This interview goes along with the posting of Toby Keith’s song “Love me if you can” shown in the post below.
Some of the interview is hard to follow because I think Toby was just going with his gut and didn’t have a transcript or anything. I found it interesting so thought I would link it.
LINK: Toby Keith Interview (broken link)
A sampling:
KEITH: The reason — Afghanistan, by the way, I just returned from over there two weeks ago, but Afghanistan’s doing great. Afghanistan is a country. They still have the Taliban crossing the border because Pakistan won’t — won’t rule their side of it, but as they regroup across, our guys are set up so well over there they just take care of them with very few casualties and the country is doing well, they don’t have all that tribal fighting that was (unintelligible).
Now, in Iraq, the biggest problem they have is insurgency and keeping the tribal wars, the civil war going on. In my opinion — and I’m just a songwriter, I’m not a celebrity, nobody should listen to me, but in my opinion, going over there and doing a hundred shows it seems to me at some point the Iraqi government, they need to establish their —
GLENN: Sure.
KEITH: — some kind of a — even if it’s all Shi’a or even if it’s all Sunni or whatever they do, their — their military and their police force are going to have to quit fighting amongst themselves tribal-wise and they’re going to have to stand up and take control of their country, or we’re going to have to stand back — we can’t leave, I think we could stand back and let them have their civil war and play king of the mountain or whatever because our guys are on every corner over there we’re living under Congress’ ultimatum, and to me, I don’t see how it can be won.
GLENN: People talk to me all the time, they call in and say Glenn, give me some good news, tell me — tell me something that is good that you see in America, give me some hope. And I see it all across America, but you travel, and you perform and you speak to so many Americans. What is the voice of the American people saying that Washington is just not hearing right now? Who are we?
KEITH: Well, I think — I think overall this is — you know, I think overall everybody’s proud to be Americans, and I think they support the troops. Now, you gotta keep in mind that I’m — you know, I’m poster boy for going over there and playing, so they’re not — not too many people are going to come up and say something bad to me about the troops, you know. So I — I hear a lot of positive things about it. As a whole, I think that — I think that we’re — our identity is that we’re compassionate. You know, we don’t — Saddam Hussein ran his country by — by slaughtering neighborhoods and then —
