PRESS TV notes, "A military convoy carrying logistic supplies for American forces has been targeted in Babil province, central Iraq. The convoy was targeted on Saturday night near the Iraqi city of Musayyib in Babil province, according to the Lebanese TV channel Al Mayadeen." MEHR NEWS adds:
Earlier, Iraqi resistance groups announced that they have recorded the footage of a US convoy being targeted and they will release its video soon.
They released the video of a truck carrying US military logistics equipment being targeted in the south of the country today.
The Saberin News Channel reported that the video belonged to a convoy carrying logistics equipment for the US Army, which was targeted by a roadside bomb on February 1 in the western part of Basra province.
According to Saberin News, the operation was carried out by Iraqi resistance group Awliya al-Dam.
If only the United States had a new president, someone with a fresh point of view who could look at this war that has dragged on through Bully Boy Bush occupying the White House for two terms, through Barack Obama's two terms as president and through Donald Trump's one term as president.
Well we do have a new president, he just doesn't have a fresh point of view.
Author Michael Knox told Hill.TV he is disappointed that President Biden has signaled he might leave certain troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, after the president committed to ending some wars during his 2020 campaign.
“I would say it’s a disappointment, but it’s to be expected. Joe Biden ended his nomination acceptance speech and his victory speech and his inauguration speech with the words ‘And may God protect our troops,’” said Knox.
The professor emeritus at the University of South Florida said former Presidents Trump and Obama also expressed similar sentiments about the U.S. military in their speeches.
Knox, author of “Ending U.S. Wars by Honoring Americans Who Work for Peace," said those kinds of repeated remarks by presidents are part of a “culture of war” in American society that emphasizes militarism.
Joe doesn't have a fresh point of view, he doesn't have a fresh anything. Even his lies are old. SPUTNIK notes:
US President Joe Biden has revived a decade-old claim that he was shot at during an overseas trip. Speaking to employees of the State Department, the 78-year-old lauded them for "personal courage" and said:
"I’ve been with some of you when we’ve been shot at. I’ve been with some of you when we’ve been in places that you would not have any idea you’d want to be when you were going to school. They never told you that that is going to happen."
The Democrat did not elaborate on when and how he was shot at, but it appears he was referring to the statement he made in 2007, which caused a lot of controversy. Back then he said he was shot at three times in the Green Zone, an area established during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. When asked to elaborate in detail, the politician gave an evasive description, saying there were instances when he was shot at or felt that he was being shot at. Only one of the instances, Biden said, involved a shot landing outside the building where the politician was staying.
"No one got up and ran from the room—it wasn’t that kind of thing.…It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head", he told reporters before saying that the more accurate description would be "I was near where a shot landed".
The politician’s explanation later caused indignation among servicemen and veterans. Back then Patrick Campbell, legislative director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, warned that the Democrat should be careful with such statements.
"Veterans don’t like it when people mischaracterise their service, people who overstate what happens to them. We have names for them", Campbell said.
'I’ve done some dumb things'
This is not the first time that Biden has stated something which has later turned out to be untrue. During his first presidential campaign in 1988, he was accused of plagiarism: the Democrat copied the speech of British politician Neil Kinnock, who served as a UK MP and Leader of the Opposition between 1970 and 1995. During that time, Biden, a law school graduate, left colleagues and voters bewildered when he claimed to be a coal miner, apparently mixing himself up with Kinnock’s father in Wales who worked down in the mines. He reiterated this claim when he became vice president of the United States in 2008.
Joe's lies were getting old back when he was in the Senate. Now he's just pathetic.
And what the US has done to Iraq is pathetic. It has not helped the Iraqi people one bit. RUDAW notes:
Militia forces affiliated with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr raided a
number of activists' houses in Iraq’s Najaf province on Saturday night,
activists told Rudaw English. The raids came a day after a group of
activists chanted slogans criticizing the cleric on the one year
anniversary of the killing of tens of people by Sadr supporters.
