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In the last year of his life, Martin 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 against secular liberals and the left.

In these dictatorships, often the only places where
people had freedom to meet and organize were mosques - and out of these
mosques sometimes grew extreme Islamist movements. The Shah's torture
state in Ir... >>>