In today's Roll Call, retired Brig. Gen. John Adams and David Jones, a former fundraiser for Congressman Charlie Rangel of New York and now lobbyist for Vigilant Worldwide -- whose clients seek to do business with Cuba's dictatorship -- argue in favor of unilaterally lifting sanctions towards the Castro regime.
However, they do so by making the following odd analogy:
U.S. reconciliation with Germany took about a decade after that terrible war introduced words such as "genocide" and "Holocaust" into the global vocabulary and claimed the lives of more than 400,000 U.S. military personnel.
By helping Germany transition from occupation to sovereignty, we kept the peace in Europe and established a beachhead against expansionary communism that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification of the two Germanys just one year later.
U.S. reconciliation with Vietnam took 20 years after Americans were stunned by news footage of men and women clinging to helicopters making their flight to freedom from rooftops in Saigon. In an act of political foresight, President Bill Clinton, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and then-Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) skillfully navigated the emotional wreckage left by that war and its 58,000-plus U.S. casualties and restored diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995.
This not only produced an invaluable economic and diplomatic presence for our nation in Southeast Asia, but enabled Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to visit Hanoi in July to commemorate the 15th anniversary of normalization and to express our concern about the human rights record of our former adversary on its own soil.
If we can reconcile with Germany and Vietnam, why not with our neighbor Cuba?
Let's help them put their concern to rest.
Undoubtedly, the U.S. should (and will) quickly reconcile with a post-Castro democratic Cuba, as it did with a post-Hitler democratic Germany.
However, they should ask themselves the inverse question:
Should the U.S. have reconciled with Hitler's Germany?
Of course not.
As for Vietnam, despite Secretary Clinton's commendable remarks regarding that regime's human rights atrocities, our policy of unfettered business ties has done nothing to improve the plight of Vietnam's courageous pro-democracy movement -- to the contrary, it has helped condemn it to secondary obscurity.
We believe our Cuban neighbors deserve better.
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