Henry Rollins on the Iraq War

I have not liked Henry Rollins music, at least the stuff that I have heard. Nor did I particularly enjoy his stand-up act when I saw it on TV. But, I like what he has to say about the war in Iraq in this Mother Jones interview:

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.

Some Bush supporters seem to have a problem with this logic. There are those of us who do not support the war because it began under false pretenses and continues without an effective strategy. Our troops have done everything that was asked of them. The problem is the people in charge are asking them to do the wrong things. In response to your mantra, naive neo-cons, we don't hate the troops; we hate you.

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

HR: 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.

Yes, unsurprisingly, Henry Rollins is pissed off and has been since the start of this fiasco. My question is, why did it take other people so long to reach the same conclusion?