Patrice de Bergeracpas

MoA—The last attack on U.S. units in Iraq happened on February 15 against a U.S. position in Erbil, Iraq. Some three small rockets were fired by an unknown group of provocateurs.

To call an attack with seven 500 pound bombs on a border station guarded by official Iraqi security forces against ISIS attacks hundreds of miles away from Erbil “defensive” and “in response” is of course ridiculous.

Katib Hisbullah (not related to Hizbullah in Lebanon) and KSS are under command of the Iraqi prime minister. They were founded with help from Iran in 2014 to fight against ISIS. Since 2018 they are regular Iraqi forces paid and equipped by the Iraqi government, not by Iran. This attack will escalate the situation in Iraq. More attacks against U.S. and other foreign units there are now assured.

KIM PETERSEN—I learned a while back to be especially skeptical of western mass media and their governments. [1] My experience of life in China is nothing like how western demonization portrays it to be. Therefore, I looked forward to the chance to experience North Korea first hand. I traveled there with a Chinese group departing China. Starting out from Dandong, China, we crossed the Yalu River to Sinuiju, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). From Sinuiji we took a train to Pyongyang and explored other areas of the DPRK in 2017. I wrote about this in “There Are Human Beings in North Korea. Neither Wealthy Nor Poor.” My impression of North Korea was extremely positive, and I look very forward to returning there one day.

ERIC ZUESSE–iden’s foreign policies are putting Democratic Party lipstick onto the Republican Party’s pig. That’s his ‘change’, on US foreign policies. Though President Joe Biden is publicly critical of Trump’s foreign policies, he’s continuing almost all of them and is changing only minor ones. The changes are almost entirely in rhetoric, not in actual policies, as will be documented here.

A good example of this entirely rhetorical ‘difference’ is described in a February 19th article from Reuters, Drawing contrast with Trump, Biden promises US allies a partnership that’s not transactional. Biden’s policy, to “promote democracy over autocracies,” condemns Trump’s polices as having been “transactional” instead of based on “values.” But, actually, America’s invasions, and coups, and economic sanctions, during the past few decades, have been ‘justified’ by condemning the US regime’s target-nations (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine before America’s 2014 coup there — and now Ukraine is ‘our ally‘) as not being “democratic,” and as not adhering to ‘human rights’, as if the US regime itself were an authentic democracy, or were unquestionably better on human rights than the targets against which its aggressions are directed — none of which is true.

ERIC ZUESSE—And then there’s Julian Assange, who has never been convicted of anything but is being drugged and held in a British maximum-security prison as the latest stage in his decade-long imprisonment-without-conviction for anything. A British judge dropped all charges against him and was keeping him in prison pending a decision by Joe Biden (via Merrick Garland) on whether or not to re-assert Donald Trump’s re-assertion of Barack Obama’s assertion that Assange had stolen (though he never stole) and made public U.S. Government secrets and should be extradited to the U.S. for what everyone expects to be a kangaroo court trial that would end in his execution for having done what Daniel Ellsberg had done in the Pentagon Papers case about the Vietnam War. The international hero, Assange, is to be ‘tried’ in a U.S. court. On February 12th, the New York Times bannered, “Biden Justice Dept. Asks British Court to Approve Extradition of Julian Assange”. Biden continues Trump’s continuation of Obama’s attempt to murder Julian Assange.

PHILIP GIRALDI—he new White House Team has been in place for more than a month and it is perhaps time to consider where it is going with America’s fractured foreign policy. To be sure, when a new administration brings in a bunch of “old hands” who made their bones by attacking Syria and Libya while also assassinating American citizens by drone one might hope that those mistakes might have served as valuable “lessons learned.” Or maybe not, since no one in the Democratic Party ever mentions the Libya fiasco and President Joe Biden has already made it clear that Syria will continue to be targeted with sanctions as well as with American soldiers based on its soil. And no one will be leaving Afghanistan any time soon. The Biden team will only let up when Afghanistan is “secure” and there is regime change in Damascus.