Deeply Saddened

The subtler partner in the Coalition of the Enlightened fell over another milestone today when one of its military resources was detrimented by small-arms fire in Basra. The resource in question was "mounting a search and detention operation", which is probably just the sort of thing that causes irrational hatred to erupt in volatile people whose experience of Abu-Ghraib-enhanced democracy is limited. The detrimentation means that the Britishness of the region has been reduced to the tune of a hundred and fifty since the launch of Operation Telic in March 2003 which, as Fred Attewill and agencies observe with cluster-bomb precision, was undertaken to "help overthrow Saddam Hussein" and was more than two years ago.

The Ministry of Pre-emption was "deeply saddened about this death and all the lives that have been lost"; indeed, the Minister himself was so distraught that he had to relegate the announcement to an anonymous spokesbeing. No other deaths worth mentioning took place in Iraq today.