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.

Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis March 01, 2009

In a previous article entitled ´The Colonization of Turkey´ (), I drew a historical diagram of Iran, China, Japan, and Turkey, the only Asiatic countries that have not been colonized, at least in the way the proper meaning of the word suggests (military occupation and foreign administration ruling the colonized country). It is clear that through the aforementioned I consider Russia as a basically European country, as its historical center lies exclusively on European soil, in the west of the Ural mountains.

Indirect Colonization and Socio-political Eclecticism

Yet, if these four Asiatic countries have not been colonized stricto sensu, they have been indirectly colonized at all levels, economic, political, educational, cultural and geopolitical. Here, I want to clarify that I make a very clear distinction between voluntary acceptance of theories, systems, ideas, practices, and policies implemented by other countries and indirect colonialism. I would rather identify the former as Socio-political Eclecticism.

Indirect colonialism means, on the contrary, blind acceptance of another country´s systems, ideas, practices, and policies without a chance for the accepting country (which is thus indirectly colonized) to preserve its authenticity, historical integrity, cultural and national independence. Indirect colonialism has mostly to do with systems composed in another country by theoreticians, philosophers, intellectuals and academia totally unrelated to the country that becomes indirectly colonized by accepting them. It may also involve the blind acceptance of a behavioural system.

The examples of Communist China and post-WW II Japan are quite indicative; particularly, the Cultural Revolution was an extreme phenomenon of de-Sinization. To accept and implement a typically Euro-centric system of worldview (Marxism – Leninism), the Communist Party of China tried systematically to irrevocably delete the essence of 5000 years of Chinese Civilization, Integrity, Authenticity and Identity. Japan´s modern society, despite the preservation of number of traditions, doesn´t reflect what Japan has been over the past 500 years. The same can even be said for post-WW II Germany, but this is not the subject of the present article.

Today´s Islam and Islamism: Indirect Colonization

Indirect colonization can also take the form of acceptance of a theoretical simulacrum of a system that the indirectly colonized country and people consider as surely their own. This is precisely the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran; in fact, modern Islamism is not a system emanating out of the Cultural and Political Heritage of Islam. It is an Orientalist sub-system created in Western European (read mainly French and English) academic and Freemasonic ateliers that superimposes the religious element over the political only to accommodate the colonial powers´ anti-Islamic, anti-Ottoman, and anti-Iranian interests. As such, it has been projected on Muslim countries in a sophisticated way only to engulf them in vain queries, unrealistic purposes, catastrophic policies and permanent underdevelopment.

The focus of the Islamism has certainly been the area of the so-called Arabic speaking countries, a vast part of the Ottoman Empire that was gradually cut off and victimized though the earlier projection of the equally colonial and absolutely fake dogma of (Pan-)Arabism. None of these countries has ever been Arabic, except Hedjaz, namely the Western part of today´s Saudi Arabia. Not a single inhabitant of the aforementioned realm (except the region of Hedjaz) is Arab, and the mere phenomenon of linguistic arabization did not change in anything the Aramaean, Yemenite, Coptic, Nubian, Kushitic and Berberic identities of the greatly different (from one another) nations who have been targeted by the colonial powers, detached from their own country (i. e. the Ottoman Empire), and monstrously deformed following the criminal projection of the fabricated, fake Arabic identity on them.

Yet, Islamism was viciously supported by the colonial countries and diffused by them beyond the limited area of the so-called Arabic speaking countries. In the late 1970s, Iran fell victim of these colonial endeavours. Certainly, Ayatullah Khomeini and his team, and the various administrations of the 30-year regime could never imagine that they are real tools of the colonial powers that apparently constitute their enemies.

