CONFLICT ITS MANAGEMENT AND RESOLUTION

AIM- TO UNDERSTAND CONFLICTS ITS MANAGEM ENT OF RESOLUTION

THROUGH A CASE STUDY APPROACH.

Basic concept

The word peace‘ is derived from the original Latin word ‘pax‘, which means a pact, a control or
an agreement to end war or any dispute and conflict between two people, two nations or two
antagonistic groups of people. According to the American military history, the word peace
essentially means ―the absence of war. Therefore, by militaries views, they fight wars to win the
peace, or they use force to maintain peace. In military paradigms, peace is seen as an ultimate or
ideal goal rather than a means to an end. Historically and politically considering in accordance
with the American military history‘s point of view, it is understood as to why peace is mostly
defined as an absence of war. This is because in the history of human society, wars of various
kinds were fought. Whenever wars occur, people need peace and ask for peace. Peace that people
needed and asked for is the state of the absence of wars, the state of having no fights. However,
many peace scholars do not agree with giving an emphasis on peace in the sense of an absence of
war only. Peace, in their opinions, is something more meaningful, valuable and important than
that.

According to Albert Einstein‘s view, peace is not only an absence of war, but it means or includes
the presence of justice, law, order or government in the society as he said -Peace is not merely the
absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order – in short, of government.

Martin Luther King, Jr., a famous human rights activist is the one who was not satisfied with the
definition of peace focusing only on the absence of the unhappy situations. In his view, peace must
include justice in society too as in his saying ―True peace is not merely the absence of tension: It
is the presence of justice. His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, said ―Peace, in the sense of the
absence of war is of little value…peace can only last where human rights are respected, where
people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. From his point, we can say that peace

1
means respect for human rights, well-being of people and freedom of individuals and nations.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), one of the famous philosophers in second half of 17th century gave
his point of view on peace that peace was not an absence of war it was a virtue, a state of mind, a
disposition for benevolence, confidence and justice. He gave importance to a virtue and a state of
mind. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) emphasized peace in the sense of a state of mind. Here is his
view ―Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity
of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come
only to peaceful people. According to Johan Gultung, Norwegian peace scholar, the term peace
‘and violence ‘are linked. Peace is the absence of violence and should be used as the social goal.8
Gultung further stated that like a coin peace has two sides: negative peace and positive peace.
Negative peace is the absence of personal violence; positive peace is an absence of structural
violence or social justice.

PSYCHOLOGY OF PEACE

Psychologists have been interested in psychological aspects of war and peace since the beginning
of modern psychology. Early in the twentieth century, William James challenged the overly
simplistic and misguided view that war was an inevitable result of human nature (James, 1910).
He also cautioned about the allure of the military in the military-industrial-university complex.
Military service emphasizes duty, conformity, loyalty, and cohesion, virtues that are likely to
attract well-meaning conscripts unless suitable civic substitutes are found. It seems appropriate
that Morton Deutsch (1995) referred to William James as the first peace psychologist in an article
that appeared in the first issue of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology.

Peace psychology as a distinct area of psychology did not begin to emerge clearly until the latter
half of the twentieth century, when the United States and Soviet Union were locked in a nuclear
arms race that had compelling psychological features and threatened the survival of humankind.
The nuclear threat peaked in the mid1980s, igniting a counter-reaction by a generation of
psychologists who began to identify themselves as peace psychologists. These psychologists were
trained in traditional areas of psychology, typically, social, developmental, cognitive, clinical, and
counseling psychology, and they were eager to apply concepts and theories that held the promise
of preventing a nuclear conflagration.

2
Two events helped to establish the legitimacy and value of peace psychology. In 1986, Ralph K.
White published an important volume on "Psychology and the Prevention of Nuclear War" which
helped identify some of the content of peace psychology. The destructive consequences of mutual
enemy images were focal in the book and approaches to peace emphasized tension reduction
strategies. In 1990, institutional support was forthcoming when the American Psychological
Association recognized a new division, the Division of Peace Psychology (Division 48).

As the Soviet Union began to unravel, leaving only one superpower in the world that could claim
economic and military supremacy, the threat of nuclear war seemed greatly diminished, at least
from the perspective of scholars in the United States. Nonetheless, the Cold War left in place
institutions and professional affiliations that supported research and practice aimed at the reduction
of violence and the promotion of peace. The general contours that would form the content of peace
psychology were becoming clear as peace psychologists turned their scholarly tools toward an
examination of the psychological dimensions of the continuing and ubiquitous problems of peace,
conflict, and violence.

Our purpose in editing this volume is to bring together in one place international perspectives on
key concepts, themes, theories, and practices that are defining peace psychology as we begin the
twenty-first century. We share with our international colleagues a broad vision of peace
psychology, covering a wide range of topics such as ethnic conflict, family violence, hate crimes,
militarism, conflict management, social justice, nonviolent approaches to peace, and peace
education. In addition to providing a useful resource that integrates current research and practices
for scholars and practitioners, we wanted the book to be accessible enough to introduce a new
generation of students, both graduate and upper-division undergraduate, to the field. When
organizing the topics in the book, we have tried to capture the four main currents in peace
psychology: (1) violence, (2) social inequalities, (3) peacemaking, and (4) the pursuit of social
justice.

CONFLICT

Conflict is a struggle or contest between people with opposing needs, ideas, beliefs, values, or
goals. Defined in broadest terms, conflict denotes the incompatibility of subject positions (Diez et
al, 2006: 565). This definition emphasizes the opposition or incompatibility at the heart of the
3
conflict, and initially leaves open the exact nature of these incompatibilities, i.e. whether they are
between individuals, groups or societal positions; whether they rest in different interests or beliefs;
or whether they have a material existence or come into being only through discourse. Given this
initial definition, conflict is not always characterised by violence. Yet, conflict might escalate and
lead to destructive results, in particular in the form of physical violence that is increasingly seen
as legitimate as conflict intensifies. However, conflict can also lead to a new social or political
organization and therefore be productive if the parties involved are able to deal with their
incompatibilities so that such a new organizational form is achieved. Conflict is present in
generally peaceful situations, but it (a) remains confined to isolated instances and so does not take
on societal significance, or (b) is dealt with within clearly defined and observed societal rules, or
(c) is dealt with productively so that it generates a new form of socio-political organization through
peaceful change. This is not to say that violent conflict cannot eventually lead to productive
change, but in order to do so, it ultimately needs to be desecuritised and therefore at least lead to
peaceful change. What defines ‘ethic conflict’ as ethnic is the tendency for opposing groups to
describe themselves using ethnic criteria like language, cultural elements, territorial claim, the
myth of common ancestry, racial ties, and using this identity to claim equal status within a state or
autonomy from it (Gurr, 2000: 53). However, ethnic identities are not fixed and transcendental.
Ethnic identity, ‘is not given; it can be chosen freely by an individual, imposed by others which
have the authority and resources to do so, or socially constructed through interactions with others’
(Gross Stein, 1996: 95). More importantly, ethnic identity is more likely to change in periods of
economic and political instability, such as economic scarcity or political upheavals. Ethnic
identities are contextual, adaptable to and activated by unexpected threats and new opportunities.
When the boundaries between the ‘in group’ and the ‘out group’ are hardened, identities are formed
in an antagonistic way where the other is constructed as an existential threat through successful
securitisation, and violence becomes more likely.

