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Robert Dreyfuss

Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (American Empire Project) Hardcover – November 3, 2005

by Robert Dreyfuss (Author)

67 ratings

Part of: American Empire Project (33 books)

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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.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Metropolitan Books
Publication date

November 3, 2005
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0805076522
ISBN-13

978-0805076523
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. One of the CIA's first great moments of institutional reflection occurred in 1953, after American covert operatives helped overthrow Iran's left-leaning government and restored the Shah to power. The agency, then only six years old, had funded ayatollahs, mobilized the religious right and engineered a sophisticated propaganda campaign to successfully further its aims, and it wanted to know how it could reapply such tradecraft elsewhere, so it commissioned an internal report. Half a century later, the most prescient line from that report is one of caution, not optimism. "Possibilities of blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers," the document warned. Since this first known use of the term "blowback," countless journalists and scholars have chronicled the greatest blowback of all: how the staggering quantities of aid that America provided to anti-Marxist Islamic extremists during the Cold War inadvertently positioned those very same extremists to become America's next great enemy. (Indeed, Iran's religious leaders were among the first to turn against the United States.) Dreyfuss's volume reaches farther and deeper into the subject than most. He convincingly situates America's attempt to build an Islamic bulwark against Soviet expansion into Britain's history of imperialism in the region. And where other authors restrict their focus to the Afghan mujahideen, Dreyfuss details a history of American support—sometimes conducted with startling blindness, sometimes, tacitly through proxies—for Islamic radicals in Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Syria. At times, the assistance occurred openly through the American private sector, as Dreyfuss describes in a fascinating digression on Islamic banking. But ultimately, too few government officials were paying attention to the growth and dangers of political Islam. A CIA officer summarizes Dreyfuss's case when he says, "We saw it all in a short-term perspective"—the long-term consequences are what we're facing now. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In an effort to thwart the spread of communism, the U.S. has supported--even organized and funded--Islamic fundamentalist groups, a policy that has come back to haunt post-cold war geopolitics. Drawing on archival sources and interviews with policymakers and foreign-service officials, Dreyfuss traces this ultimately misguided approach from support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the ultraorthodox Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and Hamas and Hezbollah to jihads in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. Fearful of the appeal of communism, the U.S. saw the rise of a religious Right as a counterbalance. Despite the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the declared U.S. war on terrorism in Iraq, Dreyfuss notes continued U.S. support for Iraq's Islamic Right. He cites parallels between the cultural forces that have promoted the religious Right in the U.S and the Middle East and notes that support from wealthy donors, the emergence of powerful figures, and politically convenient alliances have contributed to Middle Eastern hostilities toward the U.S. A well-researched and insightful book. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (November 3, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805076522
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805076523
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,078,420 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #519 in History of Islam
- #874 in African Politics
- #1,330 in Middle Eastern Politics

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67 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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BlackJack21

The Devil's Game doesn't go far enough and much of it is based on half-truths:

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 4, 2007

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The Devil's Game doesn't go far enough and much of it is based on half-truths:

