Can't keep a good nation down.

US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte on a tour of the death squad scarred battlefield.

The Iraqi elections have finally formally ended, 20 or more days after they began (click title for link). The result, with a US imposed dictator becoming an 'elected' Prime Minister, displays the utter cynicism which now defines colonial 'democracy' under the Obama stewardship of US Imperialism. Iyal Allawi won a two seat majority in the national Parliament, ahead of former PM Nouri al-Maliki, with both claiming mass electoral fraud and intimidation against the other side. Massive fraud is the bread and butter of elections in US dependencies, witnessed recently in Afghanistan and Honduras, but the crux issue has been who is allowed to stand and who is not. This election took place at a time when the US media and state were ramping up attacks against the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions for alleged undemocratic forms, yes, Obama and company have literally no shame, as it takes quite a leap of hagiography to ignore the 7 years of occupation in Iraq as the backdrop to this coronation. The justice and accountability commission – the organisation charged with pursuing the de-Ba'athification process set in train by the Americans in 2003 – has issued edicts seeking to ban 511 individual candidates and 14 party lists from the elections. On the eve of the vote the commission banned a further 50 candidates. Meanwhile, Ali Faisal al-Lami, the head of the justice and accountability commission, also ran as a parliamentary candidate, in a blatant conflict of interest indicative of a system where governmental institutions have been colonised by political parties and run as private fiefdoms. This follows mass banning of all opponents of the occupation in 2005 and 2007. It also follows the banning of anti-occupation trade unions, especially in the crucial oil sector which has been parcelled out to US and UK oil transnationals. Most chillingly of all it follows the work of John Negroponte as Ambassador to Iraq and his well worn policy of death squad warfare to silence anti Imperialist and pro-democracy opposition, a method he honed in Latin America under the Reaganite counter revolution of the 1980s. On April 20, 2004, Bush nominated Negroponte as ambassador to Iraq, stating that, "he has done a really good job of speaking for the United States to the world about our intentions to spread freedom and peace." Calling him "a man of enormous experience and skill"-in organising the rape and murder of men and women across the globe! (see this article for a review of this fascists work-http://www.ww4report.com/negropontedeathsquad). Negroponte oversaw the build up of Kurdish and Shiite Militias which were then used to murder Sunni resistance fighters, as well as other resistance forces. This strategy proved succesful, with former anti occupation forces around Moqtada al-Sadr joining the fray and taking a place within the US security fold, all in return for legitimacy and offices of state of course. As Major General Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani SAID IN 2005 "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation." Threatening everyone in a village with torture and death, if the village is deemed a potential base insurgent operations can be a very effective technique, whether the perpetrators are the Nazi SS in occupied Czechoslovakia, the death squads in El Salvador, or the new forces created under Negropontes watch in Iraq, such as the "Saraya Iraqna," which began offering big wads of American cash for insurgent scalps--up to $50,000, the Iraqi paper Al Ittihad reported. "Our activity will not be selective," the group promised. This strategy of tactical terror aimed to sever an insurgency from it's potential base of support. In the case of 40% refusing to vote in the Iraqi elections this approach would seem to have paid off.

Here we have it, Imperialist democracy, death squads and ballot boxes fiddled and stolen. Yet despite this fraud and repression, and despite the 100k plus US Troops still occupying Iraq, the resistance still fights and with no sign of capitulation. Al Sadr and other satraps trade offices for resistance, as many national liberation forces have done before, but the root cause of the resistance-US Imperialist occupation-means that new forces, new methods, and new fighters constantly emerge and renew the ranks, just as they have always done in the war against Imperialism.