Another tragic procession...and a snub

This morning, on the same day that the headlines were captured by a bomb exploding in the Iraqi Parliament building in Baghdad killing two M.P,s, and by a massive steel bridge being blown up over the River Tigris, a C-17 transport landed at RAF Lyneham containing the bodies of four British army personnel killed when their Warrior armoured car hit a land-mine near Basra.

Two of the four killed were nurses from the RAMC, one man and one woman and the senior officer present was also a woman. Gender shouldn't matter, they were all serving soldiers doing a job of work but somehow the deaths of two young women, barely out of their teens, somehow seems to reinforce the senseless stupidity of it all.

The senior officer, Joanne Yorke Dyer, apart from being a very pretty girl was a young woman with brains. She obtained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University and then chose to join the Army as a trainee intelligence officer. She had been in Iraq only a few weeks as part of her training.



Eleanor Dluglosz was only 19, a nurse who was in Iraq to provide medical support. Her mother was interviewed today, the day of her daughter's funeral and said 'We always wnated what was best for her. She meant everything to me. But you have to support them in whatever they do, don't you..and she always wanted to serve her country."




It makes me almost want to cry and to beat my hands on a desk in frustration when I hear these bereaved parents coming to terms with something no parent should ever have to face, and doing so by reconciling themselves to the old chestnut, 'she was serving her country'.

The sad thing is that the chickens never come home to roost for the people who are really responsible for the deaths of these two young women and the thousands of other , primarily American, servicemen and women who have died 'serving their country' in this hell hole of Iraq.

Bush and Blair will eventually step down from their well paid tenures, both presumably sleeping well at night, Bush satisfied that he 'got one in for the old man' and Blair confident in his Messianic role as St Anthony the Redeemer. Neither will think for too long of how many people they killed in the process.

But the grieving parents of four dead soldiers did have the last word at todays funerals. It is custom and practice for a Government Minister to attend funerals of all British service personnel killed in action. There wasn't one there today. The parents sent a message to Downing Street that attendance by a representative of the British Government 'would not be welcomed'. I think their contempt speaks for the nation.