At first I was very excited when I finally received the "Devil's Game" in the mail. Unfortunately Dreyfuss' book was a big disappointment. Let's face it, political science books are nothing more than conspiracy books, and when there's a conspiracy the author should try to get to the crux of the enigma. By circumventing around the fact that the Bush family has been tied to the bin Ladens through companies such as the defunct BCCI Bank and Carlyle Group (an aerospace weapons company who engages in heavy arms dealing around the world, while buying out weapons manufacturers) is very surprising to me.
I found myself inquiring as to why Dreyfuss doesn't mention any of this in his book.
Most Americans are aloof to these facts, and Dreyfuss makes no attempt to clear things up. This book leaves more questions than answers. How is a reader who is unfamiliar with Middle Eastern politics going to ascertain what is really transpiring when Dreyfuss doesn't mention the fact that George H.W. Bush is still a consultant and stockholder for Carlyle Group?
Moreover, the fact that Dreyfuss promulgates that Al'Qaeda is a real terrorist organization is nothing more than CIA propaganda, considering Osama bin Laden is a CIA asset. The bottom line is that Al'Qaeda doesn't exist and Dreyfuss knows this fact because he contributes to MSNBC.
Journalist Michael Moran (who is MSNBC's international editor) wrote and in-depth article about bin Laden's ties to the CIA, and ISI (Pakistani intelligence) during the Afghan Wars in the 1980's.
And if you skim through the overwhelming evidence, you'll quickly see that even an eight-year-old child could easily ascertain that Al'Qaeda is really the CIA perpetrating false flag operations.
Dreyfuss scratches many quandaries on the surface. One issue in particular is the Faustian financial owners of the banking institutions that are orchestrating the events he's discussing. In chapter 7 "The Rise of Economic Islam" Dreyfuss mentions many banks that were and still are involved in funding the Islamic extremist, but what he fails to mention are the names of the individuals who own these banks.
And there isn't enough mentioned about the arms manufacturers, military contracting companies, and energy companies that are scamming billions of dollars from the American people and all the other countries in the world. By circumventing around these quandaries, Dreyfuss fails to make the proper connections needed to ascertain how the U.S. Government correlated its hegemonic involvement with Fundamentals Islam. If he bothered to mention the Trilateral Commission and Bilderberger's involvement things would have been much clearer.

Remember, the people who are really giving the orders for terrorist attacks own the corporations and control your government!
YES MY FRIENDS!!!
The orders come from the top of the oligarchic capstone! And Dreyfuss knows it and he's not naming names in this book.

Anyway, a couple of banks that Dreyfuss cites in his book are Citibank and Chase Manhattan, but not once did he mentions that David Rockefeller controls both banks and that Shaukat Aziz is the former Vice President and head of the global private banking division of Citibank, and in 1999, Aziz became Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Pakistan. The bottom line is the banks are becoming exorbitantly wealthy off these wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and it dates back to the crusades.
I will state what I did like about this book was that Dreyfuss gives a wonderful historical thesis about the history of the conflicts in Egypt, Iran, and a little is mentioned about Israel's role in the whole scheme of events.
Unfortunately he sugarcoats over Zionist involvement, and the fact that he refers to the 9/11 attacks, as blowback is an insult to our intelligence. 9/11 was our Reichstag Fire!
Also, there isn't much about Saddam Hussein's CIA connections.

Furthermore, Dreyfuss cites that in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's CIA Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles forged an alliance with Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi pan-Islamic movement, which caused the Muslim Brotherhood to reemerge in the hopes of assassinating Egyptian president Nasser. But what isn't mentioned is that the Dulles brothers were members of the Knights of Malta, a secret society that has strong ties to the Vatican.
So how deep is the Vatican's involvement is a question that should have been raised?

Insofar as the Afghan Wars are concerned I've contemplated that Dreyfuss missed the mark on that issue also. The official story is that the U.S. financed and aided the Muhajadeen in an effort to expel the Russians from the region. The gruesome truth is that the U.S and the USSR were really allies in the Cold War.
YES THE COLD WAR WAS A SCAM!
The U.S. was funding both Russia and the Muhajadeen in the conflict. Additionally, the Russian government looted the Russian treasury, bankrupting the country.
So the inquiry is, is Dreyfuss lying about the events in the Cold War, or is he just ignorant of the facts?

There's a lot missing in this book. Overall this isn't a bad place to start your research if you're new to this subject. However, I personally recommend that you read Craig Unger's "House of Bush House Of Saud" first. Unger's book offers a much clearer picture of events in Saudi Arabia.

21 people found this helpful

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Newton Ooi

Playing with fire

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 20, 2006

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Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Berlin; these are the places of confrontation one thinks of when one considers the Cold War between the USA and the USSR. But there was one region often missed, yet which is influencing world events even now; the Middle East. It is here that the West in general, and the USA specifically, committed various acts and supported fiends of all sort in its endeavor to stop the spread of communism.

Starting in the early 1900s, and picking up after WWII, western powers fought against nationalistic groups throughout N. Africa and the Middle East. They did this by allying with and aiding local Muslim fundamentalist organizations, such as the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia, the ayatollahs in Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The nationalist groups were secular and progressive, and made easy targets for the religious fervor of the Islamists to campaign against them in various ways overt and covert. This was encouraged by the US thru the CIA, the embassies, international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, and treaties of all sorts. The initial results were civil strife throughout the Arab world. This was followed by the rise of Islamist groups throughout the Muslim world, most noticeably the rise of Hamas in Palestine.