Conflicts, even ethno-political ones, are therefore first and foremost discursive in nature (see also
Jabri, 1996; Bonacker, 2005: 273; Diez et al, 2006: 565). Incompatibilities can only be recognised
as such if someone makes reference to them. This does not mean that there is no material side to
conflicts. On the one hand, the distribution of land or other goods, or the clash of interests are core
reference points for the articulation of incompatibilities. However, they do not constitute conflicts
in and of themselves as Marxist or liberal theories based in materially defined interests would have

4
it; they need to be discursively constructed in order to become effective as conflict matters. On the
other hand, conflicts can bring about physical, psychological or emotional damage. However, these
very real experiences do not depend on a material definition of conflict, but are inflicted by
conflictual discourse or the actions legitimized through such discourse.

CONFLICT MANAGEME NT

Conflict management theorists base their research on the ‘ideology of management’ where conflict
is understood as ‘a problem of political order and of the status quo; violent protracted conflict is
thus deemed the result of incompatible interests and/or competition for scarce power recourses,
especially territory’ (Reimann, 2004:8). The focus is on conflicts between states or communities
aspiring to statehood, which under the conditions of anarchy in the international system are locked
into a struggle for power. Influenced by the rationalist consensus in the discipline of International
Relations of the 1970s and 1980s, much of the research in this area is based on rational choice and
game theory models where political and military leaders (Track I level) are characterised by their
high status, rationality and ability to calculate interests and work together towards a mutually
profitable goal. The methodologies employed for minimizing the worst excesses of violence are
limited to settlement strategies and ‘range from official and non-coercive measures such as good
offices, fact finding missions, facilitation, negotiation and mediation, to more coercive processes
such as power mediation, sanctions and arbitration’ (Reimann, 2004: 9). Conflict management
promotes intervention to achieve political settlements, mostly by those who have the power to
exercise pressure on the conflicting parties in order to induce them to settle. According to
Bloomfield and Reilly (1998:18): Conflict management is the positive and constructive handling
of difference and divergence. Rather than advocating methods for removing conflict, it addresses
the more realistic question of managing conflict: how to deal with it in a constructive way, how to
bring opposing sides together in a cooperative process, how to design a practical, achievable,
cooperative system for the constructive management of difference Conflict management
approaches consequently see desecuritisation largely as a process of agreeing new institutional
arrangements that allow for the peaceful management of 5 conflict through the provision of
information and the stabilization of mutual expectations through the codification of rules

5
CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Conflict resolution theories address the deep-rooted sources of conflict, which are taken to be
structural (and therefore, in contrast to our understanding of conflict, not discursive) and cultural.
Different to conflict management where the cause of conflict is a consequence of the anarchical
nature of the international system, conflict resolution theorists ‘argue that conflict has an
ontological base in human needs, the denial of which causes violent conflict’ (Fetherston, 2000:2).
This interpretation of conflict has been greatly influenced by Burton’s work on human needs
theory. Burton distinguishes between needs that are universal human motivations conditioned by
biology; values, which are ideas, habits, customs and beliefs characteristic of particular social
communities and interests which are the aspirations of individuals or identity groups within a
social system (Burton, 1990: 36-38). Interests can be negotiated while ‘needs will be pursued by
all means possible’ (Burton, 1990:36) as they are ontological. The needs that seem to be important
are security, identity, recognition, food, shelter, safety, participation, distributive justice and
development (Burton, 1990). Burton does not clarify the conditions under which these needs
should be met but he does encourage theorists and practitioners to broaden up the scope under
which they analyze conflict. In this vein, the focus is on getting the parties to recognize their
common needs and he suggests that this is achieved when parties to disputes are brought together
in a face to face analytical dialogue, facilitated by a third party. Inevitably they soon discover that
they have the same ultimate goals… Once it is discovered that goals are held in common, the stage
is set for a search for means that satisfy all parties to dispute (Burton, 1990:42). The methodologies
developed to address the root causes of a conflict are non-coercive and unofficial activities such
as facilitation or consultation in the form of controlled communication, problem-solving
workshops or round tables. These activities are facilitated by a third party that does not seek to
provide a solution to sides, but rather to create an environment where both sides can reflect upon
their situations and create solutions for themselves. More importantly the key aspect of problem-
solving is to deepen and broaden the analysis of conflict. This is done by including a greater
number of actors involved in the process, like civil society groups, academic institutions, all forms
of civil mediation or citizen diplomacy groups and local and international conflict resolution NGOs
operating at Track II level. The analysis as well as the broader participation of actors drawn in
problem-solving workshops demonstrates that ‘the parties do have a choice. They are not trapped

6
by fate. They can control their own future’ (Mitchell and Banks, 1996:45). Interestingly enough
this approach shows that once the relationship between the parties ‘have been analyzed 6
satisfactorily, once each side is accurately informed of the perceptions of the other, of alternative
means of attaining values and goals, and of costs of pursuing present policies, possible outcomes
are revealed that are acceptable to all parties’ (Burton, 1990:205). While the starting point of this
approach is therefore largely non-discursive in its focus on needs, the proposition for conflict
resolution relies on the transformation of conflictive discourse through self-reflection and a
broadening of dialogue between conflict parties. In other problem-solving theories, the focus shifts
from tackling frustrated needs to the psychology of inter group relations. The work of Fisher and
Keashly, for example stress the importance that, once a conflict is initiated, the perceptions,
attitudes and interaction of the parties become crucial elements of determining its further course.
Typically, there is an escalating spiral of increasing intensity in which the relationship between
the parties moves toward destructive competition and finally to a ‘malignant social process’ from
which the parties are unable or unwilling to extricate themselves (Fisher and Keashly, 1996:32).
The focus here lies on the examination of subjective aspects of conflict as the main hindrances to
resolution of interest-based issues. This implies that a third party intervention should take into
account the mix of the objective and subjective elements that interact as the conflict escalates and
de-escalates this are also known as contingency approach. Problem-solving as the main focus of
conflict resolution is based on perceiving conflict ‘objectively’ and promotes more effective
communication practices in order to resolve conflict. But it is not necessarily aimed at a
fundamental transformation of the conflict as it bases desecuritisation on the minimum
requirement of the satisfaction of the needs of both parties, although incompatibilities between
needs of different conflict parties have to be redefined in order to achieve conflict resolution.

CONFLICT PREVENTION

Conflict Prevention is the object of a wide range of policies and initiatives; its aim is to avoid the
violent escalation of a dispute. Conflict Prevention includes:

Monitoring and/or intervening to stabilize a potentially violent conflict before its outbreak by
initiating activities that address the root causes as well as the triggers of a dispute. Establishing
mechanisms that detect early warning signs and record specific indicators that may help to predict

7
impending violence. Using planned coordination to prevent the creation of conflict when
delivering humanitarian aid and in the process of development. Institutionalizing the idea of
preventing conflict at the local, regional, and international levels.
The concept and practice of Conflict Prevention evolved from being focused almost exclusively
on Preventive Diplomacy, to a new more comprehensive approach that can be defined as Structural
Prevention. This new approach includes long-term initiatives targeting the root causes of conflict.
The evolution of Conflict Prevention as a practice will depend on the necessary resources being
committed to Conflict Prevention initiatives in the future. Conflict Prevention faces serious
problems in this respect because it is extremely difficult to evaluate whether conflict prevention
initiatives have been responsible for a conflict not having happened.

