It is grimly appropriate that the "ceremony" marking the official end of the British occupation of southern Iraq should have taken place on Sunday in the departure lounge of Basra airport.
British forces have been holed up in the airport for the past three months and Sunday's "handover" to the various death squads, religious extremists and sectarian militias which the Brown government unblinkingly refers to as the new "democratic" Iraq was a suitably farcical end to the four-and-a-half-year occupation.
New Labour has been steeped in lies and spin since well before the 2003 invasion, so it is no surprise that it is trying to sell the occasion as a great leap toward a stable and free society. Foreign Secretary Dabid Miliband invited us to believe that what we are seeing is progress toward "an Iraq run by Iraqis for all Iraqis."
Yet international politics expert Dr Eric Herring has pointed out that the power vacuum is now likely to be filled by the Mahdi Army of warlord Muqtada al-Sadr, rather than a representative government.
And the Iraqis themselves appear to think differently from our government. A BBC poll of Basra's citizens taken on Friday found that 86 per cent thought that the overall effect of the British occupation had been negative. Only 2 per cent thought that it had been positive.
Even in military terms, the occupation has ended in ignominious defeat. The British "withdrawal" to Basra airport was a last-ditch attempt to cut the heavy casualty levels suffered by the occupiers. Our government was insisting over the weekend that this had led to a massive drop in attacks. Unfortunately it was only attacks on British troops that had fallen.
But this is emblematic of the occupiers' attitude to ordinary Iraqis in general. We can say for certain that 174 British troops have been killed during the occupation while having no idea what the exact figure is for civilian deaths - because they have simply not been recorded. We can, however, confidently number the slaughter in the tens of thousands.
Four million Iraqis have fled their country and those who remain are subject to appalling shortages of essential services and supplies.
The situation is even worse for women who, for all the occupiers' talk of democracy and human rights, face a death sentence for going outside without the hijab - something which just did not happen before the invasion.
No matter what the spin put on it by military top brass and new Labour drones, this war and the subsequent rapacious occupation has been a disaster for the Iraqi people and a near-disaster for Britain. Dragged into the whole sordid affair by that serviceable villain Tony Blair, Iraqis and British troops alike have been cynically deployed as a fig-leaf for a US-led adventure aimed at consolidating economic control over the region.
Although an end to the occupation is welcome, it must not be forgotten that US forces still swarm over most of the country - and the construction of massive permanent military bases continue apace - while Britain intends to retain some 4,500 troops at Basra airport until at least next spring.
Gordon Brown has given himself a wafer-thin veneer of credibility with this flawed and phony "handover," but the British people must never forget that it was he who bankrolled Blair's war and he must not be allowed to escape the consequences.
It is grimly appropriate that the "ceremony" marking the official end of the British occupation of southern Iraq should have taken place on Sunday in the departure lounge of Basra airport.
British forces have been holed up in the airport for the past three months and Sunday's "handover" to the various death squads, religious extremists and sectarian militias which the Brown government unblinkingly refers to as the new "democratic" Iraq was a suitably farcical end to the four-and-a-half-year occupation.
New Labour has been steeped in lies and spin since well before the 2003 invasion, so it is no surprise that it is trying to sell the occasion as a great leap toward a stable and free society. Foreign Secretary Dabid Miliband invited us to believe that what we are seeing is progress toward "an Iraq run by Iraqis for all Iraqis."
Yet international politics expert Dr Eric Herring has pointed out that the power vacuum is now likely to be filled by the Mahdi Army of warlord Muqtada al-Sadr, rather than a representative government.
And the Iraqis themselves appear to think differently from our government. A BBC poll of Basra's citizens taken on Friday found that 86 per cent thought that the overall effect of the British occupation had been negative. Only 2 per cent thought that it had been positive.
Even in military terms, the occupation has ended in ignominious defeat. The British "withdrawal" to Basra airport was a last-ditch attempt to cut the heavy casualty levels suffered by the occupiers. Our government was insisting over the weekend that this had led to a massive drop in attacks. Unfortunately it was only attacks on British troops that had fallen.
But this is emblematic of the occupiers' attitude to ordinary Iraqis in general. We can say for certain that 174 British troops have been killed during the occupation while having no idea what the exact figure is for civilian deaths - because they have simply not been recorded. We can, however, confidently number the slaughter in the tens of thousands.
Four million Iraqis have fled their country and those who remain are subject to appalling shortages of essential services and supplies.
The situation is even worse for women who, for all the occupiers' talk of democracy and human rights, face a death sentence for going outside without the hijab - something which just did not happen before the invasion.
No matter what the spin put on it by military top brass and new Labour drones, this war and the subsequent rapacious occupation has been a disaster for the Iraqi people and a near-disaster for Britain. Dragged into the whole sordid affair by that serviceable villain Tony Blair, Iraqis and British troops alike have been cynically deployed as a fig-leaf for a US-led adventure aimed at consolidating economic control over the region.
Although an end to the occupation is welcome, it must not be forgotten that US forces still swarm over most of the country - and the construction of massive permanent military bases continue apace - while Britain intends to retain some 4,500 troops at Basra airport until at least next spring.
Gordon Brown has given himself a wafer-thin veneer of credibility with this flawed and phony "handover," but the British people must never forget that it was he who bankrolled Blair's war and he must not be allowed to escape the consequences.