Activists on Friday held a ceremony to mark the one year anniversary of a
massacre in Najaf’s Sadrayn square where Sadr supporters known as the
"Blue Caps" stormed an anti-government protest camp. Twenty-three people
were killed and more than 182 wounded, according to AFP.
Live rounds and petrol bombs were used against protesters during
clashes, and their tents were burned or removed. Days later, Sadr
announced the dissolution of the "Blue Caps" militia.
Video from the anniversary ceremony on Friday showed dozens of people
gathered in the Writers Union Hall in Najaf, chanting slogans against
the Sadrist movement and its leader. "No god but Allah. Muqtada is the
enemy of Allah,” they shouted in clips that went viral on social media.
The day after the ceremony, forces from the pro-Sadr Saraya al-Salam
(the Peace Brigades) militia stormed the homes of four activists,
terrorizing them and their families, according to Najaf activist Saif
al-Mansoori.
Speaking to Rudaw English on Saturday, Mansoori said they are being
threatened by people who are active on the political scene. "Freedom of
expression is guaranteed in the constitution, but the one who threatens
the activists because they try to express their views freely, is
participating in elections that are part of the democratic process.”
This as Fadhel al-Nashmi (ASHARQ AL-AWSAT) reports, "Unidentified assailants attacked the headquarters of the Iraqi Communist Party in Najaf with Molotov cocktails, burning the offices despite causing no causalities." It's related. In the past the Communist Party partnered with Moqtada. That partnership broke and last week they announced an alliance with the demonstrators. Then their headquarters were bombed.
We'll wind down with this from Danny Haiphong (BLACK AGENDA REPORT):
The white hooligans who invaded Capitol Hill on January 6th set the stage for the U.S. ruling class to reinvigorate its most prized political narrative: American exceptionalism. Trump committed the most egregious crime of all in the eyes of the empire by encouraging his most loyal supporters to desecrate what one police officer on the scene called “the most sacredest place.” His closing act paved an even smoother road for the incoming Biden administration to quickly militarize Washington D.C. and normalize a period of sustained crisis vis-à-vis cosmetic changes to the leadership of the empire. But as neoliberal elements of the ruling class breathe a sigh of relief, the struggle against the Biden administration’s imperial criminality will face immense challenges in the coming period.
For one, Biden is a white supremacist and a war hawk but one would never know listening to the corporate media. The ruling class understands that Joe Biden is less popular than Bernie Sanders’ mittens and has thus focused all of its energy on the optics of his administration. However, endless celebrations of the “diversity” embodied in Joe Biden’s cabinet are nothing but hollow gestures for people under the crossfire of U.S. empire. As Nikole Hannah-Jones pondered the significance of Lloyd Austin being named the first Black Secretary of Defense , no one in the Biden camp has spoken out against the past, present, and future war crimes which will undoubtedly shape the administration.
“Celebrations of the “diversity” embodied in Joe Biden’s cabinet are nothing but hollow gestures.”
Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken provided a useful review of what to expect from the U.S. empire moving forward in his confirmation hearing with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Blinken co-signed U.S. support of disgraced coup leader Juan Guaido as the head of state in Venezuela and endorsed the continued enforcement of starvation sanctions on the Venezuelan people. He also affirmed the blatant lie that Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Blinken agreed with Trump that China represented the “greatest foreign policy challenge of this century” and promised to build a more effective but equally “tough” strategy of containment . The first days of the Biden era saw a U.S. military envoy enter occupied Syria from Iraq. Israel, the U.S.’ closest military ally in the region, celebrated Blinken’s affirmation of U.S. loyalty to the settler state by launching an airstrike that killed a handful of Syrian men, women, and children. The politics of representation, in the area of U.S. empire, amount to a narrow nationalism that places the superiority and exceptionalism of the United States above the lives of colonized people and oppressed people around the world.This is why it is so important for organizations such as Black Alliance for Peace to develop and strengthen in the coming period. The Trump era left the struggle against empire defenseless from the popularization of faux-populist and white nationalist politics on the one hand, and the Democratic Party’s con of diversity on the other. Only an organized Black Left movement can reconcile the contradictions presented by these two ideological wings of a dying imperialist bird of prey.
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