However, contrarily to the Safevid Persian imperial policies, the Islamic Republic does not reflect any real political opposition to the colonial powers. The official Iranian claim for Vilayat-e Faqih is not a political system, and does not provide for any opposition to Anglo-French and American post-colonialism. The Iranian theoretical background of the Islamic Republic is a religious system that, although Shia, reflects Sunni schools of jurisprudence and philosophy in many aspects. But it consists in a superimposition of the religious on the political, and this did not occur at all at the Safevid or earlier times. In fact, this fact relates to our modern times, and to the colonial projections on the Islamic countries.

From the times of the earlier Islamic dynasties down to the Ottoman and Safevid times, the political ideology of the Caliphate and the other imperial Islamic establishments certainly reflected Islamic values but was not subordinated to the religion. It was the continuation of earlier imperial political ideologies, the Sassanid Iranian, the Eastern Roman, the Arsacid Parthian, the Imperial Roman, the Seleucid Syrian, the Macedonian, the Achaemenid Persian, the Babylonian, the Assyrian, and the Akkadian systems.

As imperial systems, not as religions, the Ottoman Empire, Safevid Iran, and Mogul India enabled the world of Islam to prevail over the rest of the world politically, economically, intellectually, culturally, educationally, academically, and artistically. In this case, the ´rest of the world´ was in fact limited to two realms: Northwestern Europe and China.

The European colonial attack against these imperial systems (something that is not the subject of the present article) involved many methods, but the most critical one was the projection of the Freemasonry-invented and colonially diffused Islamism, a system which – so conveniently for the colonial powers and so pathetically for all Muslims – superimposed the religious over the political element within the query for an all-Islamic political entity.

This Islamic pseudo-state, in which the religious element is superimposed over the political element, if we hypothesized that it existed, it would be the top colonial achievement throughout the Islamic world because it would consist in a non-political entity (a fake state – as any state without a proper political ideology is a fake) guided by an extreme deformation of Islam that is believed as Islam by today´s Muslims, and even worse, this deformation of Islam would play the role of the political ideology in that fake state.

When I speak of deformation of Islam, I mean that to the earlier stages of prevalence of the Hanbalist school and the system of Ibn Taimiya have been added the most recent layers of Wahhabism and Islamic Modernism (Jemal al Din Afghani and Mohamed Abduh), which bear a strong mark of unscreened colonial influence. As long as today´s Islamic sheikhs, muftis, theoreticians, theologians, and intellectuals do not reject the aforementioned layers, they will fail to reach Islamic authenticity at either the political – ideological or the philosophical – theological level. Accordingly, what they call ´religion´ is totally irrelevant and illusory. But this is again not the main subject of this article.

I expanded much on the issue of Islamism as indirect colonization, because what was achieved by the colonial powers in Iran in 1979 is attempted against Turkey with a 30-year delay.

Kemal Ataturk and Modern Turkey: Colonial or Anti-Colonial?

As I said earlier, a voluntary acceptance of theories, systems, ideas, practices, and policies implemented by other countries is not indirect colonialism. I used the term “Socio-political Eclecticism” to describe it. This was typical of Kemal Ataturk and did characterize the innovations he introduced in Turkey. I would not refer to the subject but I do so only to refute Islamist literature against the founder of Modern Turkey. This literature is abundant in Arabic and Farsi but it progressively finds however its way to the global mass media in several international languages due to the phenomenon of labor immigration. In fact, Arabic speaking countries´ elites, plunged in severe analphabetism and extreme obscurantism, have felt for many long decades a grave complex of inferiority because Turkey was not colonized, whereas their territories were colonized by the English, the French, the Italians, and more recently the Americans.

The following trait is an additional testimony to the colonial nature of the Arabic speaking countries; both parts of their regimes, the local modernizers who want to pathetically imitate Europe and America (and they do so without understanding the logic and the reason behind every behavioural or theoretical particularity of the Westerners) and the Islamists who idiotically believe in the pillars of the Islamic Modernism and even more inanely desire the rise of an Islamic state (deprived of political ideology and with their deformed Islam playing the role of political ideology), hate Kemal Ataturk, revile Turkey´s achievements (that are all due to his policies), and try to defame them as a form of colonialism – called Turkey´s westernization.

