Anti-war activist and folksinger Joan Baez says she was prevented from performing for a group of U.S. soldiers who returned from service in Iraq.

Both Baez and veteran newsman Dan Rather were barred from a recent performance for soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, she revealed in a letter to the Washington Post published Wednesday.

Joan Baez performs at a protest encampment near U.S. President George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Aug. 21, 2005.
(LM Otero/Associated Press)

In an interview with CBC Radio, Baez said she didn't know why she was not allowed to perform.

"All I can tell you is exactly what John Mellencamp's manager told my manager, which is, 'She is not approved,'" Baez said.

Mellencamp had organized the performance at the Washington, D.C., hospital and invited Baez to attend to perform Jim Crow, a duet they sing together on his most recent album.

Baez, a prominent anti-war activist during the 1960s, said the army may still hold that against her. She said she had requests from individual soldiers to perform in the 1960s, but never felt she could entertain the troops without appearing to support the Vietnam War.

Rather, the former 60 Minutes newsman and CBS anchor who has been critical of the Bush administration, had been scheduled to interview Mellencamp on stage, but was also denied entry.

The medical centre declined comment on why it would not admit them, saying only the request for them to participate came too late.

Regrets from Vietnam era 

Baez said she wanted to perform for soldiers back from Iraq to tell them "welcome home."

She said she regrets not having been more welcoming to Vietnam veterans, many of whom felt their country had turned against them. 

"I thought more about what happened to them when they came home," she said.

"They came home to some real bitterness from people who'd been working to end the war. I was not bitter, but I didn't do any kind of real welcoming, so I think that's what led me to say 'Yes, maybe it's a good time to start.'

"The people coming back from the war in Iraq are going to be at least as traumatized as people coming back from the war in Vietnam."

Still a strong advocate for peace, Baez said she would have performed a song by Tom Waits, The Day After Tomorrow, if she had been allowed to participate in the concert.

"It's a magnificent song, and it is anti-war but it's done in such a way that it is one of those universal songs," she said.

Baez drew a parallel between the war in Iraq and Vietnam.

"In a way it's very much déjà vu. There are differences in location, there are differences in the administration, but the fact that we are really on somebody else's territory doing as we please for our own reasons and nobody else's is really untenable."

And now that the American people have turned against the war, the Bush administration, like the Nixon administration in the 1970s, is not listening, she said.

With files from the Associated Press