Over one year ago, the war-weary population and Congress rose up in protest and a war with Syria was averted to the chagrin of international capital. The hawkish politicians and pundits, masters of war, military establishment, arms manufacturers, and other interested parties want another go at it. On all the mainstream TV channels, the same people who advocated for the 2003 invasion in Iraq under false pretenses (‘weapons of mass destruction’), are pushing for military strikes to ‘save’ Iraq (and maybe Syria) from Islamic militants from the Islamic State or IS (previously called ISIL and ISIS) that have been shunned by Al Qaeda. But, this is only the cover story for a proposed war, which might be cover for a secret war in Iraq since the US and possibly Iran are flying “surveillance drones…over northern Iraq,” and possibly those which are armed. In response to a question about “U.S. concern of disruption of oil supplies,” President Obama said: “if, in fact, ISIL was able to obtain control over major [oil] output, significant refineries, that could be a source of concern” and that if there are “disruptions inside of Iraq…some of the other producers in the Gulf [will have]…to pick up the slack.” Basically, this means that U.S. military intervention in the region would be driven by oil.[1] This conclusion is no surprise, considering that in September, in front of the UN General Assembly, Obama said something that investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill called a “really naked…declaration of imperialism”: “the United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure our core interests in the region…We will ensure the free flow of energy from the region to the world. Although America is steadily reducing our own dependence on imported oil, the world still depends on the region’s energy supply and a severe disruption could destabilize the entire global economy,” which I’ve described in the past as the basis for Obama’s dirty energy doctrine. [2] While Obama’s petro-policy establishes some background, it is important to give some of the history of US involvement in Iraq in order to construct a fuller picture.

Long before the US got involved in the history of Iraq, the British were the pre-eminent power in the Mideast. In 1916, the British and French formulated a secret agreement called the Sykes-Picot agreement, which was later leaked by the angry Bolsheviks in October 1917, in which diplomats of both countries drew lines and divided up Arabic parts of the faltering Ottoman Empire into their own spheres of influence. In a sense it was a bit like the lines drawn in the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 as part of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in that those ethnic and cultural groups affected had no say, except this treaty only involved two parties instead of a group of twelve countries. Sadly for the people of the region, even though the agreement’s revelation was an embarrassment for the British and French, the League of Nations granted mandates to both countries in 1919, preserving the borders that diplomats had drawn up and put them into stone. These same borders would be used a rallying cry for IS as the maligned Stratfor put it, “from the point of view of Iraq’s jihadist celebrities, the 1916 borders drawn in secret by British and French imperialists represented by Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot to divide up Mesopotamia are not only irrelevant, they are destructible.” Even establishment reporter David Ignatius wrote in a recent column for the Washington Post that “the “line in the sand,” as author James Barr called the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement to partition the region, is dissolving before our eyes, and the primary beneficiaries are ruthless Islamic terrorists”” and that Iraq is splintered, requiring, in his view, a restablizing of the region by gathering “the essential players around a table and…framing a new security architecture” and possibly revisiting “the post-1919 borders” and having accommodation of “different ethnic minorities.” The New York Times recently wrote that Iraq what Iraq has been “haunted” by since its founding in 1921, “appears to have become a reality: the de facto partition of the country into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish cantons.” The article also noted that “Iraq and Syria’s potential fragmentation along sectarian or ethnic lines…may well generate new conflicts driven by ideology, oil, and other resources” all while what they declared was the “ISIS onslaught” has made “the formal secession of Iraqi Kurdistan far more plausible.”

Still, there is something more: the hunger for resources and the push for imperialism. This is important, since, as former war correspondent Scott Anderson noted in Smithsonian magazine,

“for nearly 400 years prior to World War I, the lands of Iraq existed as three distinct semi-autonomous provinces…within the Ottoman Empire…This delicate system was undone by the West, and for an all-too-predictable reason: oil…the “nation” of Iraq was created by [the British by] fusing the three Ottoman provinces into one and put under direct British control…Naturally, Britain didn’t present this as the land-grab that it truly was…[unlike] the ‘artificial nation’ of Jordan…[Iraq’s] history would be marked by a series of violent coups and rebellions, with its political domination by the Sunni minority simply deepening its sectarian fault lines…[sadly] the disastrous British playbook of 1920 was almost precisely replicated by the United States in 2003.”

