Devil's Game
| Author | Robert Dreyfuss |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | U.S. foreign policy |
| Publisher | Dell Publishing |
|
Publication date
|
October 2006 |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Pages | 400 |
| ISBN |
Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam is a 2006 book by Robert Dreyfuss, an American investigative journalist. It discusses how Western governments supported the growth of Islamic fundamentalism for several purposes.
The book addresses a number of different Middle Eastern interventions made by the West, as outlined below.
The book discusses how Western governments supported the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood in order to sabotage the efforts of Pro-Soviet Arab Nationalist leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. The goals of Nasser were to end Western domination and control in the Middle East. This was a great threat to Western interests, who used the Muslim Brotherhood to destabilize the Nasser government.
"[T]he United States spent many years trying to construct a barrier against the Soviet Union along its southern flank. The fact that all of the nations between Greece and China were Muslim gave rise to the notion that Islam itself might reinforce that Maginot Line-style strategy. Gradually the idea of a green belt along the "arc of Islam" took form. The idea was not just defensive. Adventurous policy makers imagined that restive Muslims inside the Soviet Union's own Central Asian republics might be the undoing of the USSR itself, and they took steps to encourage them." (Introduction of Devil's Game)
Dreyfuss also discusses how the West used Islamic radicalism to suppress Communist movements in the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world. He provides a comprehensive review of the support of Western governments for the Mujahadeen and Jihadi Islamic fighters, who were trained and sent into Afghanistan. With the close support and advice of CIA paramilitaries, these Islamic jihadists helped defeat Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The book also describes the work of Bernard Lewis and his model of Islamic Balkanization, where the CIA secretly supported Islamic movements within the Soviet Union to utilize them as Anti-Communist insurgents in the event of war. The consequence of this CIA program is the present-day Islamic Chechen separatist conflict that the Russians are fighting.
...
Wikipedia