It is possible to distinguish three sets of elements that compose the process of Conflict Prevention:
The definition of the context with reference to the nature of a conflict, its causes, and its cyclical
phases; the use of mechanisms to monitor indicators and signs to forewarn impending violence;
and the selection of the specific initiatives to be taken.

The concept of Conflict Prevention emerged in the theoretical literature of the early 1990s, but
initially without significant practical application. The idea of Conflict Prevention was presented
as an official policy of the UN by Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali in 1992 in his An
Agenda for Peace. He emphasized "fact-finding and analysis-to identify at the earliest possible
stage the circumstances that could produce serious conflict-and the need for Preventive Diplomacy
to resolve the most immediate problems with attention to underlying causes of conflict." The focus
was on punctual preventive interventions. The end of the Cold War gave the impression that the
international community could intervene more flexibly and effectively to prevent the explosion of
conflicts. This impression was reinvigorated by the negative experiences of Yugoslavia and
Rwanda. A different behavior of neighboring countries, in the case of Yugoslavia, and a limited
but robust military intervention in Rwanda, was commonly believed, could have saved hundreds
of thousands of lives. A successful UN deployment in Macedonia confirmed this idea.
Since then, the concept of Conflict Prevention has developed further and moved its focus from
"Preventive Diplomacy," including a limited set of diplomatic or military initiatives, to more
structural interventions. Academics and practitioners have since stretched the concept to include,
in addition to diplomacy and military operations, institution building, economic development, and

8
grass roots community building. In the 2001 Report of the Secretary General on Prevention of
Armed Conflict, "an effective preventive strategy" is said to require "a comprehensive approach
that encompasses both short-term and long-term political, diplomatic, humanitarian, human rights,
developmental, institutional, and other measures taken by the international community, in
cooperation with national and regional actors".
Structural Prevention lays its conceptual roots in part of International Relations Theory. Concepts
of Security Community, and Johan Galtung’s "Warm Peace," as well as theories of integration and
international regimes, identify the structural foundations of a peaceful international community.
The structure of these communities, it must be noticed, is composed not of elements of pure power
but rather of norms, values and shared interests. Similarly, the peaceful interaction among different
groups inside a state can be fostered through structural initiatives of constitutional engineering,
economic development, institution building, and education.

CONFLICT TRANSFORMAT ION

Conflict Transformation in a narrow sense refers to the ‘process of engaging with and transforming
the relationships, interests, discourses and if it is necessary, the very constitution of society that
supports the continuation of violent conflict’ (Miall, 2001:4). It therefore refers not simply to a
change in the structure of a conflict, but to fundamental changes in conflict discourse that
effectively, in our terminology, involves their desecuritisation. In a different but related argument
Baker (1996) distinguishes between “conflict managers” and “democratisers”, where the former
are focused on overcoming violence and establishing procedures for peaceful conflict management
and democratisers are attempting to establish justice as a way to tackle the root causes of conflict
and allow “long-term reconciliation” as a “positive” peace (Miall et al, 1999: 208). Human rights
are part of establishing justice, and in the logic of Baker enable the long-term healing of rifts, and
are as such core to a new societal identity. At the same 7 time, while violent conflict is the problem
to be changed, conflict as such is an important catalyst for change. Moreover, the role of the people
within the conflict parties is of great pertinence because the peacebuilding comes from within
rather from outside. As Lederach argues: Conflict transformation must actively envision, include,
respect and promote the human and cultural resources from within a giving setting. This involves
a new set of lenses through which we do not primarily, see the setting and the people in it as the

9
problem and the outsider as the answer. Rather, we understand the long term goal of transformation
as validating and building on people and resources within the setting (Lederach, 1995). The work
of Galtung has been highly influential as he emphasized the relationship between conflicts and
larger conflicts embedded in the structure of world society and the world economy. The resolution
of a conflict needs to be based on a fundamental change to this structure and therefore the
transcendence of the existing contradictions (or incompatibilities) (Galtung, 1996:116). Azar’s
work (1990) on protracted social conflicts (PSC) has considerably influenced conflict
transformation theory, taking conflict resolution a step further. The critical factor in PSC seems to
be ‘the prolonged and often violent struggle by communal groups for such basic needs as security,
recognition and acceptance, fair access to political institutions and economic participation’ (Azar,
1991:93). The dynamic relationship between the state and the communal groups is at the core of
the problem (what Azar described as ‘the disarticulation between the state and the society as a
whole’ 1990:7). His theory goes beyond simple structural or behavioral explanations and suggests
how patterns of conflict interact with the satisfaction of human needs, the adequacy of political
and economical institutions and the choices made by political actors. It also explores how different
options could lead to benign or malignant spirals of conflict. Rupesinghe’s work (1998) makes the
point for a conflict transformation approach that embraces multi-track interventions. He stresses
the importance of involving peace constituencies at grassroots level and across the parties at the
civil society level and also forging alliances with any groups able to bring change, such as the
media, business groups and the military. Last but not least, Lederach (1997) argues for the
transformation of a war system to a peace system characterised by the values of peace, justice,
truth and mercy. This transformation is seen in changing the personal, relational, structural and
cultural aspects of conflict, in different time periods and different system level. The structure of
this process is based on a pyramid where the elite leaders and decision makers are at the top,
leaders of social organizations, churches, media in the middle level and grassroots community
leaders at the bottom. Accordingly peace building should take into account complementary
changes at all these levels. 8 Conflict transformations understand conflict as an agent of both social
control and change (Clements, 1998:138). It places primary emphasis on the question of social
justice as it rejects the traditional aim of conflict management to restore the status quo and instead,
develops a notion of conflict as a positive agent for social change. Moreover, it is multitrack and -
dynamic as it combines Track I, II, III activities and it stresses the importance for creating new

10
infrastructure for empowering underprivileged groups that will make it possible to address
structural inequalities with the aim of long term social reconstruction and reconciliation. More
specifically, there is an urgency to examine which are the collective actions that could advance
and solidify peace by avoiding a relapse to conflict. Even if scholars and practitioners have
different understandings of conflict there seems to exist a broad consent that a fundamental
transformation of the wartorn society is needed. It is only by addressing the political, social,
psychological and economical causes, as well as the effects of armed conflict that a recurrence of
violence can be prevented and a viable peace established. This means that a variety of tasks has to
be addressed and multidimensional approaches are needed (Fisher, 2004:4). Such a
multidimensional approaches includes the following desecuritising strategies: Transformation of
cultures of violence; establishment of tradition of good governance including respect for
democracy, human rights and development of civil society; healing psychosocial wounds and long
term-reconciliation; integration into co-operative and equitable regional and global structures; and
the balancing of stable long-term macroeconomic policies and economic management and locally
sustainable community development (Miall, Ramsbotham and Woodhouse, 1999: 203). Not all of
these strategies are unique to the Conflict Transformation approach, but it is here that the different
elements of dealing with conflict come together. Conflict Transformation approaches therefore
represent the broadest approaches to desecuritisation, at the heart of which are broader societal
transformations, including fundamental shifts in how identities and interests are constructed so
that they are no longer incompatible. Transformation is generally conceptualised as positive, but
of course changes in the construction if identities and interests can in principle also lead to greater
incompatibilities and the intensification of securitisation, although such changes would then not
take the form envisaged by Conflict Transformation theorists and practitioners. We therefore
suggest distinguishing between positive conflict transformation, where the transformation implies
desecuritisation, and negative conflict transformation, where the opposite is the case.

