The end of Britain's occupation of Iraq was proclaimed last Thursday. By the end of May, the remaining troops should be repatriated, leaving a few hundred soldiers to "train" the Iraqi army.

Predictably, Brown's ministers congratulated themselves about what they called "a job well done". Never mind the 200 men, women and children, who were killed in April, in Baghdad alone! Far from being the "stable new country" hailed by the government, Iraq remains torn apart by the rival armed thugs produced by the western invasion!

Never mind either, the devastation of the war. Six years after the invasion, the 3.5 million inhabitants of Basra still do not have a working sewage and refuse system, despite the potential catastrophic health consequences this may have in such a hot climate.

Nor do they have regular electricity supplies. The invaders may boast of having restarted oil production, for the benefit of Western oil majors, but the factories which survived the bombings are left to rust for lack of electricity. As a result, over 20% of the population of Basra is jobless and depends entirely on NGOs for food.

What happened to the "reconstruction", which ministers boasted so much about, then? Official figures tell part of the real story. While £6.4 billion was spent on military expenditure for the war and occupation, only £744m went to "reconstruction". But even that is misleading: a large part of this sum went to "security" projects, like Basra's brand new detention centre. Turning the screw on the Iraqi population was always far more important than repairing the devastation caused by the invasion!

By a cynical twist, Britain's "end of occupation" coincides with the organisation of a high-powered "Invest in Iraq" conference in London. Brown has invited the whole of the Baghdad government and a host of Iraqi businessmen to wine and dine with representatives of a hundred or so British companies. Six years on, the City is preparing to reap the profits of the bloodbath of Iraq!

Yes, this was all there really was to this criminal war. 179 British soldiers died, 800 were severely wounded or disabled, tens of thousands of Iraqi were killed in the British zone of occupation alone, all that for the greed of the City barons!