The late political activist Chris Harman adds to this, writing that the “Middle East, with its huge oil reserves, was by far the most important prize for any imperialism in the second half of the 20th century,” as the British engaged in “double dealing” so that British firms could get their “hands on the oil reserves of Iraq and Iran.” [3] Pro-British governments in Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq were used to protect British “oil interests” as British troops pulled out in 1947, but Israel’s victory against “an ill-organised army sent by Arab monarchies” changed the equation. [4] A military coup led by Abdul Nasser “ended the pro-British monarchy” in Egypt and the new government nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, which was owned by Britain and France, resulting in a joint British-Israeli-French attack on Egypt. [5] At the same time this was happening, the British Empire was declining and the US swooped in, supplanting Britain “as the dominant power in the Middle East.”[6] Interestingly, the US followed British policy in the region and they were “highly successful in asserting hegemony over the region and its oil” by exploiting divisions between peoples and states which already existed. [7] This policy followed the same strategy used by European imperial powers during the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the 19th century.

With the stage set, the US would continue to assert its hegemony in the Middle East for years to come. After all, the presidential doctrines from Truman to Obama all have involved petroleum as a major “national security interest” directly or indirectly.[8] The then-Prime Minister of Iraq, Abd al-Karim Qasim, who was not a communist, was a pro-Soviet leader whose “authoritarian rule…gradually isolated him from the citizenry” didn’t have the ire of the US government until he “partially nationalized the oil industry” which angered US and UK multinational corporations. This, along with his populist programs (land reform, construction of low-cost housing, liberalizing the country’s constitution, etc…) made him “Iraq’s most popular leader.” Qasim also took Iraq out of the US orbit by removing the country from the Baghdad Pact and decriminalizing Iraq’s Communist Party, which made the US government, which was already mad about the partial nationalization, even madder. [9] During the Kennedy Administration, Qasim was finally ousted in a coup with Saddam Hussein’s anti-communist Ba’ath Party, many of whom had been arrested by Qasim, backed financially by the CIA. The US had tried to assassinate Qasim in 1960 and failed, but in 1963, with the coup completed, the popular Iraqi nationalist leader was given a short trial and was promptly executed. With a new regime in place, the “threats posed by Qasim” to “British imperial policy in the Middle East” and US interests were removed. More horribly for the people of Iraq, the CIA provided the new regime with a list of thousands of “leftist activists and organizers” who were killed in a subsequent mass murder. [10] The new regime only lasted a few months, when it was ousted by pro-Nasser forces, until it re-emerged in 1968, in a ‘corrective coup,’ which led to the rule of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr for eleven years. After al-Bakr resigned and stepped down in 1979, Saddam Hussein became the next President and dictator of the country, ruling Iraq for the next 24 years, and he was supported by the US government time and time again until he became ‘unfavorable.’

Iraq under Saddam engaged in a “long and bloody war” with Iran from 1980 to 1988 in hopes of attracting “the support of the US and the wealthy Gulf states and cement[ing] its relations with multinationals,” a conflict in which the US government gave weapons to both sides.[11] Despite this strange logic, Iraq’s government was not completely delusional, considering that the US even sent over future Secretary of Defense and war criminal Donald Rumsfeld, then a special Mideast envoy, at one point, to “ensure…Saddam Hussein that the US would not object to using chemical weapons against Iran” in a war which would ultimately kill 1.5 million people.[12] Between at least 1985 and 1989, the US served as Iraq’s supplier for biological materials which were used by Saddam’s scientists to create biological weapons with materials including those which could cause anthrax, “damage vital organs…[and cause] systematic illness.”[13] Additionally, US exports of weapons to Iraq included “precursors to chemical warfare agents [and] plans for chemical warfare production facilities,” which continued into December 1989 even though chemical weapons and possibly biological weapons had been used against Iranians, Kurds, and Shiites.[14] Saddam, still wanting to attract the support of the US, Gulf States and multinationals, thought that invading Kuwait, which he claimed was with “tacit U.S. approval,” would benefit his regime.[15] As it turned out, he was wrong.