CASE STUDY METHOD

The case study method often involves simply observing what happens to, or reconstructing ‘the
case history’ of a single participant or group of individuals (such as a school class or a specific
social group), i.e. the idiographic approach. Case studies allow a researcher to investigate a topic

11
in far more detail than might be possible if they were trying to deal with a large number of research
participants (nomothetic approach) with the aim of ‘averaging’. The case study is not itself a
research method, but researchers select methods of data collection and analysis that will generate
material suitable for case studies such as qualitative techniques (semi-structured interviews,
participant observation, diaries), personal notes (e.g. letters, photographs, notes) or official
document (e.g. case notes, clinical notes, appraisal reports). The data collected can be analysed
using different theories (e.g. grounded theory, interpretative phenomenological analysis, text
interpretation (e.g. thematic coding) etc. All the approaches mentioned here use preconceived
categories in the analysis and they are ideographic in their approach, i.e. they focus on the
individual case without reference to a comparison group.

12
VIETNAM WAR

13
DESCR IPTION OF THE C ASE

Dates 1954-1975

Location South Vietnam

North Vietnam
Cambodia
Laos

Result North Vietnamese Victory

Troop Strength South Vietnam: 850,000

United States: 540,000

14
 South Korea: 50,000
Others: 80,000 plus

Wounded

South Vietnam: 200,000 – 400,000 civilians

170,000-220,000 military
Over 1 million wounded
United States: 58,200 dead
300,000 wounded

North Vietnam: 50,000 plus civilian dead

400,000-1 million military dead.
Over 500,000 wounded

The Vietnam War is the commonly used name for the Second Indochina War, 1954–1975. Usually
it refers to the period when the United States and other members of the SEATO (Southeast Asia
Treaty Organization) joined the forces with the Republic of South Vietnam to contest communist
forces, comprised of South Vietnamese guerrillas and regular-force units, generally known as Viet
Cong (VC), and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). The U.S., possessing the largest foreign
military presence, essentially directed the war from 1965 to 1968. For this reason, in Vietnam
today it is known as the American War. It was a direct result of the First Indochina War (1946–
1954) between France, which claimed Vietnam as a colony, and the communist forces then known
as Viet Minh. In 1973 a “third” Vietnam War began—a continuation, actually—between North
and South Vietnam but without significant U.S. involvement. It ended with communist victory in
April 1975.

The Vietnam War was the longest in U.S. history until the Afghanistan War (2002-2014). The war
was extremely divisive in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. Because the U.S. failed to
achieve a military victory and the Republic of South Vietnam was ultimately taken over by North
Vietnam, the Vietnam experience became known as “the only war America ever lost.” It remains
a very controversial topic that continues to affect political and military decisions today.

15
ANALYSIS OF THE STUDY

The Vietnamese often compare the shape of their country to two baskets of rice suspended on a
bamboo pole. The baskets represent the two major rice growing river deltas that support the
majority of the population of the country the Red River Valley in the north and the Mekong River
Delta in the south. The bamboo pole is the narrow waistline of central Vietnam that connects the
two river deltas. The delta areas of the Red River and the Mekong form the heartlands of modem
Vietnam. About two-thirds of the country's sixty million people live there. These areas produce
the bulk of the rice, the staple food in the typical Vietnamese diet. Most of the people of Vietnam
art ethnic Vietnamese. They are descended from people who inhabited the region of the Red River

16
Delta in North Vietnam several centuries prior to the Christian era. In their physical characteristics,
the Vietnamese are roughly similar to many neighboring peoples in Southeast Asia and China.
However, Vietnam has been recognized as a distinct culture for over the thousand years and its
language is a separate member of the world family of languages.

During the first millennium B.C., Vietnam emerged as a small principality based on rice culture
and local commerce in the lower Red River Delta. In the second century B.C.; Vietnam was
conquered and integrated into the expanding Chinese empire. For one thousand years, Vietnam
became the part of China. Chinese officials administered the territory and attempted to assimilate
the Vietnamese population into Chinese civilization. Chinese political and social institutions were
introduced and Vietnamese education got based on the Confucian concept of the civil service
examination system. Chinese styles also bream dominant in literature and the arts.

To the Chinese, the absorption of the Red River Delta represented the expansion of a superior
civilization over people of primitive culture. And there is no doubt that one thousand years of
Chinese rule left a lasting imprint on Vietnamese culture. The impact did not stop Vietnamese to
see themselves as a separate and distinct people. On several occasions, popular uprisings broke
out in an effort evict the foreign intruder. Finally, in the mid-tenth century A.D., Vietnamese rebels
took advantage of chaotic conditions in China, drove out the Chinese and restored Vietnamese
independence.

After exile of Chinese the new state, which called itself Dai Viet (Greater Viet), soon became a
major force in the Southeast Asia. Although politically independent, Vietnamese political and
social institutions continued to be based on Chinese models. Confucian philosophy concept
reinforced the position of the monarch (who now called himself Emperor on the Chinese pattern)
and the centralized rower of the state.

The ethnic Vietnamese make up approximately ninety percent of the total population of the
country. The remaining ten percent are composed of a variety of peoples. These include:

(1) Various ethnic and cultural groups living in the mountainous areas of Vietnam (about three
million);

17
(2) The Chain (50,000) and the Khmer (400,000), who are descended from peoples assimilated by
the Vietnamese during their historic expansion to the south; and

(3) three million descendants of Chinese settlers who migrated into Vietnam from south China
during the past 300 years. With so much of its population ethnic Vietnamese, Vietnam is one of
the most homogeneous societies in Southeast Asia, a region noted for its ethnic and
culturaldiversity.This homogeneity has helped to promote Vietnam's exceptionally strong sense of
national identity.

The major divisions among the Vietnamese are geo-graphical and religious. The former is partly
a product of Vietnamese expansion to the south.

In these new conditions, a "frontier village" atmosphere of freedom and individual choice
developed. the people of the south came under the influence of French institutions and culture,
further accentuating there givnal differences. They were thus more receptive to the introduction of
a system based on western capitalist practices and political democracy. These distinctive
differences between North and South, contributed significantly to the course of the Vietnam War.
The second major division among the ethnic Vietnamese is religious. The majority of the
population is at least nominally Buddhist, with an admixture of Confucian, Taoist, and animist
beliefs.

The map shows Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a country in Mainland
Southeast Asia. The nation is situated on the eastern part of the Indochinese Peninsula with a
coastline along the South China Sea. It borders China in the north, it has a long border with Laos,
and it borders Cambodia in the southwest. Vietnam shares maritime borders
with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Vietnam traces its origins to the clans of Viet peoples who dwelled in the region extending from
present-day Shanghai down the Red River Delta to the Mekong River Delta. The history of the
Vietnamese people traces back over 2,200 years, with the first record of the Viet people found in
the writings of Chinese historians.

Vietnam has a long history of being ruled by foreign powers, and this led many Vietnamese to see
the United States’ involvement in their country as neo-colonialism. China conquered the northern

18
part of modern Vietnam in 111 BC and retained control until 938 AD; it continued to exert some
control over the Vietnamese until 1885. Originally, Vietnam ended at the 17th parallel, but it
gradually conquered all the area southward along the coastline of the South China Sea and west to
Cambodia. Population in the south was mostly clustered in a few areas along the coast; the north
always enjoyed a larger population. The two sections were not unlike North and South in the
United States prior to the Civil War; their people did not fully trust each other.

