HENRY ROLLINS Says War In Iraq 'Never Was A Good Idea'

Gary Moskowitz of Mother Jones recently conducted an interview with punk rock icon Henry Rollins. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Mother Jones: The first thing I wanted to ask you about was your USO tours. Can you tell me about how and why you got involved doing those tours?

Henry Rollins: I do it because that's my way of protesting the war, and it's my custodial duty to go behind this president that started this needless war that's hemoraging everything from needless lives to money and everything else. And the fact that the soldiers don't dictate policy; they just go and do what they are told, leads me to believe I don't really have a beef with the troops, I have a beef with the people who sent them into where they are deployed. So I go and I meet these people without any hesitation and I quite like them.

Mother Jones: And can you tell me what your interactions with the troops are like?

Henry Rollins: You meet them in hospitals, you meet them on the ground, in the mess hall, sometimes there's a meet and greet situation set up where you shake hands, tell stories, whatever. Sometimes you're just at dinner, kind of holding court. It's called a handshake tour, what I do. Sometimes they ask you to go up and speak for 20 or 30 minutes. I do all of that.

Mother Jones: And is there anything that you've felt or seen during these tours to Iraq that you weren't prepared for?

Henry Rollins: In parts of Iraq, when you go the motor pool, and you see vehicles that need to be repaired, and why they need to be repaired, like bullet clusters where the driver's head was, you know, thankfully it's bulletproof glass, or the sides of these vehicles looking like the biggest bullet possible just tore through it. And you realize someone tried to kill these guys. And that's pretty arresting.

Mother Jones: Have these experiences changed the way you think about the war at all, having met so many people one on one, face to face?

Henry Rollins: No. [The war] was a bad idea. It never was a good idea. It's an illegal war. We're not there for the purposes that George W. Bush says. He has a perfect situation there because if you leave it now, you leave these people who did not ask for your incursion; you leave these people in worse shape than when you got there. And so no, I don't think anything different about it, I just feel it more acutely, and at this point it's now more of a personal thing. I get letters from the wives saying my husband died. I get letters from the moms. I got a letter from one mom who wants me to write a letter to her son to try and talk him out of joining the Army. I get letters from wives who miss their husbands, moms what to tell me regretfully that their son, who loved my DVDs, and his friends, who all love my DVDs, and they all listen to my CDs out there, he died two days ago and she had to tell somebody. A guy who shot and killed a child mistakenly, he writes me and asks me to give him good reason why he shouldn't kill himself. These are the letters I get, and I get them pretty often. So this thing is a very personal experience for me. It's more than just something I see on the news.

Mother Jones: A USA Today article I saw talked to Al Franken and other people who had done USO tours and they mentioned one occasion in which you kind of slipped and made some disparaging comments about Dick Cheney, and there was mixed reaction from troops. Is that difficult, to go and not let your ideas about the war come out?

Henry Rollins: No. Because the war they are fighting and the war you speculate on from the safety of your home are two different things. There really is a disconnect. And so, I don't think it would be anything but deleterious to morale to go out there and say "this is a bogus war, man." Anything that could be deleterious or distracting to these people is not on.

Read the entire interview at www.motherjones.com.