Shows that playing with fire is not a good idea

books:

	• Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (American Empire Project) Robert Dreyfuss Metropolitan Books, 2005 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A veritable text book on fundamentalist Islam

I'll give this book five stars for information and three stars for readability. Though only 400 pages, it took me four days to read it. I was expecting two.
I felt like I was back in college reading another text on global ecopolitics. I would be surprised if the book was not required reading for some classes.
The author is generally even handed in my opinion. The book did a good job of helping me understand the history and complexities of fundamental Islam as it is forced to interface with capitalism. This is not an easy subject to tackle.
Most of us will wish that Bush had read this book. Some of us wish that Bush had read anything of significance related to the complexities of dealing with often unstable regimes that happen to be sitting on most of the worlds oil supply. This didn't slow down Bush and Company a bit. They just decided to take it because they "needed it."

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Complements Web of Deceit

Robert Dreyfuss interviewed me once, for a piece in WIRED or Mother Jones, and I remember him as a serious, methodical person. It is no surprise to find him producing this meticulously documented and objectively constructed history, a perfect complement to Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, on whose Amazon page I have a more detailed review of the overall topic.

The author captures the essence in his own introduction: the US was so focused on anti-communism and anti-Soviet campaigns that it deliberately chose to sponsor extreme rightist Islamic fundamentalists, fascists in their own way as the extreme right in America is today (see American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America).

The author is very specific in addressing how the US feared "nationalism, humanism, secularism, socialism" in its obsession with countering the Soviets, and so it chose to aid Islamic fundamentalists who opposed those more rational and publicly-oriented altneratives. In essence, the premise of the invasion of Iraq, that we are doing it to spread democracy, is yet another big lie--we have been denying democracy to the Arabs every since Roosevelt met with the Saudi king and formed a pact with the devil himself.

I totally agree with the author as he documents and sums up his own view that "A war on terrorism is precisely the wrong way to deal with the challenge posed by political Islam."

The author offers four prescriptions for US action, and at the end here I list some relevant books that provide a broader context:

1) Remove the grievances--US troops in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, support for Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, support for Israel's plans to attack Iran

2) Abandon imperial pretentions in the Middle East

3) Refrain from seeking to impose preferences--political, economic, cultural, or religious, on the region

4) Stop making bellicose threats against Islamic nations from Iran to Sudan (and I would add, to Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, and others)

I am reminded by this book of the common sense prescriptions in Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. The raw fact is that the global literature is coming around to three points of view that are inter-related:

1) Bin Laden is largely right and on firm grounds in taking on both the debauched Saudi regime and the amoral unilaterally invasive US

2) Dick Cheney has committed so many high crimes and misdemeanors, with similar high crimes at the operational level (warrantless wiretapping on Americans, rendition and torture of all others) that America has lost all moral legitimacy both at home and abroad

3) We have the wrong global strategy, indeed we have no global strategy--we are trying to put out a forest fire with a hammer.

Some of the reviewers jump to conclusions, for example, the CIA was NOT really trying to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, until Congressman Charlie Wilson made it his personal vendetta. There is a much larger context within which American incompletence at world affairs can be judged, and it includes the shortcomings of the US educational system, the corruption of the US electoral system, and the grotesque dysfunctionality of the "winner take all" US system of governance. I hope some of the books below--or at least my reviews of them--will provide addtional context for this excellent work. See Web of Deceit for detailed comments I choose not to repeat here--the two books are a good combination with some overlap.

The American Empire Project has produced some really first-rate books on their chosen theme, and for this they are to be praised.

Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times
The Black Tulip: A Novel of War in Afghanistan
Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)

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Shows that playing with fire is not a good idea

Robert Dreyfuss, an American journalist who covers national security for Rolling Stone magazine, has written a splendid book, part of the very useful American Empire Project. He shows how the US state has followed the British Empire's example of funding and backing right-wing fundamentalist Islamic activist groups to defeat Arab nationalism.

From 1885 on, the British state fostered a pan-Islamic alliance against Russia and the Ottoman Empire. It also backed Ibn Saud, leading to the creation of Saudi Arabia, the Hashemites, who became kings of Iraq and Transjordan, the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic fundamentalist party, and Haj Amin, the mufti of Jerusalem.

After World War Two, the US state took over Britain's role. In the 1950s it used the Muslim Brotherhood against President Nasser of Egypt and Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran. From 1957 on, it allied with Saudi Arabia, whose money funded Islamist banks and madrassas across the world. In the 1970s, the US state used fundamentalists in Jordan and Israel against Syria and the PLO. From 1973 on, it funded the mujehadin in Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden.

Dreyfuss shows that Al Qa'ida is not an existential threat to the USA. It has no access to weapons of mass destruction and since 9/11 it has not fired a shot in the USA. Bush inflated the threat from Al Qa'ida to create a pretext for US expansion into the Middle East and Central Asia. Dreyfuss argues that the US state could have destroyed Al Qa'ida without attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. He maintains that the war on terror was the wrong response to 9/11. It has not led to democracy or security but to tyranny, war and reaction.

The US state is now supporting Iraq's Islamists and still backs the feudal autocracy of Saudi Arabia. As usual, it is backing the worst people in every country, and the worst people back it. Instead, we need to back a Palestinian state and get the USA to withdraw its military presence from the Middle East.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

The first complete account of America?s most
dangerous foreign policy miscalculation: sixty years of support for Islamic fundamentalism

Devil?s Game is the gripping story of America?s misguided efforts, stretching across decades, to dominate the strategically vital Middle East by courting and cultivating Islamic fundamentalism. Among all the books about Islam, this is the first comprehensive inquiry into the touchiest issue: How and why did the United States encourage and finance the spread of radical political Islam?

Backed by extensive archival research and interviews with dozens of policy makers and CIA, Pentagon, and foreign service officials, Robert Dreyfuss argues that this largely hidden relationship is greatly to blame for the global explosion of terrorism. He follows the trail of American collusion from support for the Muslim Brotherhood in 1950s Egypt to links with Khomeini and Afghani jihadists to cooperation with Hamas and Saudi Wahhabism. Dreyfuss also uncovers long-standing ties between radical Islamists and the leading banks of the West. The result is as tragic as it is paradoxical: originally deployed as pawns to foil nationalism and communism, extremist mullahs and ayatollahs now dominate the region, thundering against freedom of thought, science, women?s rights, secularism?and their former patron.

Wide-ranging and deeply informed, Devil?s Game reveals a history of double-dealing, cynical exploitation, and humiliating embarrassment. What emerges is a pattern that, far from furthering democracy or security, ensures a future of blunders and blowback.

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