France’s military involvement in Vietnam began when it sent warships in 1847, ostensibly to
protect Christians from the ruling emperor Gia Long. Before the 1880s, the French controlled
Vietnam. In the early 20th century, Vietnamese nationalism began to rise, clashing with the French
colonial rulers. By the time of World War II, a number of groups sought Vietnamese independence
but as Vo Nguyen Giap—who would build Vietnam’s post–WWII army—expressed it, the
communists were the best organized and most action-oriented of these groups.

During the Second World War, Vichy France could do little to protect its colony from Japanese
occupation. Post-war, the French tried to re-establish control but faced organized opposition from
the Viet Minh (short for Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or League for the Independence of
Vietnam), led by Ho Chi Minh and Giap. The French suffered a major defeat at Dien Bien Phu in
1954, leading to negotiations that ended with the Geneva Agreements, July 21, 1954. Under those
agreements, Cambodia and Laos—which had been part of the French colony—received their
independence. Vietnam, however, was divided at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh led a communist
government in the north (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) with its capital at Hanoi, and a new
Republic of South Vietnam was established under President Ngo Dinh Diem, with its capital at
Saigon.

The division was supposed to be temporary: elections were to be held in both sections in 1956 to
determine the country’s future. When the time came, however, Diem resisted the elections; the
more populous north would certainly win. Hanoi re-activated the Viet Minh to conduct guerilla
operations in the south, with the intent of destabilizing President Diem’s government. In July 1959,
North Vietnam’s leaders passed an ordinance called for continued socialist revolution in the north
and a simultaneous revolution in South Vietnam.

19
Some 80,000 Vietnamese from the south had moved to the north after the Geneva Agreements
were signed. (Ten times as many Vietnamese had fled the north, where the Communist Party was
killing off its rivals, seizing property, and oppressing the large Catholic population.) A cadre was
drawn from those who went north; they were trained, equipped and sent back to the south to aid in
organizing and guiding the insurgency. (Some in the North Vietnamese government thought the
course of war in the south was unwise, but they were overruled.) Although publicly the war in the
south was described as a civil war within South Vietnam, it was guided, equipped and reinforced
by the communist leadership in Hanoi. The insurgency was called the National Liberation Front
(PLF); however, its soldiers and operatives became more commonly known by their opponents as
the Viet Cong (VC), short for Vietnamese Communists. The VC were often supplemented by units
of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), more often called simply the North Vietnamese Army
(NVA) by those fighting against it. Following the Tet Offensive of 1968, the NVA had to assume
the major combat role because the VC was decimated during the offensive.

20
UNITED STATES MILITARY ADVISORS IN VIETNAM

The U.S., which had been gradually exerting influence after the departure of the French
government, backed Diem in order to limit the area under communist control. Mao Zedong’s
Communist Party had won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and western governments—particularly
that of the U.S—feared communist expansion throughout Southeast Asia. This fear evolved into
the “Domino Theory”; if one country fell to communist control, its neighbours would also soon
fall like a row of dominos. US officials believed that if South Vietnam fell to communism, so
would the surrounding countries of Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Laos, and Cambodia.
The containment strategy, laid out by George Kennan in the Long Telegram, dictated that the
united States do everything in its power to prevent the spread of communism.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) advised that was not the case—America had a strong
military presence in the Pacific that would serve as a deterrent. Earlier, “Wild Bill” Donovan, head
of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II forerunner of the CIA, had also advised

21
that the U.S. had nothing to gain and much to lose by becoming involved in what was then French
Indochina.

A different feeling prevailed among many within the U.S. government. The communist takeover
of China and subsequent war in Korea (1950-53) against North Korean and Chinese troops had
focused a great deal of attention on Southeast Asia as a place to take a strong stand against the
spread of communism. During President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration (1953–1961),
financial aid was given to pay South Vietnam’s military forces and American advisors were sent
to help train them. The first American fatality was Air Force Technical Sergeant Richard B.
Fitzgibbon, Jr., killed June 8, 1956. (His son, Marine Corps lance corporal Richard Fitzgibbon III
would be killed in action in Vietnam September 7, 1965. They were the only father-son pair to die
in Vietnam.) In July 1959 Major Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand were off duty
when they were killed during an attack at Bien Hoa.

Ho Chi Minh had been educated in Paris. There is considerable debate over whether he was
primarily nationalist or communist, but he was not especially anti-Western. (An American medic
treated him during World War II, probably saving his life.) Ho attempted to contact Eisenhower
to discuss Vietnam but received no answer. “Ike” may not have seen the message, but at any rate
he was focused on establishing NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) as a wall against
additional communist advances in Europe and was intent on securing France’s participation in
NATO. That would have made any negotiation with Ho politically ticklish. A lingering question
of the war is what might have happened if Eisenhower and Ho had arranged a meeting; possibly,
an accord could have been reached, or possibly Ho was simply seeking to limit American
involvement, in order to more easily depose the Diem government.

22
AMERICAN MILITARY INVOLVEMENT ESCALATES

In 1965, Johnson dramatically escalated US involvement in the war. He authorized a series of

bombing campaigns, most notably Operation Rolling Thunder, and also committed hundreds of
thousands of US ground troops to the fight. Fearful that the war would jeopardize his domestic
agenda, Johnson concealed the extent of the military escalation from the American public (January
1961–November 1963). North Vietnam, had by then established a presence in Laos and developed
the Ho Chi Minh Trail through that country in order to resupply and reinforce its forces in South
Vietnam. Kennedy saw American efforts in Southeast Asia almost as a crusade and believed
increasing the military advisor program, coupled with political reform in South Vietnam, would
strengthen the south and bring peace. Two U.S. helicopter units arrived in Saigon in 1961. The
following February a “strategic hamlet” program began; it forcibly relocated South Vietnamese
peasants to fortified strategic hamlets. Based on a program the British had employed successfully
against insurgents in Malaya, it didn’t work in Vietnam. The peasants resented being forced from
their ancestral lands, and consolidating them gave the VC better targets. The program, which had
been poorly managed, was abandoned after about two years, following the coup that deposed
Diem.

23
Diem fell from favor with his American patrons, partly over disagreements in how to handle the
war against the VC and partly because of his unpopular suppression of religious sects and anyone
he feared threatened his regime. Buddhists, who comprised South Vietnam’s majority, claimed
Diem, a Catholic, favored citizens of his religion in distributing aid. He, in turn, called the
Buddhists VC sympathizers. On June 11, 1963, an elderly Buddhist monk named Thich Quang
Duc sat down in the street in front of a pagoda in Saigon to protest Diem’s policies. Two younger
monks poured a mix of gasoline and jet fuel over him and, as the three had planned, set fire to him.
Associated Press correspondent Malcolm “Mal” Browne photographed him sitting quietly in the
lotus position as the flames consumed him. The photo was published worldwide under the title
“The Ultimate Protest,” raising (or in some cases reinforcing) doubts about the government that
the democratic United States was supporting. Seven more such immolations occurred that year.
To make matters worse, Diem responded by sending troops to raid pagodas.

In November, a coup deposed Diem, with the blessing of Kennedy’s administration, which had
quietly assured South Vietnam’s military leaders it was not adverse to a change in leadership and
military aid would continue. The administration was caught by surprise, however, when Diem was
murdered during the coup, which was led by General Duong Van Minh. This began a series of
destabilizing changes in government leadership.

