Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R) recently appointed retired General Tommy Franks, who was responsible for some of the greatest failures in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, to be a top military adviser. That’s par for the course for the Romney campaign, which is littered with planners, organizers, and boosters of the Iraq war.

Romney’s support from the Iraq war’s lead planners reaches to the top. Most of the war’s key players who aren’t advising Romney have strongly come out in support him, lending the imprimatur of their foreign policy instincts to his campaign. Here are some of the key endorsements of Romney or his foreign policy:

DICK CHENEY

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “When I think about the kind of individual I want in the Oval Office in that moment of crisis, who has to make those key decisions, some of them life-and-death decisions, decisions as the commander in chief, who has the responsibility for sending our young men and women in harm’s way – that man’s Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ : “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

DOUGLAS FEITH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “The Obama administration has gone out of its way to try to deemphasize the ideological part of the problem, and to define the conflict as a conflict that the United States has with an organization and its affiliates, rather than an international movement tied together by an ideology. I think Romney did a pretty good job in making it clear that the problem is broader than Al Qaeda.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11.”

DONALD RUMSFELD

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Terrific, comprehensive speech by Gov. Romney at [the Virginia Military Institute]. He knows America’s role in the world should be as a leader not as a spectator.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Our military capability and technological advantage will be safe in Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s hands.”

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

GEORGE W. BUSH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “I’m for Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Mission accomplished.”

Texas Governor and GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry finally laid out his foreign policy platform and, in doing so, attempted to set himself apart from both the neoconservative foreign policy of George W. Bush and the progressive realism (and corresponding embrace of multilateral institutions) employed by the Barack Obama administration.

Perry rejected the aggressive unilateralism of the Bush foreign policy, saying:

I do not believe that America should fall subject to a foreign policy of military adventurism. We should only risk shedding American blood and spending American treasure when our vital interests are threatened and we should always look to build coalitions among the nations to protect the mutual interests of freedom loving people.

But he shied away from the mulilateral coalition building proven effective by Obama in toppling Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya and gaining U.N. Security Council support for Iran sanctions. Perry said, “We cannot concede the moral authority of our nation to multi-lateral debating societies.”

Perry is eager to distance himself from Bush’s foreign policy doctrine, which left the U.S. overextended in two wars. And he needs to steer his campaign clear of endorsing Obama’s foreign policy since a large swath of the GOP criticized the White House’s Libya strategy and predicted Obama’s “leading from behind” would lead to defeat for Libyan rebels.

But distancing himself from the Bush administration or the “military adventurism” exhibited in the invasion of Iraq might be difficult with Douglas Feith — a Bush administration official well known for leading the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans which was reponsible for cooking up faulty intel on Iraq’s WMD program — and Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld serving to advise Perry on foreign policy.

Indeed, advice from Feith might have been what led Perry to already contradict his position against military adventurism when asked about about preemptive military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. He said there are “a lot of different ways to deal with Iran,” and added:

I’m never going to take off the table our ability to have a military solution to a country like Iran.

Perry, much like George W. Bush in 2000, appears to be making campaign promises of a modest foreign policy and cautious use of military force all while surrounding himself with foreign policy hawks who will do all they can to keep the U.S. on a war footing.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has been a vocal presence in Washington since its founding in the days following the 9/11 attacks as a self-described “nonpartisan policy institute dedicated exclusively to promoting pluralism, defending democratic values, and fighting the ideologies that threaten democracy.” But FDD’s position consistently fell in line with the Bush administration’s militant “war on terror” and policies espoused by Israel’s right wing Likud party. In recent years, FDD has become one of the the premiere DC organizations promoting more aggressive actions against Iran.

FDD’s effectiveness in promoting their hawkish messages is magnified by their access to major media outlets. FDD president Clifford May appears regularly on Fox News as a terrorism expert, and other FDD employees — including Mark Dubowitz, Benjamin Weinthal, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Michael Ledeen — often appear in the oped pages of major newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

Given FDD’s prominence in the media and influence that results from it, it’s important to explore sources of the group’s funding. Documents obtained by ThinkProgress offer new insights into who funded the first four years of FDD’s operations.

The documents, which have been combined into one PDF with addresses redacted, offer a comprehensive list of grants, accounting for virtually all of FDD’s funding from 2001 to 2004. They reveal that the Abramson Family Foundation, headed by founder and CEO of U.S. Healthcare Leonard Abramson, offered the largest portion of FDD’s startup funding with a $222,523 grant in 2001. Abramson continued to generously fund FDD with an additional $600,000 in contributions from 2002 to 2004.

Canadians Edgar M. and Charles Bronfman, heirs to the Seagram liquor company fortune, contributed $1,050,000 to FDD between 2001 and 2004. Edgar M. Bronfman served as president of the World Jewish Congress from 1979 to 2007. Charles Bronfman, along with fellow FDD donor Michael Steinhardt cofounded Taglit Birthright which offers free trips to Israel for young Jewish adults. Steinhardt is a hedge fund mogul who contributed $850,000 to FDD from 2001 to 2004.

Other notable donors included: Home Depot cofounder Bernard Marcus who contributed $600,000 between 2001 and 2003; mortgage backed securities pioneer Lewis Ranieri contributed $350,000 between 2002 and 2004; and Ameriquest owner, and Bush administration ambassador to the Netherlands from 2006 to 2008, Roland Arnall contributed $1,802,000 between 2003 and 2004.

Other notable, but less generous, donors included: media mogul and Democratic Party donor Haim Saban, a surprising donor considering FDD’s Republican bent and Clifford May’s former role as an RNC spokesperson; The Israel Project director Jennifer Mizrahi; and Dalck Feith, father of former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith.

When contacted for comment, May said, “Ms. Mizrahi and Mr. Saban are not current supporters of FDD,” and added that “FDD is fortunate to have hundreds of donors, all kinds of donors, who are interested in defending democratic societies around the world from their sworn enemies.” May said “most of the original group of donors were introduced to me by Jack Kemp, FDD’s founding chairman, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a founding member of FDD’s board of directors.”

Most of the major donors are active philanthropists to “pro-Israel” causes both in the U.S. and internationally. With the disclosure of its donor rolls, it becomes increasingly apparent that FDD’s advocacy of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, its hawkish stance against Iran, and its defense of right-wing Israeli policy is consistent with its donors’ interests in “pro-Israel” advocacy.

While FDD has a 10-year history of engaging in alarmist rhetoric and fear mongering — e.g. in 2002 FDD aired a series of ads conflating Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein — and helped promote the “Bush doctrine” which led to the invasion of Iraq, its donors have, for the most part, hidden behind their anonymous contributions to the organization. The new documents should permit for greater scrutiny of the interests and individuals behind FDD’s hawkish presence in the Washington think tank world.