DEVIL’S GAME

The Book

“A worthy addition to Metropolitan’s American Empire Project: a devastating account that policymakers-not to mention American citizens-ignore at their peril.” Kirkus Reviews

I wrote Devil’s Game to fill in a gap amid the millions of words that have been written about political Islam and U.S. policy since September 11, 2001.

It’s the story before the story, and it helps answer the question: How did we get into this mess? It’s my contention that part of the answer to that question, at least, is that for half a century the United States and many of its allies saw what I call the “Islamic right” as convenient partners in the Cold War.

I approached this book not as an historian, but as a journalist. A great deal of it is based on scores of interviews with men and women from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. military, and the private sector who participated in many of these events. And I relied on dozens of published works. Most of the sources I interviewed are quoted on the record, and virtually every fact in the book is footnoted.

For those who wonder how it is possible that the United States now supports a regime in Iraq run by hard-core Islamists, by Shiite fundamentalists supported by Iran’s ayatollahs, at least some of the answers will be found in this book.

For those who worry that Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Pakistan, and other Middle East and South Asia countries could fall to Iran-style Islamic revolution, at least some of the reasons why this is a real possibility will be found in this book.

For those who wonder about the worldwide support system for Osama bin Laden’s movement, at least some of the background about how that system came to be will be found in Devil’s Game.

Today it’s convenient to speak about a Clash of Civilizations. But in Devil’s Game I show that in the decades before 9/11, hard-core activists and organizations among Muslim fundamentalists on the far right were often viewed as allies for two reasons, because they were seen a fierce anti-communists and because the opposed secular nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh.

In the 1950s, the United States had an opportunity to side with the nationalists, and indeed many U.S. policymakers did suggest exactly that, as my book explains. But in the end, nationalists in the Third World were seen as wild cards who couldn’t be counted on to join the global alliance against the USSR. Instead, by the end of the 1950s, rather than allying itself with the secular forces of progress in the Middle East and the Arab world, the United States found itself in league with Saudi Arabia’s Islamist legions. Choosing Saudi Arabia over Nasser’s Egypt was probably the single biggest mistake the United States has ever made in the Middle East.

A second big mistake that emerges in Devil’s Game occurred in the 1970s, when, at the height of the Cold War and the struggle for control of the Middle East, the United States either supported or acquiesced in the rapid growth of Islamic right in countries from Egypt to Afghanistan. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. In Syria, the United States, Israel, and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against Syria. And, as described in a groundbreaking chapter in Devil’s Game, Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of Hamas.

Still another major mistake was the fantasy that Islam would penetrate the USSR and unravel the Soviet Union in Asia. It led to America’s support for the jihadists in Afghanistan. But as Devil’s Game shows, America’s alliance with the Afghan Islamists long predated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and had its roots in CIA activity in Afghanistan in the 1960s and in the early and mid-1970s. The Afghan jihad spawned civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, gave rise to the Taliban, and got Osama bin Laden started on building Al Qaeda.

Would the Islamic right have existed without U.S. support? Of course. This is not a book for the conspiracy-minded. But there is no question that the virulence of the movement that we now confront-and which confronts many of the countries in the region, too, from Algeria to India and beyond-would have been significantly less had the United States made other choices during the Cold War.

So what can the United States do now? It can start by not making things worse. It can withdraw from Iraq, and so remove the most important recruiting tool that Al Qaeda has. It can vastly reduce its military presence in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf. It can work to reduce irritants that anger Muslims and fuel hatred and bitterness, above all by facilitating the creation of a viable Palestinian state and by working to ease conflicts on the fringes of the Muslim world, from the Philippines to Indonesia to Kashmir to Sudan.

Toward the end of Devil’s Game, I put forward what I believe are some constructive ideas about how to deal with the challenge posed by the Islamic right. But at the very least, it is my hope that Americans learn that the ultimate solution does not involve the U.S. armed forces. It will take many decades of nation-building and religion-building in the Middle East before enlightened, secular forces manage to eclipse the benighted forces of political Islam. Hopefully, at least, the United States won’t get in the way.