That same month, Kennedy himself was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. His successor, Lyndon
Baines Johnson, inherited the Vietnam situation. Johnson wanted to focus on instituting “Great
Society” programs at home, but Vietnam was a snake he did not dare let go of. His political party,
the Democrats, had been blamed for China falling to communism; withdrawing from Vietnam
could hurt them in the 1964 elections. On the other hand, Congress had never declared war and so
the president was limited in what he could do in Southeast Asia.

24
25
GULF OF TONKIN INCIDENT

That changed in August 1964. On August 2, two North Vietnamese torpedo boats in broad daylight
engaged USS Maddox, which was gathering communications intelligence in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Two nights later, Maddox and the destroyer USS Turner Joy were on patrol in the Gulf and
reported they were under attack. The pilot of an F-8E Crusader did not see any ships in the area
where the enemy was reported, and year’s later crew members said they never saw attacking craft.
An electrical storm was interfering with the ships’ radar and may have given the impression of
approaching attack boats.

26
Congress swiftly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that removed most restrictions from the
president in regards to Vietnam. By year’s end, 23,000 American military personnel would be in
South Vietnam. Though a congressional investigative committee the previous year had warned
that America could find itself slipping into in a morass that would require more and more military
participation in Vietnam, Johnson began a steady escalation of the war, hoping to bring it to a
quick conclusion. Ironically, the leadership of North Vietnam came to a similar conclusion: they
had to inflict enough casualties on Americans to end support for the war on the U.S. homefront
and force a withdrawal before the U.S. could build up sufficient numbers of men and material to
defeat them.

On September 30, 1964, the first large-scale antiwar demonstration took place in America, on the
campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The war became the central rallying point of
a burgeoning youth counterculture, and the coming years would see many such demonstrations,
dividing generations and families..

On Christmas Eve, in Saigon, a VC set off an explosive at the American officers’ billet in the old
Brink Hotel, killing two Americans and 51 South Vietnamese. This would be a war without a front

27
or a rear; it would involve full-scale combat units and individuals carrying out terrorist activities
such as the Brink Hotel bombing. Both the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) and
the VC used torture, to extract information or to cowl opposition.

GENERAL WILLIAM C. WESTMORELAND

In previous war, progress and setbacks could be shown on maps; large enemy units could be
engaged and destroyed. Guerrilla warfare (asymmetrical warfare) does not permit such clear-cut
data. This presented the new MACV commander (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam),
General William C. Westmoreland with a thorny challenge: how to show the American people
progress was being made.

Westmoreland adopted a search-and-destroy policy to find and engage the enemy and use superior
firepower to destroy him. Success was measured in “body count.” It was to be a war of attrition
and statistics, a policy that suited Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who distrusted the
military and often bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff in issuing directives. Every major engagement
between U.S. forces and VC or NVA was an American victory, and the casualty (body count) ratio
always showed significantly larger casualties for the communist forces than for the Americans.
The body count policy fell into disfavor and was not employed in future American wars; in
Vietnam it led officers to inflate enemy casualties. The VC and NVA dragged off as many of their
dead and wounded as possible, sometimes impressing villagers into performing this task during
28
battles, so determining their casualties was guesswork based on such things as the number of blood
trails.

On the other side, the same thing was occurring, with even more inflated numbers—vastly more.
Both sides were fighting a war of attrition, so communist commanders sent Hanoi battle reports
that often were pure fantasy. One example, cited in Grab Their Belts to Fight Them: The Viet
Cong’s Big-Unit War Against the U.S., 1965–1966, by Warren Wilkins (Naval Institute Press,
2011), is a description of the first major battle between the VC and American Forces—U.S.
Marines—near Van Truong, from the VC point of view. It claimed,”In one day of ferocious
fighting we had eliminated from the field of battle a total of 919 American troops, had knocked
out 22 enemy vehicles and 13 helicopters, and had captured one M-14 rifle.” Marine losses actually
were 45 dead, 203 wounded, and a few vehicles damaged.

On February 7, 1965, the U.S. Air Force began bombing selected sites in North Vietnam. This
grew into the operation known as Rolling Thunder that began on March 2, 1965, and continued to
November 2, 1968. Its primary goal was to demoralize the North Vietnamese and diminish their
manufacturing and transportation abilities. An air war was the most that could be done north of
the 17th parallel, because the use of ground troops had been ruled out. North Vietnam was a
prodigy of both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Red China. On July 9, 1964, China
had announced it would step in if the U.S. attacked North Vietnam, as China had done in the
Korean War. North Vietnamese officers, after the war, said the only thing they feared was an
American-led invasion of the north, but the U.S. was not going to risk starting World War III, and
at the time that seemed to loom as a distinct possibility.

29
TET—THE TURNING POINT

By the end of 1967, there were 540,000 American troops in Vietnam, and the military draft was
set to call up 302,000 young men in the coming year, an increase of 72,000 over 1967. Financial
costs had risen to $30 billion a year. But the war news was hopeful. The South Vietnamese Army
was showing improvement, winning 37 of their last 45 major engagements. American troops had
won every major battle they fought, and General Nguyen Van Thieu had come to power in South
Vietnam in September; he would remain in office until 1975, bringing a new measure of stability
to the government, though he could not end its endemic corruption. Antiwar protests continued
across America and in many other countries, but on April 28, 1967, Gen. Westmoreland became
the first battlefield commander ever to address a joint session of Congress in wartime, and Time
magazine named him Man of the Year. In an interview he was asked if there was light at the end
of the tunnel, and he responded that the U.S. and its allies had turned a corner in Vietnam.

On January 30, 1968, during Vietnam’s celebration of Tet, the lunar new year, VC and NVA units
launched a massive attack in every province of South Vietnam. They struck at least 30 provincial
capitals and the major cities of Saigon and Hue. American intelligence knew an attack was coming,
though the Army had downplayed a New York Times report of large communist troop movements

30
heading south. The timing and scale of the offensive caught ARVN, the U.S. and other SEATO
troops by surprise, however. They responded quickly, recapturing lost ground and decimating an
enemy who had “finally come out to fight in the open.” Communist losses were extremely heavy.
The VC was effectively finished; it would not field more than 25,000–40,000 troops at any time
for the remainder of the war. The NVA had to take over. It was one of the most resounding defeats
in all of military history—until it became a victory.

News footage showed the fighting in Saigon and Hue. The Tet Offensive shocked Americans at
home, who thought the war was nearing victory. Initially, however, homefront support for the war
effort grew, but by March Americans, perceiving no change in strategy that would bring the war
to a conclusion, became increasingly disillusioned. CBS evening news anchor Walter Cronkite
returned to Vietnam to see for himself what was happening. He had been a war correspondent
during World War II and had reported from Vietnam during America’s early involvement. In 1972
a poll determined he was “the most trusted man in America.”

In a February 27, 1968, broadcast he summed up what he had found during his return trip to the
war zone. He closed by saying:

“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists
who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to
unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet
unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the
next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before
negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be
to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend
democracy, and did the best they could.”

President Johnson, watching the broadcast, said, “If we’ve lost Walter Cronkite, we’ve lost the
country.” In May, Johnson announced he would not run for reelection. He also said there would
be a pause in the air attacks on North Vietnam as “the first step to de-escalate” and promised
America would substantially reduce “the present level of hostilities.”

