IRAQ casualties have risen sharply amidst the political vacuum following the inability of the various puppet pro-Shia or pro-Sunni parties, led by Maliki and Allawi, to form a government four months after the election.
July was Iraq’s deadliest month for more than two years with 535 people killed and thousands injured in bomb blasts or other attacks.
The insurgency, seven years after the ‘imperialist victory’ and four years after the lynching of Saddam Hussein, is intensifying with popular support.
This is in the midst of an ‘electricity intifada’, with thousands demonstrating and with millions angry because of the inability of the Maliki regime to provide electrical power for cooking and air conditioning, in the super-heat of the Iraqi summer with temperatures of over 50 degrees centigrade.
The masses say that Saddam, after all of the imperialist assaults and despite the cruel UN sanctions, was always able to get the electrical power back on, but that the puppets cannot. They have simply pocketed the billions in ‘aid’ given by the US and other states, and used it for their private insurance schemes, via Swiss bank accounts.
The tip of the iceberg of this criminal robbery of the Iraqi people can be seen in the figures produced by the US government. The Department of Defence has been unable to account properly for $8.7bn (96 per cent) of the $9.1bn the Pentagon received from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI).
Further, ‘Since 2003, the Congress has appropriated $53.31 billion for Iraq relief and reconstruction activities.’
It has been found that, ‘The Department of Defence (DoD), the Department of State (DoS), and the Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have records, management policies and procedures, but have not fully implemented those procedures for preserving their Iraq reconstruction records.
‘This situation leaves the US government vulnerable to waste and theft as it may not have the necessary information to pursue potential cases of fraud and/or to perform audits of reconstruction activities.’
Further: ‘Since our last report in January 2010, SIGIR (Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction) has opened an additional 13 criminal investigations involving 18 subjects.
‘This brings the total number of criminal investigations opened resulting from this initiative to 45, involving a total of 60 subjects.’
At the same time as the aid has been pilfered and the smashed power and water infrastructure left where it was blasted to by the ‘shock and awe’ campaign, the Iraqi puppet regime has banned the electrical trade unions after conducting a big campaign against the oil workers trade unions.
This is much to the embarrassment of the Western trade union leaders who cheered when Saddam’s statue was torn down and then welcomed the Allawi and Maliki dictatorships.
Under Premier Allawi, the city of Fallujah was destroyed and children are still being born deformed, because of the chemicals that US forces used.
Under Allawi, the trade unions have been banned, this aid has been pocketed and the infrastructure has remained smashed and obliterated.
The UK and US union leaders should apologise to the Iraqi masses for the role that they have played in supporting and helping to prop up the imperialist stooge regimes in Iraq that slaughtered the masses and pilfered the ‘aid’.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi people are advancing forward and are going to celebrate the beginning of the withdrawal of US troops by overthrowing the puppet regime that the US is leaving behind, in order to have free elections in a liberated country where the masses will elect the government of their choice.