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SQUEEZE LAOS in its more populous western provinces. Communist forces mounted an offensive on the Plain of Jars more than two weeks ago, began to surround Luangprabang, the royal capital, and maintained pressure on Sam Thong and Long Cheng, headquarters of the CIA-backed army of Meo tribesmen.
There was very little that Laos' politically astute Premier, Prince Souvanna Phouma, could do about last week's events. Largely as a morale-boosting gesture, he declared a state of emergency. He also issued a pro-forma demand that all foreign troops be withdrawn from Laotian soil—while taking care to blame Hanoi for having pioneered the "illegal route of access and infiltration known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail" years ago. So as not to trigger a Communist stampede into western Laos—an event that would surely shatter Souvanna's already fragile relations with powerful Laotian rightists—the allies seemed ready to set some undeclared limits on Lam Son operations. There would be no strikes north of the 17th parallel, which forms the border between the two Viet Nams, or west of Route 23, which runs north-south halfway across the Laotian panhandle. It also seemed likely that the ARVN would be pulled out before the April monsoons.
In general, however, the great ARVN invasion was greeted with yawns in the war-weary capital of Vientiane. On assault day, the North Vietnamese embassy closed its gates at 5 p.m. as usual. When the Buddhist festival of Makhabovxa came up three days later, the entire city of 150,000 shut down—including Vientiane's three newspapers, none of which had yet got around to reporting news of the invasion.
New Yalu? Among Hanoi's backers, Lam Son stirred a predictable frenzy but no definite response. The operation also stirred grave fears on Souvanna Phouma's part. What if the invasion, like MacArthur's drive to the Yalu in Korea, alarmed Peking enough to send Chinese troops into the war? Last week Nixon sought to salve Peking by emphasizing that the Laotian thrust posed "no threat" to China.
In Saigon, however, Vice Premier Ky addressed a group of South Vietnamese pilots and suggested that ARVN might "have to cross to the other side of the Ben Hai River" and hit the North Vietnamese on their own ground. Ky's offhanded talk, one Washington official shrugged, "keeps the enemy worried, and that's what we want."
All along, Nixon had been far less concerned with foreign reaction to the Laos venture than with the response at home. Five days before the invasion, when the President and half a dozen top advisers met to discuss the go/no-go decision, the domestic impact was uppermost in Nixon's thoughts. The State Department was particularly concerned about rousing dormant peace groups.
At one point during his deliberations, the President said: "There are 18 reasons not to do it and two reasons to do it." But the two positive reasons were too compelling to ignore, he decided. "I might make the wrong decision for the right reasons, but I'll be damned if I'm going to make the wrong decision for the wrong reasons." All that mattered, Nixon continued, was the future of the war. He would simply have to take his chances with the home front.