Rejection of colonialism is not a theoretical endeavour; it is mainly a political act. It denotes denial of the colonial powers, involving fight and war against them, lack of contact with them, opposition to their plans, dismantlement of their deeds and destruction of their interests at the local level. Even more importantly, rejection of colonialism means absolute refutation of all colonial proposals; in fact, national sovereignty implies automatic rejection of cooperation with colonial powers´ representatives (military, economic, administrative, academic, spiritual, etc.) and decisive punishment of all those who betraying their nation, for their own economic sake, collaborate in any form with the colonial powers´ forces.

Nothing of all this concerns the pathetic apostates of the Ottoman empires who, believing in the diverse lies of the colonial representatives, collaborated with the English and the French only to see a disaster befalling on their countries that remained underdeveloped, anachronistic and dysfunctional. The various Arabic speaking groups who, after having been enticed by the English and the French, voluntarily worked with them, represent servility, docility and slavery better than any other ethnic group on earth. They were expecting to become rulers in a united ´Arabic´ kingdom, and they were divided to more 10 (ten) countries (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Qatar, Emirates, Oman, Bahrain)! But this was not what the English were promising in 1915 to these imbecile Arabic speaking groups in order to convince them to desert the national army of their country, the Ottoman Empire, and help them bring down the last political instance of the Islamic world. …..

None of all these besotted, ignorant and lewd pseudo-elites of Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Cairo would have expected in the 1910´s the developments that followed the end of WW I. They were ´sure´ that the English and the French would help them substitute their bogus-state to the Ottoman Empire that they had hated due to the evil propaganda of the colonials, which they were gullible, obtuse and brainless enough to accept.

The pro-Western (minority) and the Islamist (majority) elites of the so-called Arabic speaking countries, who have uninterruptedly served the colonial powers as the world´s most obedient and passive slaves, having engaged in typically evil duplicity (promising one thing to their colonial masters and saying precisely the opposite to their rude, uncivil and barbaric masses), denounce Kemal Ataturk´s policies that displeased the colonial powers because they were the means of a backward country´s rise to power and modernity.

In fact, Kemal Ataturk, contrarily to Lenin, Mao and others, did not intend to (and did not) implement a certain system; although we have the tendency to view his policies now en bloc and thus consider them as a system, they were not perceived like that in the 1920s and the 1930s. His policies were not a mere imitation, a blind copy or a dogmatic transplantation of another system. There was a great role for the state in the restructuring of the economy, but there were private companies as well. There was a change of writing system far more radical than the small changes introduced by Lenin in the Russian alphabet. Everything was decided upon and introduced as policy in order to enable the local populations smoothly cope with Western European and Northern American competition in terms of science, technology, economy, efficient governance, and social infrastructure. It was an effort of modernization based on a pragmatic assessment of the then world.

Kemal Ataturk´s policies were not dictated by the colonial powers, and this is very easy to reconfirm after crosschecking the subject at the global level; nowhere did France and England suggest to local governments to implement policies introduced in Turkey by Kemal Ataturk.

At this point one has to denounce once forever the ridiculous myth of Arabic countries´ socialism; there has never been such a thing as Arab socialism. The socialists, the Nasserists and the Baathists did not dare implement even 10% of Kemal Ataturk´s reforms. No Latin writing, and no Sunday as weekend! And certainly, none of them dared prohibit the Islamic veil from the public places or to eliminate the religious schools that have always been the worst impediment in the path of modern countries for progress.

The policies of Kemal Ataturk could not possibly and actually did not please the colonial powers because they offer to any country whereby they are to be eventually implemented the tools to achieve competition with the leading European countries. On the contrary, the colonial countries consider that their own interests are guaranteed when the targeted countries simply imitate Western policies, fail to understand the reasons and the purposes behind these policies, and are thus engulfed in internal inconclusive conflicts that are eternalized.

