnam in 1975 after losing a costly war with the Communist regime there.

"You know, sometimes it's hard to get rid of history,'' Bush said in India earlier this year, standing alongside Prime Minister Mammohan Singh. "Short-term history shows that the United States and India were divided… The relationship is changing dramatically.Part of that change is going to be how to deal with the nuclear issue.''

....In Vietnam, the U.S. sees another new market for its own goods in a nation where nearly 60,000 American soldiers died – and one million Vietnamese died – during a war that raged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Former President Clinton, the first American president to visit Vietnam since the war, restored diplomatic relations with the Communist-run regime in 1995 and established a trade treaty in 2000 as he traveled to Hanoi, and also Ho Chi Minh City, to acknowledge a new relationship.

Bush retraced those steps just before Thanksgiving, with a swing through Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, posing for photographs before a massive bust of Ho Chi Minh, the late Vietnamese nationalist who died in 1969 and is enshrined in a tomb in Hanoi modeled after Lenin's.

The granting of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with Vietnam "marks a significant step forward in the process of normalizing relations with Vietnam and will benefit both our nations,'' Bush said today. "This designation will advance our trade and investment relations with Vietnam and ensure that the United States shares in the economic benefits generated by Vietnam's interests… The American people welcome the remarkable transformation and economic progress in Vietnam, and we will continue to work together to strengthen our ties.''