Saturday, February 08, 2003
[posted by jaed at 7:32 PM]An Iraqi soldier's tale:
I'm a little amazed to find this in the Guardian:
"We are all very tired," Abbas said. "I haven't heard of Tony Blair. But if George Bush wants to give us freedom then we will welcome it."
To find such a thing in hallowed pages of the Guardian makes me think I should check it for fever. But apparently the lapse in anti-American sentiment was brief: the headline on this story is "The choice for Iraq's rag-tag army: be killed by the US or by Saddam".
The man quoted is a soldier who deserted and crossed the border into what we might as well call Kurdistan. He says, basically, a lot of soldiers and officers would surrender, but the Republican Guard won't and will try to prevent others from surrendering. He and his fellow soldiers don't want to get bombed (understandably), nor do they want to get shot by the Republican Guard (ditto). Morale is low, he says, and conditions for the soldiers suck.
(Digression: He also talks about trenches. When den Beste mentioned trenches a while back, I thought he was kidding! What do the Iraqi commanders think this is, 1914? Yikes.)
