raed
Omdat we het niet mogen vergeten - en omdat het een mooi beeld geeft van de verdraaide wereld waarin we leven: een citaat van dear_raed, blogger uit Bagdad. Voor wie het gemist heeft [?], de man bleef, zo goed als mogelijk was, tijdens de oorlog doorgaan met schrijven. Met zijn standpunten kun je het oneens zijn, maar hij heeft ze in ieder geval... die amerikaanse soldaat ook trouwens. En dan denk ik: zo ver ligt dat niet uit elkaar. Toch?

"I know what we have done is right and we had to do it but there must have been a better way to do it.”

When a soldier starts his conversation like this you can’t help but really really like him. He was standing in the heat, yesterday it was about 52C, guarding the entrance to building where our “governing council” meets. And he was on a roll, the next victims of his attack were the members of the governing council themselves. “these guys, they work only four days and take the rest of the week off, they should be working 16 hour days to get their constitution going”. Give the man a cigar. “they have huge lunches, throw tons of food out and they drive stolen cars”, by now we were laughing so loud in the car people were looking at us like we were crazy. He said that if his name is ever mentioned he will be in trouble and mentioned something about an “article 15”. We had 20 minutes with him while we were being OK-ed for meeting a Council member, he was so cool I wish the Americans didn’t freak out every time an Iraqi walks towards them I wanted to shake his hands and say thank you. He made sure I got my pieces of paper back and let us in. But he left us with one more pearl of wisdom:

“They tell you it’s the Oil but I know it is not the Oil, I just can’t figure out what the hell it is we are here for.”

He should be on TV.