The invasion of oil-rich Kuwait would be the beginning of a U.S. military intervention in Iraq that would last for years to come. The US and its allies invaded full force in August 1990, in a war meant to “purge the American people of the Vietnam Syndrome,” with a “devastating bombing campaign, a land invasion, and the massacre of 100,000 Iraqis,” and followed by brutal UN sanctions after the war. [16] Still, this is only scratching the surface. In Harman’s view, the six-month-long invasion was not only about disciplining Iraq or warning other governments and movements in the region “who might challenge US oil companies,” but it was intended to show the other world powers to accept the US’s goals as the world policeman.[17] At the same time, the war was centered around energy, with the US achieving its major goals in the invasion by making sure the “incomparable energy resources of the Middle East” remained under US control and that profits that supported the US and British economies kept flowing, while teaching the ‘lesson’ that “the world is to be ruled by force.” [18] In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn writes that the war had the political aim to boost George H.W. Bush’s popularity, but it was also motivated by a long-standing US desire “to have a decisive voice in the control of Middle East oil resources,” which is in contrast to the “very weak” official justification that Iraq was building a nuclear bomb. [19]

The short invasion also had devastating effects on people of Iraq. The US dropped some “ninety thousand tons of bombs on Iraq in the space of forty-three days, intentionally destroying the civilian infrastructure, including eighteen of the twenty electricity generating plants and the water pumping and sanitation systems” which led to starvation, “disease and deaths of tens of thousands of children.” [20] While the bombing had been intended to lead to internal revolts in Iraq and to “force Saddam Hussein from office,” as Chalmers Johnson argued, it clearly “violated international humanitarian law and made the United States liable to charges of war crimes.” [21] After the invasion was over, brutal sanctions were imposed on Iraq, reinforcing and deepening the destruction of the bombing, by imposing harsh measures on Iraq including limits on post-invasion reconstruction and expanding social services. [22] Along with the starving and death of, at minimum, 350,000 Iraqi children, a maximum of half a million, as a result of the sanctions, which lasted for almost thirteen years (1990-2003), the US and allied forces continued to have a no-fly zone over parts of Iraq and bombed it off and on. [23] Some commentators have argued that this bombing is part of a ‘twenty year war’ (1990-2010 or 1991-2011) the US committed against Iraq: Bret Stephens argued it was an “unbroken thread” of differently named US military operations, John Tirman writing in the Boston Globe said that it constituted “an extraordinary American venture” and the former Executive director of Veterans for Peace, Michael T. McPhearson calling it a “20 year nightmare for the Iraqi people.”

In 2003, despite worldwide opposition to another invasion of Iraq, encouraged by the dissemination of war propaganda which is illegal under international law, the US and its allies invaded Iraq. This intervention has its roots in the ideas of those who were part of the former secretive think tank called the Project For A New American Century (PNAC). These neo-cons wanted an invasion of Iraq to gain control of its oil, fire a “warning shot across the bow” of every Mideast leader, and establish Iraq as “a military staging area for the eventual invasion and overthrow of several Middle Eastern regimes,” including allies, as noted in 1996 report.[24] Later, PNAC would push for a possible “permanent Gulf presence” and they would take positions in the Bush administration to “implement their neoconservative agenda” with Vice-President Dick Cheney, one of PNAC’s founding members, as part of the pack. [25] As cover for a war theorized by PNAC, the US government insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction possibly because “America supplied them” in the past, as noted earlier in this article. [26]. In 2003, a 12,000 page document was released to the UN Security Council by the Iraqi government showing, among other aspects, that of the “150 international companies that had armed Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s,” twenty four of them were American, including Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Honeywell International and Bechtel. [27]

There was something even more disturbing about the invasion, which had clearly not happened in the previous invasion in 1990-1991: selling off public services. The “whole country” became “for sale” with oil, government ministries, “schools, universities, roads…bridges” and more beginning to be privatized, more and more than ever before.[28] Winners of reconstruction of Iraq brought on by the bombing of the country to smithereens, included businesses who had “long-standing connections…with Natsios and the Bush administration,” with examples including Bechtel, Halliburton/KBR, DynCorp, and numerous others.[29] There are other groups that profited from the invasion as well, like the Carlyle Group, “thanks to the sales of robotics systems, and a major Iraq contract to train police.”[30] As social activist Naomi Klein put it, “nowhere has the merger of these political and profit-making goals [of groups like Bechtel and the Carlyle Group] been clearer than on the battlefields of Iraq.” [31]

