Constrained by the rules imposed by the US/UK occupation authorities, the new "democratically elected" Iraqi government's role is to split and fragment resistance to the illegal occupation, reports Sean Murray

To much fanfare from Bush and Blair the final results of the elections to the Iraqi National Assembly were announced on 17 February. The Shia United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) won the 30 January election with 48 per cent of the vote, was allocated 140 seats. The Kurdish parties, which came second in the poll, have 75 seats and interim PM Iyad Allawi's party 40 seats.

The 275-seat National Assembly will first have to choose a largely symbolic President and two Vice-Presidents. They will in turn appoint a Prime Minister - the most important position in the new government - and a cabinet.

Negotiations are still continuing as to who will be the new Prime Minister. The front-runner is the current interim Vice-President, Dr Ibrahim al-Jaafari, spokesperson for the Islamic Dawa Party.

But even as the results were being announced, Bush and Blair were confirming that the new government would continue to be subservient to the US/UK occupation. Opinion polls report that 80 per cent of Iraqis want the US/UK forces to leave now. The second point on the platform of the UIA calls for "a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq." But four days after the Iraq's voted - the majority presumably in favour of this point - Bush stated that "you don't set timetables." And while Tony Blair called the elections "magnificent" he dismissed a firm timetable out of hand.

Other statements in the platform of the UIA guarantees a job to every Iraqi; proposes social security and compensation to workers; state support for the building of houses for homeowners and the provision of health services, medicine and medical insurance. It also supports women's participation in politics, the economy and social life; support for youth and for families; developing industry and agriculture and education. In addition it calls for an independent foreign policy. All these can also expect a veto by Bush, Blair and the real power in Iraq, US ambassador John Negroponte - a man who organised death squads in Latin America in the early 1980s.

While Allawi and his government were also rejected at the polls the former finance minister in the interim government, Adel Abd al-Mahdi, looks set to continue to be an important figure in the new cabinet.

Al-Mahdi is the Bush administration's man in the UIA. In October, he told a gathering of the American Enterprise Institute that he planned to "restructure and privatise [Iraq's] state-owned enterprises", and in December he made another trip to Washington to unveil plans for a new oil law, "very promising to the American investors". It was al-Mahdi himself who oversaw the signing of a flurry of deals with Shell, BP and ChevronTexaco in the weeks before the elections, and it is he who negotiated the recent austerity deal with the IMF.

The "independent" government is anything but. The US occupiers completely control the national budget - both the oil sales revenues and reconstruction and other funds allocated to it by the US administration. The US and British occupiers of Iraq have 150,000 service personnel, 20,000 private "security" contractors, a budget of $50 billion a year. They have four permanent military bases and 10 more are planned.

Before he handed over to the collaborator Allawi, US pro-consul Paul Bremer enacted one hundred or more rules and "transitional administrative laws" which the Iraqi parliament and the incoming government cannot change. These impose permanent low tax rates, an open door to US investment, and privatise huge chunks of state-owned property: in short the full neoliberal agenda, ensuring US corporate domination.

Bremer not only chose the interim Iraqi government, he purged its permanent bureaucracy, selected its judges, and imposed contracts in these ministries, lasting years ahead. The National Assembly can change the ministers but will have to operate within this strait jacket until presidential elections next December. And this too will take place under the same conditions as the recent election. Only the utter slavishness of the western billionaire media conceals this shameful fact from the population in the occupying countries.

But even this fraudulent victory would not have been possible without concession wrought out of US as a result of the mass uprising in 2004.

The election results testify to a strategic concession the US-UK occupation authorities made to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, in return for undermining the movement of resistance to the occupation during the siege of Najaf last year.

It provides the only possible basis for Bush and Blair to claim that the elections represents the democratic will of the Iraqi people and endorses the war and occupation. In fact opinion polls continue to show 80 per cent of Iraqis oppose the occupation. Events over the coming months will make it abundantly clear that the results are not an endorsement of the occupation.

The price of victory for George Bush was to sideline the large Sunni Arab minority from whom the rulers of Iraq have been drawn since the foundation of the state.

The conservative Shi'a clerics around Sistani could hardly refuse the historic offer of power, though they will have to share this power with the Kurdish nationalist leaders, the other excluded grouping in the traditional arrangement. No matter to the Americans that by creating a different excluded minority out of the former Sunni dominant élites they have laid the basis for an ongoing conflict that could degenerate into a bloody confessional and ethnic civil war. If it happens the main criminals will not be the Iraqi Islamists or Ba'athists but Bush and Blair.

Last autumn they faced the nightmare of the collapse of their occupation strategy as radical Shi'as and the varied opposition forces within the so-called Sunni triangle came together to oppose the occupation arms in hand. The US occupiers and the puppet regime pulled all the dirty tricks they could to split this alliance, including bombs in the different communities' mosques, assassinations of leaders and so on. The elections were also devised as a way to split the population because Bush and company knew the Sunni population would boycott the poll.

Part of US/UK's strategic aim to split the popular resistance was to bring the Shi'as to power under their most conservative leaders. Now the Iraqi people will have to pay the price. The only way to shorten this process and save the Iraqi people from the poisonous "divide and rule " policy designed by the Anglo-American occupiers is to drive them out as quickly as possible.

Guerrilla warfare - now confined in its support to a minority section of the population - is not the solution. Class struggle is. Of course armed resistance to the occupiers remains not only important, but also unavoidable. In the south and the north, in the Shi'a areas of Baghdad, in the southern oilfields, resistance can take a mass form on the streets and in the workplaces. It must do so. Radical Islamism can only divide the resistance, alienate women, youth, intellectuals and above all workers.

That is why a workers' party, secular, socialist and revolutionary, must emerge in Iraq committed to the total and immediate expulsion of the occupiers and the mobilisation of the country's resources for reconstruction of homes, schools, factories, roads and rail links. Such a party must be internationalist, linked to the Palestinian struggle, to all progressive forces in the Middle East and central Asia and to the antiwar and anticapitalist movement in the west.

A resurgent international movement could undermine the US and UK rulers' support at home, and the morale of its troops in the field, helping to bring about a defeat for imperialism and a massive impulse to revolution everywhere.