Luther King Jr. questioned US military interventions against progressive movements in the Third World
by invoking a JFK quote:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Were he alive to witness the last three decades of US foreign policy,
King might update that quote by noting:
“Those who make secular revolution impossible will make extreme Islamist revolution inevitable.”
For decades beginning during the Cold War,
US policy in the Islamic world has been aimed at suppressing secular reformist and leftist movements.
Beginning with the CIA-engineered coup against a secular democratic reform government in Iran in 1953
(it was about oil),
Washington has propped up dictators,
coaching these regimes in the black arts of torture and mayhem.