There were a number of people who profited and had a role in creating a new Iraq. One of those people was James Baker, who became an equity partner at the Carlyle Group after George H.W. Bush’s term ended and was part of a law firm that is “often recognized as one of the leading oil and gas firms in the world”: Baker Botts. When George W. Bush named him as the special envoy on Iraq’s debt, he did not have to cash out his interests in Baker Botts and the Carlyle Group, even though both groups had “direct interests in the war.”[32] Later, as an envoy, Baker was supposed to be convincing governments that “Saddam-era debts should be canceled,” yet he was pushing for them to be paid by the Iraqi government.[33] Even though Baker resigned after Naomi Klein revealed the true nature of his dealings, Iraq went on to pay over $2.5 billion in reparations, mostly to Kuwait, and the rest of the unpaid debt was “merely rescheduled” which means it will have to be paid in the future.[34] There are a number of other sinister characters that should be remembered as well. One of these was George Schultz, who headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which was formed to help the “Bush White House…building the case for war in the public mind,” which sounds eerily similar to The Committee on Public Information which worked to build the case for World War I among the generally pacifist American population. [35] Schultz, at one point wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post calling for Saddam to be removed from power but he did not “disclose to his readers that he was, at the time, a member of the board of directors at Bechtel…[which] would collect $23 billion to reconstruct Iraq.”[36] There’s someone else as well: Richard Perle. Perle was not only a “friend and business associate of [Henry] Kissinger’s” but he was “one of the first post-9/11 disaster capitalists” since he created a venture capital firm not long after 9/11 called Trireme Partners which invested “in firms and services relevant to homeland security and defense.”[37] This is relevant because he sat on the Defense Policy Board, an advisory committee which offers an “excellent example of the invasive and malignant influence that military corporations exert on government policy.” [38] Perle even “told his investors about his pull at the Pentagon” which is not unreasonable since he was a director of a corporation which manufactured “high-tech eavesdropping technology” and was employed by Goldman Sachs, but his colleagues never knew about Trireme Partners. [39] There is one last figure that cannot be forgotten: Paul Bremmer, who was part of an insurance brokerage named Marsh & McLennan, which was “created a month after 9/11 to profit from the new concern around catastrophic risk.” [40] Bremmer went on to ‘manage’ Iraq as the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA based in Iraq’s Green Zone, which is exactly what Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, is all about. Importantly, Bremmer, in conjunction with Rumsfeld, decided to “disband Saddam’s army, the one institution that somewhat united the country,” which has bearing on the recent events in Iraq. There are others I won’t go into detail on, but are still important. [41]

Flash forward to December 2011, when the US, in accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement signed with Iraq, was pulling out the last US troops from the country. For some, this must have meant that the ‘twenty year war’ waged by the US against Iraq was over. Yet, a secret army of contractors, diplomatic personnel and more remained, with many of them a likely part of the U.S.’s biggest embassy in the world in the Green Zone, a sign of U.S. hegemony. Almost in an imperialistic manner, the US government abandoned plans to keep troops in the country in October 2011 because “Iraqi leaders…adamantly refused to give U.S. troops immunity” or as Obama put it recently, the US has a “core requirement” where US troop presence in any country requires immunity from the host government and “the Iraqi government…declined to provide us that immunity.” One can’t blame the Iraqi government for rejecting immunity for US troops who had occupied their country for eight years and were part of the terrorization of Iraq’s population in a war that killed a minimum of 200,000 Iraqis and a maximum of over a million. The US government is now considering a war against Iraq not by bringing in ground troops but rather a Libya-style war of a massive bombing campaign accompanied by a no-fly-zone to achieve “results” regardless of the “collateral damage.” The US seems distrustful of Maliki’s government, which we installed, and this might be because it is not “an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein” as argued by free market fundamentalist Thomas Friedman in the 1990s but rather is a rather a government that is too weak.[42]