Adding to Americans’ disillusionment was the race issue. Tensions between blacks and whites had
been intensifying for years as African Americans sought to change centuries-old racial policies.

31
The Civil Rights Movement had produced significant victories, but many blacks had come to
describe Vietnam as “a white man’s war, a black man’s fight.” Between 1961 and 1966, black
males accounted for about 13 percent of the U.S. population and less than 10 percent of military
personnel but almost 20 percent of all combat-related deaths. That disparity would decline before
the war ended, but the racial tensions at home began to insert themselves into the military in
Vietnam, damaging unit morale.

Even white troops were beginning to protest. One day in October 1969, fifteen members of the
Americal Division wore black armbands while they were on patrol, the symbol antiwar protestors
wore in the states. Earlier, in March 1968, the Americal Division had been involved in what
became known as the My Lai Massacre, in which over 100 men, women and children were killed.
Similar, even larger, atrocities were conducted by VC and NVA units—such as an NVA attack on
a Buddhist orphanage at An Hoa in September 1970 or the execution of 5,000 people at Hue during
the Tet Offensive—but the concept of American soldiers killing civilians in cold blood was more
than many Americans could bear. Support for the war eroded further. Some antiwar protestors
blamed the men and women who served in Vietnam, taunting them and spitting on them when
they came home. Military personnel, including nurses, were warned not to wear their uniforms in
the States. However, polls consistently showed the majority of Americans supported the war.

RICHARD NIXON’S WAR

32
Republican Richard Nixon won the presidency in the fall elections. Emphasis switched to
“Vietnamization,” preparing South Vietnam’s military to take over responsibility for continuing
the war. General Westmoreland had been promoted to Army Chief of Staff and replaced in
Vietnam by Gen. Creighton Abrams. For the first time, MACV worked with South Vietnam’s
government to create annual plans. Security was improving even as American forces were in the
process of withdrawing. Then, on March 30, 1972, the North Vietnamese attacked across the 17th
parallel with 14 divisions and additional individual regiments. Better armed than ever before,
thanks to increased aid from the Soviet Union, they employed tanks for the first time. The ARVN
bent but did not break. By June they had stalled the invasion, with the help of American airpower.
The NVA suffered some 120,000 casualties. American drawdown continued, with only 43,000
personnel left in-country by mid-August. In retaliation for the invasion, and in hopes of forcing
Hanoi to negotiate in good faith, Nixon ordered Haiphong harbor in North Vietnam to be mined
and he intensified bombing of North Vietnam. Hanoi offered to restart peace talks, yet remained
intransigent in its demands. Frustrated, Nixon ordered the big bombers—B-52s—to strike Hanoi,
beginning December 16 (Operation LINEBACKER). In less than two weeks, these strategic
bombers had shattered the north’s defenses. On January 27, 1973, peace accords were signed
between North Vietnam and the U.S.

The ceasefire allowed Nixon to declare “peace with honor,” but no provisions existed for enforcing
the terms of the accords. North Vietnam spent two years rebuilding its military; South Vietnam
was hamstrung in its responses by a fear the U.S. Congress would cut off all aid if it took military
action against communist buildup. Its army lacked reserves, while the NVA was growing.

33
On March 5, 1975, the NVA invaded again. ARVN divisions in the north were surrounded and
routed. No American air strikes came to aid the overstretched South Vietnamese, despite Nixon’s
earlier assurances to Thieu. To its own surprise, Hanoi found its forces advancing rapidly toward
Saigon, realized victory was at hand, and renamed the operation the Ho Chi Minh Offensive. On
April 30, their tanks entered Saigon. American helicopters rescued members of its embassy and
flew some South Vietnamese to safety, but most were left behind. North and South Vietnam were
combined into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976.

The domino fell but did not take down any of those around it. Although America’s war in Vietnam
failed to salvage the Republic of South Vietnam, it bought time in which neighboring countries
improved their economies and defensive capabilities, and it may have discouraged greater
communist activism in places like the Philippines.

34
THE MEDIA AND VIETNAM

One of the lingering legacies of the Vietnam War is the widespread belief in America that “the
media cost us the war in Vietnam.” Images such as the burning monk; South Vietnamese Police
Chief Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan about to pull the trigger of a pistol pointed at the head of a
bound VC prisoner; of a naked young girl running crying down a road after an American napalm
strike that left her badly burned—these images and others became seared into the minds of
Americans on the homefront, and in those of civilians in allied nations such as Australia.

Never before or since have journalists been given such complete access to cover a war. Unlike
previous wars, where only still images or short movie newsreels were available for conveying
images, this was America’s first television war. Images of fighting, of dead and wounded soldiers,
of POWs held in North Vietnam were beamed into America’s living rooms night after night, as
was footage of hundreds, sometimes thousands of antiwar protestors marching through the streets.
Such images pack tremendous emotional punch but often lack context. The photo of the South
Vietnamese police chief, for example, cannot by itself explain he had just seen the dead body of a
close friend minutes before; even Eddie Adams, the photojournalist who snapped the photo felt it
unfairly maligned Lt. Col. Loan

35
Undoubtedly, news media played an important role in Americans saying, “Enough.” Indeed, Vo
Nyugen Giap had always envisioned using media as one of his spear points for victory. He has
written that he was prepared for a 25-year war; he realized he did not have to achieve military
victory; he only had to avoid losing.

36
Yet, to say the media cost America victory in Vietnam is vastly oversimplifying a very complex
situation. A number of sources had warned U.S. leaders against becoming embroiled in Southeast
Asia. Corruption and instability in South Vietnam’s government did not instill confidence in its
people, or in the Americans working with it. Ruling out an invasion of North Vietnam assured that
a purely military victory would not be possible, a fact that was at odds with many Americans’
expectations for the war.The Vietnam War remains a very controversial subject. It is unlikely
historians will ever agree on whether it was necessary or what benefits derived from it.

37
REFLECTION

The aim of this practical was to understand conflicts, its management and resolution through a
case study approach. Case study research refers to an in-depth, detailed study of an individual or
a small group of individuals. Such studies are typically qualitative in nature, resulting in a
narrative description of behavior or experience. Case study research is not used to determine cause
and effect, nor is it used to discover generalizable truths or make predictions. Rather, the emphasis
in case study research is placed on exploration and description of a phenomenon.

The case chosen for the practical was the Vietnam War. Vietnam War began in 1954 and lasted
till 1975. The United States and other members of the SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty
Organization) joined the forces with the Republic of South Vietnam to contest communist forces,
comprised of South Vietnamese guerrillas and regular-force units, generally known as Viet Cong
(VC), and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). The U.S., the war from 1965 to 1968. For this
reason, in Vietnam today it is known as the American War. This was the longest war that was
fought by America after Afghanistan war.

A number of factors acted independently or in combination to cause and escalate the conflict in
Vietnam. The different perceptions, values and goals of different parties involved clashed with
each other in this war. Vietnam dominance in France began to decline, U.S began exerting pressure
to influence the departure of French government. In the elections the communist parties had won
and U.S began fearing that domino theory will become truth. And their fear of countries becoming
communist led to infiltrate Vietnam and escalate the conflict.

