MOTÖRHEAD's LEMMY On Current Situation In Iraq: 'It's Another Vietnam — A War You Can't Win'

August 8, 2008

Greg Prato of Rolling Stone magazine recently conducted an interview with MOTÖRHEAD frontman Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister. An excerpt from the chat follows.

Rolling Stone: "Motörizer" is MOTÖRHEAD's 20th studio album. Did you ever think the group would last this long?

Lemmy: We never had any plan of any kind, really. A lot of people didn't think we would last this long. You don't think like that when you're starting a band — you're just starting a band to see what happens. It's very gratifying to still be around.

Rolling Stone: What's the biggest difference between writing and recording albums now than when the group did "Overkill" or "Ace of Spades"?

Lemmy: It's like another planet, isn't it? People thought different, people looked different, people did things differently, people philosophized differently about their fate. It was just different. And hasn't changed for the better, y'know? [laughs] Ain't it funny, how things never seem to change for the better? They improve things, and they're always worse!

Rolling Stone: The lyrics in "The Thousand Names of God" deal with the theme of war. What are your thoughts on the current situation in Iraq?

Lemmy: It's a fucking mess. It's another Vietnam — a war you can't win, because you can't fight an enemy you can't see. Anybody in that country could be the enemy. You can't shoot them all, so therefore, you have to get out. We should have never gone there in the first place. I mean, you can say, "Saddam is an asshole," which is certainly true, but he wasn't a threat to America. George Bush and Colin Powell on TV told me he was my enemy. And I knew that he wasn't. I'll tell you a funny story — to improve the mood a bit — when the British army went into Iraq for Desert Storm, they had no desert uniforms, only the green ones. Do you know why? Because they sold them all to Iraq two years before! Isn't that brilliant? Sums it all up right there.

Read the entire interview at www.rollingstone.com.

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