We have a very clear indication of the terrible clash occurred between Kemal Ataturk and the Apostate Freemasonic Lodge which is the guiding force of the colonial regimes of France and England; to eliminate its subversive penetration, which was targeting him directly, Kemal Ataturk, as a true and staunch Freemason, decided the elimination of the institutions depending on the Apostate Freemasonic Lodge, and the cancellation of their evil works.

However, one must have a clear idea of what Kemal Ataturk and his military – political establishment have been and what they have not. The latter is also of importance as it still influences and determines today´s Turkey, its political decision making process, and its intellectual – academic debates.

Kemal Ataturk was not an atheist firmly engaged in favour of evolutionism and materialism; to depict him in this way bears witness to either ignorance or conspiracy. The Turkish Republic was never an anti-Islamic country determined to harm Islam; on the contrary, it was a state whereby nothing could be done in order to defame Islam. Contrarily to Kemal Ataturk´s state, the Islamic Republic of Iran constitutes a reason for Islam´s defamation, denigration and vilification. Similarly with Saudi Arabia, which is the state that defamed Islam most throughout the World History, Iran and every fanatic Islamist establishment misrepresent Islam and damage its chances of being correctly, fairly and accurately perceived by people allover the world.

Ever Lurking Colonial Powers: from Turkey´s Adhesion to NATO to Erdogan´s High Treason

As I already said in the previous article, Turkey´s adhesion to NATO in the early 50s was partly due to the pro-American policy of the heretic premier Adnan Menderes, who had attended the American College for Secondary Education at Izmir in the 1910s, and pursued a steady anti-Ataturk policy that rightfully ended with his execution, following a military coup against his demagogic and catastrophic government.

Turkey´s participation in the NATO was certainly a form of partly colonization that did not affect directly the Turkish society. It mainly consisted in diffusion of falsehood (from the part of the top US, English and French military) among the top Turkish military, mainly the 3-star and 4-star generals. The falsehood had preponderantly to do with general geo-strategic considerations and perception of threats; by exaggerating the Soviet threat, the NATO colonials obtained Turkey´s participation in the Cold War.

Of course, the overall phenomenon involved diverse methods such as excessive bribery, multifaceted deception, secretive initiation to American and English Freemasonic institutions that are all controlled by the Apostate Freemasonic Lodge, premeditated support of these generals in their promotion. This occurred in parallel with the very traditional method which provided for the selection of several Turkish students abroad for initiation and membership in the aforementioned institutions whereby every member is a real hostage; this is so because the initiation and the membership involve grave psychological constraints, psychic shocks, severe threats, and blackmail. The later social and professional promotion of the diverse members in the administration machine, the academia, the mass media, the politics, the diplomacy and the economy offers the means of power control to the evil and subversive organization that identifies its interests with those of England and France. As hierarchy is all that matters therein, the real targets are unknown to most of the members, but the ordered action is compulsory; consequently, the people held captive in this organization can prove to be greatly harmful to their own country – at their unbeknownst. In fact, every concept of national independence, personal, social and political freedom, and democracy is eliminated when this organization is allowed or manages to be fully functional. This is the reason Kemal Ataturk, well aware of their perversity, prohibited their further function in the 1930s.

Several coups in Turkey were precisely due to the desire of the military to put under control or to limit the activity of this sort of unconscious traitors. Certainly Turkey is only one example in this regard; similar phenomena occurred in various countries.

One can describe the entire system as an effort to totally control and damage other countries through a veil of predefined (pre-arranged) networks that function as catalysts. It goes without saying that more isolated a country is greater is the difficulty of the Apostate Freemasonic Lodge to penetrate it. That´s why the trickery of the liberal economy was invented in order to mainly help the malicious institution further penetrate whereby penetration was difficult or impossible in the past.