Neo-cons are going from channel to channel, pushing the cause for war with Iraq, along with senators such as John ‘bomb Iran’ McCain and Lindsey ‘world is a battlefield’ Graham. Still, even Rand Paul said that Dick Cheney was to blame for the current Iraq crisis while former judge Andrew Napolitano even wrote that “America is no safer because of the Iraq war, but we are weaker” and that “we have no lawful right to choose a side [in Iraq] and assist it militarily.” Numerous peace groups like Veterans for Peace, CodePink, Iraq Veterans Against the War, World Beyond War, the War Resisters League, and numerous others have declared that they are opposed to another war in Iraq, as has a majority of the American population as shown in poll after poll. On the other hand, the forces pushing for war seem to echo what Joesph Nye, wrote about soft power [43] in 2004:

“popularity is ephemeral and should not be a guide for foreign policy in any case. The United States can act without the world’s applause. We are so strong we can do as we wish. We are the world’s only superpower, and that fact is bound to engender envy and resentment…We do not need permanent allies and institutions. We can always pick up a coalition of the willing when we need to.”[44]

Such arrogance about American power professed by Nye is similarly professed by the warmongers and think tanks like the pro-Israel and purportedly bipartisan Washington Institute of Near East Policy as recorded on C-SPAN, and numerous others [45] who are pushing for another war.

Later in his life, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached about how he did not accept war as a lesser evil and his rejection of liberalism:

“I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, as horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But I now believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good. If we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In our day of space vehicles and guided ballistic missiles, the choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”[46]

In this time of dire need, we must heed the words of Dr. King and do all we can through nonviolent means to stop the US government from committing the “supreme international crime” against Iraq for the third time in world history: a war of aggression.

Notes:

[1] ISIS attacked Iraq’s biggest oil refineryand possibly took it over, which makes US intervention that much more likely. On June 19th, Obama seemed to be pushing what one could easily call the ‘prelude to war’ with the increase in so-called ‘military advisers’ to Iraq and he also said that US national security interests in Iraq include commitments to “issues like energy and global energy markets” which is code for protecting (mostly) petroleum in the Persian Gulf region. In a post on the Heritage Foundation’s blog, of all places, one of their senior analysts, James Phillips, wrote that: “Even if it [ISIS] is expelled from oil-producing areas, the resulting destruction of pipelines and other infrastructure is likely to boost world oil prices.” Others wrote about this as well: Nafeez Ahmed also wrote about oil more broadly as a cause of the uprising, writing that “…the rise of Isis…is blowback from the same brand of oil addicted US-UK covert operations we have run for decades;” veteran Arab journalist Nicola Nasser wrote in CounterPunchthat“the raging war in Iraq now will determine whether Iraqi hydrocarbons are a national asset or multinational loot. Any U.S. military support to the regime it installed in Baghdad should be viewed within this context;” political economist Rob Urie who also wrote in CounterPunch that “what is now at risk with the fall of Mosul and Tikrit and the reported capture of a major oil field is the investment and past, present and future profits of the multi-national oil companies that are now operating in Iraq;” and Michael Schwartz wrote on TomDispatchthat “the issue that underlies much of the violence [is] control of Iraqi oil…there was nothing new about local guerrillas attacking oil facilities…It has always been about the oil, stupid!”

[2] See articles I self-published on the topic: ‘Part 1: A petroleum-based national security policy‘ & ‘Part 2: the Great Game of extreme energy extraction‘.

[3] Harman, C. (2008). A people’s history of the world (p. 558). London: Verso.

[4] Ibid, 559.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 559-560

[8] See the article I self-published (‘Part 1: A petroleum-based national security policy‘), specifically starting with the paragraph beginning “With all of this rhetoric, one may just dismiss it as words…” and David S. Painter’s analysis in The Journal for American History titled ‘Oil and the American Century,’ among others.

[9] Discussion of the 1963 coup originally comes from one of my articles on JFK’s presidency in Dissident Voice about “assassinations, anti-communism, interventionism and right-wing dictators.”

[10] Andrew and Patrick Cockburn later described the coup “in retrospect…[as] the CIA’s favorite coup” and William Blum noted on page 134 of Rogue State that the US State Department was pleased by the new regime in Iraq honoring agreements to the Iraq Petroleum Company, since the US had a part in this petroleum company.

[11] Harman, 600.

[12] Zinn, H., Konopacki, M., & Buhle, P. (2008). A people’s history of American empire: a graphic adaptation (p. 255). New York: Metropolitan Books.

