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325 Conclusion Sowing Dragon’s Teeth When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, the men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength, and if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the state will not be equal to the strain. Never forget: when your weapons are dulled, your ardor dampened, your strength exhausted, and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue. —Sun Tzu, The Art of War In the White House, the future rapidly becomes the past; and delay is itself a decision. —Theodore Sorensen in Nation’s Business (1963) From the tale of Cadmus in Greek mythology we get one of the first lessons about the dangers of blowback, a modern term for a timeless phenomenon— actions that provoke calamitous, although entirely unintended, consequences. Cadmus, a Phoenician prince, sent some of his men to draw water from the spring of Ares, the god of war. When they failed to return, he sent more men and then more men, until none remained. He then went to the spring himself, where he saw the dragon lying by the water, sluggish from his recent meal. Taking advantage of the situation, Cadmus slew the dragon by leaping directly into its mouth and killing it from within its jaws. The goddess Athena told him that, if he sowed half the dragon’s teeth in the earth, his men would be replaced. Dutifully following her instructions, Cadmus planted the teeth. He did not expect the results. From the ground emerged ferocious warriors who attacked everything—and everyone—in sight. Athena advised Cadmus to strike one of 326 Vietnam’s Second Front them with a stone. He complied, and the warriors, assuming that they had been assaulted by one of the others, turned against each other. The band of sparti, as they were known, nearly destroyed themselves in the ensuing fratricidal bloodbath ; the survivors became Cadmus’s most loyal supporters when he founded the city of Thebes. In the end, Ares forced Cadmus to serve eight years of penance for killing his dragon before being released to return home. Later, the remainder of the dragon’s teeth fell into the possession of the hero Jason, whose experience paralleled that of Cadmus almost exactly. Like Cadmus and Jason, three successive administrations and members of Congress reaped what they sowed in Vietnam. They sent increasing numbers of troops to Southeast Asia, fought among themselves politically, and served penance to the gods of war, although none of the presidents lasted eight years. In sowing the proverbial dragon’s teeth, they precipitated an endless national debate that destroyed two presidencies, killed and maimed millions of Asians and Americans, wreaked incalculable harm on the fabric of culture and society in both nations, and fundamentally damaged and permanently altered the premises of politics and diplomacy in the United States. The war was fought on two fronts, with the actions in Southeast Asia invariably affecting the political battlefield at home, and vice versa. Hoping to save democracy on two fronts from the march of communism, they nearly destroyed it with their own “march of folly.”1 Such is the story of domestic politics and the Republican Party during the Vietnam conflict, a history marred by evasions, equivocations, delays, and postponements of critical decisions, actions and inactions that produced the most terrible of unintended consequences. The research in the preceding chapters suggests a number of conclusions about the centrality of domestic political considerations as they relate to the making and implementation of U.S. foreign policy, the significant contributions of members of the Republican Party to the policymaking process during the war, and the roles played by Congress and the three presidents of this period. The historian David Skidmore argues, “Policy makers do not have the luxury of ignoring domestic political imperatives, even when these imperatives work against otherwise sound policies.”2 Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama have pursued foreign policies based on domestic political calculations . In doing so, they frequently subordinated the national interest to their own partisan or personal interests. Political expediency often trumped national security as presidents maneuvered to win reelection, boost their standings in opinion polls, or manipulate public and congressional opinion. The 1998 film Wag the Dog may have been a fictionalized account of...

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