"A DUTY TO PAY OUR POLITICAL AND MORAL DEBT"

More than 2,000 Polish soldiers left for Iraq yesterday, the first in a series of deployments from a Europe that has proved willing to send troops to Iraq despite anti-U.S. pressure from France and Germany.

The soldiers will be part of a 9,200-strong Polish-led multinational division ensuring security in one of postwar Iraq's four zones.

"Democracy, liberty and respect for human rights would not have existed in Poland and in Central Europe if Western democracies had treated us with indifference 14 years ago. We have a duty to pay our political and moral debt," President Aleksander Kwasniewski told his troops as they prepared to depart.

Good man.