From the war in Vietnam. It stands there as a continual, glaring reminder that the United States-
which claimed itself as a peace-loving United States-was capable of that kind of bungling that got
them into that war. The sense of bafflement was especially great among psychologists, because a
good many of them felt that the bungling that got U.S into the Vietnam War, consists largely of
ignoring certain fundamental Psychological truths. Most of American policy-makers (both
Johnson and Nixon, for instance) behaved as if they don’t recognize certain things that
psychologists take for granted-things such as the necessity of empathy (including empathy with
our own worst enemies), the dangers of black-and-white thinking, and the role of the self-fulfilling
prophecy in the vicious spiral of the arms race.

38
It seems to me that a flagrant concrete example of violation of the principle of empathy was our
bombing of North Vietnam. That bombing was urged and continually supported by most flagrant
non empathizers-the military. But its effects included a continual solidifying of opposition to U.S
among the people in North Vietnam. It was as if they were doing their best to persuade every man,
woman, and child in North Vietnam that America really is the devil, the wanton cruel aggressor
that Communist propaganda has always said it was. Most of military men in active service not
only failed to empathize with the North Vietnamese; it looked as if they actively, though
unconsciously, resisted the temptation to empathize. They shut their eyes to the best evidence
available: the first-hand testimony of people like Harrison Salisbury (1 967), Cameron (1966),
Gerassi (1967), Gottlieb (1965), and the Quakers of the ship, Phoenix, who went to North Vietnam
and came back saying that bombing was solidifying opposition to U.S (Zietlow, 1967). They shut
their eyes also to the evidence that the bombing was tending to alienate them from most of the
other people in the world. And, most surprisingly, they shut their eyes to the evidence of history,
represented by their own strategic bombing survey after World War I1 (Over-all report, 1945)
which described how our bombing of Germany and Japan had had the same solidifying effect.
Another incident of monk burning himself was handled rashly by sending troops to monastery for
raids further dehumanizing themselves.

Here the Freud concept of the misbalance between the powers also was quite evident. As The
Americans considered themselves superior and a race that was supposed to bring peace to the
world. Their superiority made them assume that the war would be easily won by them.

The Vietnam War is also known as mirror-image war. The militants on each side clearly believed
that the other side was the aggressor. The North Vietnamese saw the United States as aggressing
against the soil of their homeland, and, in mirror-image fashion, militant Americans see the North
Vietnamese as aggressing against South Vietnam, both by a campaign of assassination in the
villages and by actual troops invading the South. There is a supreme irony in this mirror-image
type of war. It seems utterly ridiculous that both sides should be fighting because of real fear,
imagining the enemy to be a brutal, arrogant aggressor, when actually the enemy is nerving himself
to fight a war that he too thinks is in self-defense. Each side is fighting, with desperate earnestness,
an imagined enemy, a bogey-man, a windmill.

39
The reason for war escalation was the rigidity of overlapping territorial claims, usually on both
sides, and the special emotional intensity of those claims. Usually each side refused to grant for
one moment that there could be a particle of validity in the other side’s claim. There is a clean-
cutness, a simplicity, an all-or-none quality in these territorial perceptions that is clearly a gross
oversimplication of the complexity of reality. In each side’s reality-world that land just is its own;
that’s all there is to it. Dean Rusk, and his perception of what land belongs to whom in Vietnam.
Of course Secretary Rusk didn’t see South Vietnam as belonging to America, but he did apparently
see it as self-evidently part of something called the “Free World,” and he did assume an American
responsibility to resist any Communist encroachment on the Free World. If he had not seen the
problem in these simplistic terms, he would hardly have kept coming back, as he did, to the simple
proposition that the Communists have to be taught to “let their neighbors alone.” To him it
apparently seemed self-evident that South Vietnam was a “neighbor” of North Vietnam rather
than, as the Communists apparently perceive it, a part of the very body of an independent nation
called “Vietnam,” into which American invaders have been arrogantly intruding. To Mr. Rusk the
notion that American troops might be honestly regarded by anyone as invaders was apparently an
intensely dissonant thought, and therefore unthinkable.

On both sides ideology was to a large extent rationalization; the chief underlying psychological
factor is pride-the virile self-image defined as having the courage to defend one’s “own” land when
foreigners are perceived as attacking it. In a sense you could also say that fear is a fundamental
emotion in wars of this type, but it is important to recognize that the fear is mobilized by cognitive
distortion-by the mistaken assumption that the land in dispute is self-evidently one’s own, and that
therefore anyone else who has the effrontery to exist on that land, with a gun in his hand, must be
a diabolical alien “aggressor.” Neither fear nor pride would be intensely mobilized-as both of them
are-if it were not for this cognitive distortion. Each side feels that its manhood is at stake in whether
it has the courage and the toughness to see to it that every last one of those intruders is thrown out
of its territory. To Ho Chi Minh this proposition was apparently as self-evident and elemental as
the mirror-image of it is to Dean Rusk. Neither one of them, apparently, would tolerate
overlapping, and therefore ambiguous, territorial images. Frenkel-Brunswik (1 949) would
probably say that neither could tolerate ambiguity.

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The conflict resolution took place after Richard Nixon campaigned for the presidency with a
“secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. Once in office, his administration sought to achieve “peace
with honor.” Nixon ultimately expanded the war into neighboring Laos and Cambodia, while
simultaneously encouraging the “Vietnamization” of the war effort, which entailed the gradual
withdrawal of US troops and an increasing reliance on the South Vietnamese armed forces. By the
end of 1969, the number of American troops in Vietnam had been cut in half.

The peace making process was then took up by signing of The Paris Peace Accords
which established the terms according to which the last remaining US troops in Vietnam would
be withdrawn. In 1975, the North Vietnamese finally achieved the objective of uniting the country
under one communist government. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam was formally established
on July 2, 1976, and Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Though the outcome of the war
was a clear defeat for the United States, the countries surrounding Vietnam did not subsequently
fall to communism, demonstrating the flawed reasoning of the domino theory.

CONC LUS ION

The Vietnam War was the result of the international environment created by the Cold War between
two hegemonic nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, struggling over the distribution of
power in the international system at the end of World War II. The Vietnam War was the result of
the international environment created by the Cold War between two hegemonic nations, the United
States and the Soviet Union, struggling over the distribution of power in the international system
at the end of World War II

The war weakened American people’s faith and confidence in their governments. In fact, there
was a widespread public distrust of the government, especially in military decisions right after the
war.

The Vietnam War also left many long lasting effects on the veterans who had fought hard in the
war. Around 700,000 Vietnam veterans suffered psychological after-effects. The Vietnam War
thoroughly changed the way the American approaches military actions.

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REFRENCES

Cheistie, D. J., Hare, A. P., & Winter, D. D. (2001). Peace, Conflict and Violence: Peace
Psychology for the 21st Century. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

CQ Researchers (2011). Issues in Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi, Sage.

Fox, M. A. (2014). Understanding Peace: A Comprehensive Introduction, New York, Routledge.

Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents, Penguin Books Ltd.

Galtung, J., Jacobsen, C. G., & Brand-Jacobsen, K. F. (2002). Searching for Peace: The Road to
Transcend, London: Pluto Press

Hall, Mitchell K. “Roots of the Vietnam War.” The Vietnam War, 2018, pp. 3–24.,
doi:10.4324/9781315542874-1.

Om, Hari, and B. S. Parakh. Contemporary India: Textbook in Social Sciences for Class IX.
National Council of Educational Research and Training, 2002.

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