Gen. James Jones: Vietnam & Iraq

Speigel Online: You participated in the Vietnam War. Does Iraq remind you at all of Vietnam?

General James Jones: I think there are some similarities, obviously. Here we have an intervention, we have a new government that we're trying to support so that we can have a basis for a democratic way of life. We're trying to train an army, which we did in South Vietnam. We don't have a uniformed enemy; in Vietnam we had the Viet Cong and they were not uniformed. But we also had the North Vietnamese army which was uniformed. We have popular opinion that started out quite high in support -- I'm talking about the US now, we know what it is in Europe. And then you have the traditional impatience of the public when things don't get resolved as quickly as they think they should and where people believe that mistakes were made. But regardless of how we got to where we are -- that can be debated by historians now and by people who have time to do that -- people are dying here, troops are dying. We need to make sure that we bring this to a successful conclusion so we can, in fact, stop the bloodshed. It seems to me that one of the best ways to do that is by presenting a united front. Not only at home, domestically in the US, but to the extent that we can internationally because I believe that we all have a stake in this.

… Speigel: In addition to the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, the American government has been accused of sending terror suspects to Third World dictatorships where they are allegedly tortured. Human rights violations are also suspected at Guantanamo. As a high representative of the US military do you find it difficult to present American standards on human rights as a role model for the people of Iraq or Afghanistan?

Gen. Jones: When I was in Vietnam we had a terrible incident called the My Lai Massacre and at the time I was wondering, 'How could this happen? This doesn't happen in the armed forces of the United States. This is not what we do, this is not who we are.' And my reaction to these stories and these facts was much the same. I said, 'This can't be happening. This is not what we do, this is not who we are.' But the thing that I always fall back on with regard to my lifetime of experience is that for every one of those types of things that happen there's generally a very honest and open quest for truth and accountability. We're all human; we can all make mistakes, sometimes by omission, sometimes by commission. But there has to be accountability and there has to be a day of reckoning so that you can look at yourself in the mirror and feel good about yourself. What happened in those instances, in my judgment, was an aberration with regard to who we are and what we are -- and an aberration with regard to what the world thinks we are, which is just as important.

Speigel interview with U.S. General James Jones, “America Has Enough on its Hands Right Now,” 2/07/06.