With respect to Turkey, the first stage of colonialism involved mainly a few members, ceaseless contacts, extensive selection of data, and thorough analysis of the system´s functionality. The data would be later used, when the correct timing would be identified. The first stage lasted no less than 50 years, 1952 – 2003.

The most important effect of this stage of colonialism was the high acquaintance with the details of political, military and economic life in Turkey, and the progressively acquired control of the various military projects, functions, plans, and practices. This was achieved through continuous interaction with the selected 3-star and 4-star generals, their Freemasonic initiation, and the subsequent long cooperation.

During this period, while NATO served the colonial purposes as described, France and England never got rid of their hereditary Anti-Turkish racism and hysteria. Whenever the Cold War was not undergoing a severe crisis, the two European colonial powers pursued their plans either triggering Turkish – Greek conflicts (tragic events at Istanbul in 1955) or provoking inter-community misunderstandings in Cyprus (through the 50s and the 60s until 1974).

In addition, they laid the foundations of their approach to what they diffused as ´Kurdish problem´ which is another typical fallacy because under the umbrella – name ´Kurds´ the Anglo-French colonial academia and diplomats compressed more than 10 different nations. The tactics is very old and widely implemented; a state whereby ten different nations are compressed and oppressed can never undergo proper and pertinent nation – building, and this situation triggers in turn internal conflict and underdevelopment. It is mainly in the 60s and the 70s that Anglo-French academia started speaking of ´Kurds´ (and meaning – erroneously – one nation) analytically.

Similarly, the Armenian Diaspora was given the order to continue the anti-Turkish propaganda for the terrible massacres occurred in 1915 – 1916 in the Northeastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire because the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, incited by the French and the Russians, had decided to betray their own country for the sake of the enemy. Instead of demanding recognition of an inexistent genocide, the Armenians of the Diaspora should present to Turkey their apologies for having shamelessly betrayed their own country,

At the same time, the reactionary elements of the Modern Islamic theology and the traditionalist minority managed to survive and to form some connections with Islamic extremists in countries like Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and Pakistan. This was anticipated by the colonial powers, and offered them an additional point of pressure over Turkey.

The second stage of Turkey´s colonization started with the rise of the AKP party in 2003. It was meant to complete the earlier preparation, and fulfill Turkey´s colonization. The sophisticated plan provided for the following parts:

1. The political rise of an extremist Islamist party camouflaged up to great extent

2. The parallel socioeconomic rise of provincial businessmen ready to form the backbone of the new establishment

3. An active engagement of Turkey in negotiations with the European Union which would bring forth the pretext for democratization

4. The orchestrated pressure by EU institutions and the Islamist party for limitations in the role of the military in Turkey

5. The gradual diffusion and imposition of Islamist ideas and forms of thought among the Turkish society

6. The recognition of the myth “Kurds” by the Turkish government

7. The recognition of the myth “Armenian Genocide” by the Turkish government

8. The elimination of Turkish ambitions in Caucasus and Central Asia

9. The use of Turkish diplomacy in order to promote several colonial peace plans in the Middle East

10. Advanced liberalization and consequently increased economic control of Turkey

11. The final attack against the military establishment through the creation and meticulous guidance of a huge scandal directed against the military which would involve spectacular but untrue discoveries in order to impress the local people, and defame the military.

12. Adoption of all the terms and dogmas of Islamic Modernism

13. Acceptance of all the terms of the colonial dogmas, Orientalism, Pan-Arabism, and Islamism, and

14. The final abolition of Kemal Ataturk´s Turkey and the subsequent adaptation of the country into a religious, barbaric and unilateral system – similar with that of the Ayatullahs of Iran or the religious extremism and darkness of Saudi Arabia.

In a forthcoming article, I will analyze the character of today´s Turkey which is being altered and turned into that of a fully colonized country.

Note

Picture: Allenby enters Jerusalem; a critical development of the WW I in the Middle East.