Even for a hollow charade, it was a bit thin on ceremony. A real puppet government would have had drums and a specially trained squad of Iraqi pipers in kilts skirtling back and forth for the cameras as the massed ranks of carefully screened dignitaries watched the sad choreography.

New dawns would have been declared, flags lowered and raised, and from the steps of his palace the puppet ruler would have pledged unquestioning loyalty to his imperial overlords.

Instead, the Bush administration made do with an anonymous office suite within the hastily renamed US embassy complex and a sheet of rolled paper to mark the installation of the CIA agent Iyad Allawi as the titular ruler of Iraq.

In the political make-believe world of George Bush's presidential election campaign, Iraq is now no longer a direct responsibility for the US, and thus no longer a drain on his electoral prospects.

But installing viable puppet regimes is a complex imperial political art, with a rulebook that runs back to the Roman empire. To be successful, a puppet ruler must offer his cowed people the lesser of two evils - the "benign" repression of his own security forces, in contrast to the outright brutality of the imperial legions. To his overlords, the puppet must offer the promise that a local face can rule the conquered more easily and cheaply. It has been done: Herod, puppet king of Augustus's Roman empire, ruled the fractious Jewish homeland for decades with the aid of mercenaries and a decent secret police force.

On the surface, Allawi's credentials as a puppet ruler are excellent. Born into a wealthy Shia family, he joined the Ba'ath Party as a student in Baghdad. In 1971, he left for London, where he spent the next three decades. In 1978, Saddam Hussein's agents tried to kill him with an axe at his home in north London. During the first Gulf war, while working for MI6 and the CIA, Allawi founded the Iraqi National Accord. The INA was one of six organisations favoured for funding under the US Congress's Iraqi Liberation Act 1998. Allawi has been on the CIA payroll for a decade and was allegedly responsible for the disastrous Downing Street claim that Saddam's mythical weapons of mass destruction could be operational in 45 minutes. He is a strong supporter of recruiting ex-members of Saddam's secret torture police, the Mukhabarat, to fight the insurgents. He is a man who is more than willing to fight a dirty war. To bolster his image in Washington, Allawi's supporters have spent more than $300,000 hiring US lobbyists and public relations firms such as Brown Lloyd James.

But Allawi's masters have forgotten the first rule of political puppetry. Puppet rulers can never win wars. That is a job for the empire's legions. Herod was installed after the Sixth Legion had pacified Judaea and Samaria. In the face of determined violent resistance, a puppet's security forces inevitably collapse. Being a puppet ruler, or working for them, is a mercenary enterprise, not a cause worth dying for.

I once had the misfortune to live under the most elaborate puppet government constructed by man. The Transitional Government of National Unity (TGNU for short) was not one but 13 racial governments packed into the same political space. Their mission was to bolster the South African apartheid regime's illegal occupation of Namibia in the late 1980s. Each puppet leader, casualty of some power struggle within the South-West African People's Organisation liberation movement, was awarded a casting-couch Afrikaner secretary and a suite of walnut office furniture in the colonial German Tintenpalast. They had sold their souls, and their dwindling followers, for a hefty salary and a Merc. They metamorphosed from black freedom fighters to apologists for a racist regime. When real independence came, they were swept away.

In Iraq, Allawi is also an irrelevance. The native resistance, and some foreign jihadi factions, are already fighting a complex cross-war of liberation against the US occupier. The level of violence is widespread, frequently suicidal, and profoundly destabilising. The resistance is fragmented, competitive and regional, making it triply difficult to contain. In every contact with the insurgents, Allawi's would-be army - the new US-trained Iraqi forces - has deserted or fled.

Allawi's local face is not going to make the occupation easier. Nor is Allawi likely to win any kind of legitimacy, barricaded within the US fortress in central Baghdad. His only hope would be to turn on the occupiers and denounce the actions of those who protect his life.

Cynically, in Iraq, the White House appears to be trying to repeat the puppet-regime tactics it used in Afghanistan, where whole regions have been allowed to fall under the control of different warlords just so long as Taliban activity is kept suppressed.

Although nominally Afghan, President Hamid Karzai, with his bodyguard of US special forces, serves a purpose: to distance the Bush administration from its responsibility as the real occupying military power. Karzai's regime is just an imperial cut-out device.

Afghanistan was easily abandoned because it is insignificant and worthless. But Iraq, with 10 per cent of the world's oil supply under its sands, is far too precious to lose, and the Americans want to maintain some hold on the country. A real transfer of power will take place only when a legitimate Iraqi leadership emerges, inevitably, from within the ranks of the resistance.

Any puppets on the CIA's payroll are unlikely to be eligible for the job.

[kevintoolis@hotmail.com]