[13] Blum, W. (2000). Rogue state: a guide to the world’s only superpower (pp. 121). Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press.

[14] Ibid, 122.

[15] Zinn, Konopacki, & Buhle, 256.

[16] Ibid, 256-7 and Harman, 600.

[17] Harman, 600.

[18] Chomsky, N. (1992). What Uncle Sam really wants (p. 67). Berkeley: Odonian Press.

[19] Zinn, H. (2003). A people’s history of the United States: 1492-Present (Fifth ed., p. 595). Boston: Harper Perennial.

[20] Ibid, 26; Johnson, C. (2006). Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic (p. 26). New York: Metropolitan Books.

[21] Johnson, 27.

[22] Ibid, 27-29.

[23] Ibid, 29.

[24] Caldicott, H. (2002). The new nuclear danger: George W. Bush’s military-industrial complex (p. XXII). New York: New Press.

[25] Ibid, XXIII

[26] Ibid, XXIX

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid, XXXVIII-XXXIX

[29] Ibid, XI, XLII, and XLV

[30] Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism (p. 400). New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.

[31] Ibid, 407

[32] Ibid, 401.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid, 402.

[35] Ibid, 402-3.

[36] Ibid, 403.

[37] Ibid, 404-5.

[38] Caldicott, XXXIII-XXXIV; Klein, 405.

[39] Caldicott, XXXV; Klein, 405.

[40] Caldicott, XLVI.

[41] For more specific people involved in Iraq, see Chapters 16 and 17 of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and from page XXI to page LV of The New Nuclear Danger by Helen Caldicott.

[42] Chomsky, N. (1992). What Uncle Sam really wants (p. 67-8). Berkeley: Odonian Press.

[43] Serow, A. G., & Ladd, E. C. (2007). From Soft Power. The Lanahan Readings in the American Polity (Fourth Edition ed., pp. 650). Baltimore: Lanahan Publishers Inc. On this page, Nye defines soft power as “getting others to want the outcomes you want…[which] rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others,” in an excerpt from his book, Soft Power. Later, Suzanne Nossel, currently the executive director of the PEN American center, who was formerly the deputy Secretary of State and held high positions in Amnesty USA and Human Rights Watch, would articulate her idea of ‘smart power,’ which would contrast “the formerly unabashed Bush-Cheney reliance on ‘Hard Power.’” By employing soft Power or “diplomatic, economic, and cultural pressures, which can be combined with military force, to ‘work our will’ upon foreign nations.” This idea would form the basis of the thesis of ‘humanitarian imperialism’ or intervening militarily under humanitarian pretenses, which are a guise for the real reasons of intervention. Nye’s arguments follow those of Nossel since he also claims to have invented the term of ‘smart power.’

[44] Ibid, 654-655, another excerpt from Nye’s book, Soft Power.

[45] Other people supporting the war include, according to Bob Dreyfuss writing in The Nation, aSlate article, an article in the Weekly Standard, a Reuters article, a Washington Post column, another Washington Post column, an article in The Guardian, an article in the Star Tribune, the Atlantic Council, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and the Center for American Progress: former Vice-President and war criminal Dick Cheney; the CEO of the New American Foundation Anne-Marie Slaughter; the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ); the ISW (Institute of the Study of War) chair and former four-star general Jack Keane and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); now AEI scholar Paul Wolfowitz who formed the main ideas of the Bush doctrine; Douglas Feith who engaged in postwar planning in Iraq; Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard [which is similar to what Kristol argued in the past]and Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar of the AEI; war criminal Tony Blair; Representative Ed Royce who wants to attack what he idiotically terms “columns of terrorists” in Iraq with drones; Berry Pavel of The Atlantic Council; Clifford D. May who is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; Washington Post columnists Charles Krauthammer and David Ignatius; and Brian Katulis, Hardin Lang and Vikram Singh of the Center of American Progress.

[46] King, M. L. (2012). Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings (pp. 157-158). Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1963). In 1960, he made a similar speech in Chicago, Illinois. The quotes used in this article do not come from that speech, but come from another speech, seemingly later in his life: “He said in his last book that he had come to see the need for the method of nonviolence in international relations.” The book that this quote talks about is called The Trumpet of Conscience, which was published in 1968.