By reading this book, one comes to understand that the actions of the US during the Cold War helped to create Al Queda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and various other Muslim fundamentalist groups both local and international. This then was the Devil's game that the US played. By siding with Islamists the US betted that together they could defeat communism. This happened, but what came after might be a lot worse.

21 people found this helpful

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J. Adams

A veritable text book on fundamentalist Islam

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 9, 2008

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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."

5 people found this helpful

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Cyrus K Davies

ISLAMIZATION of the MIDDLE EAST

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 23, 2021

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It’s as true and as vividly w indicates today in the Middle East, the ISLAMIZATION of that regime to keep mass the populations ignorant and keep them under totalitarian regimes while robbing them of their resources as well as keep them fighting amoug themselves till their total destruction....!!!

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Dwight C. Douglas

The Devil Made Us Pay Them

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 31, 2015

Verified Purchase

The way I discovered this book was when two former CIA Afghani operatives sat down next to me at a bar in Washington, DC. After a brief discussion about the state of the world, they suggested I read Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam by Robert Dreyfuss. For those people who are conspiracy freaks, this book will only make you more paranoid. For those of us who are looking for a fuller understanding of how we got to the point that a religion would be so politically and militarily driven, this is the perfect book. In a sense, it makes me ashamed of my country. My only regret was that this was published in 2006 and in the decade since, there have been so many things this book predicted. Wake up Washington I give Devil’s Game five stars and hope that other writers and researchers carry on this work.

12 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Dino

Great book - horrible print

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 20, 2018

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This is a well-written book and very interesting. It deserves 5 stars, but... loses one star due to it at times comes across as too over-dramatized and conspiratorial. For example, it is hard to believe that the Islamic Finance industry is some kind of Islamic takeover of the West aided by the Deep State. One big minus is the quality of print. It seems as it is some "on-demand" print from a PDF file. The cover is pixelated and colours are bad. Does not look good in a bookshelf. The print of the text inside the book is also bad, at times one can just make out the letters and it is annoying to say the least. Too bad for a good book as this - for the price one would have expected more.

One person found this helpful

Amr Alfaisal

Interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 20, 2022

Verified Purchase

Demonstrates the Wests continual support for extremists in the Middle East.
Has many factual errors in the section dealing with Islamic banking.

Daffy Bibliophile

A Double-Edged Sword

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 26, 2012

Verified Purchase

Dreyfuss has written a very interesting book that will make you think twice when you read the headlines in today's paper. His central idea is that the United States has used fundamentalist Islamic movements to counter the growth of Arab nationalism and socialism as well as Soviet expansionism. To support his argument he uses interviews with former CIA and State Department employees as well as an impressive array of articles from foreign policy journals, declassified government documents and other sources. All in all, he's done his research!

"Devil's Game" gives a great overview of the history of Islamist movements going all the way back to the late nineteenth century and the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood with British money and encouragement. Dreyfuss then moves on to the post-Second World War world and the preeminence of the USA. The CIA coup against the democratically elected Mossadegh government in Iran is detailed. Ironically the Americans used Iranian ayatollahs to create mobs demanding the return of the Shah; this tactic would be used against the Shah and the Americans twenty-six years later, ushering in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Dreyfuss covers the use of Islamic fundamentalism, the Islamic religious right, against Nasser in Egypt and against "godless communism" throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, including, of course, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. Interestingly, the Americans, the Saudis and the Pakistanis used Islamic mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in order to provoke the Soviet invasion thus giving the USSR its own Vietnam.

Of course we all know how the meddling in Afghanistan turned out, we're still dealing with the blowback from that fiasco. Stinger missiles anyone? The lesson which I took from this book is that religious fundamentalism wielded as a geopolitical tool, is very much a double-edged sword. If Britain and later the United States had sided with Arab nationalism instead of seeing it as a threat to their interests in the region and if the US hadn't been so blinded by its obsession with the Soviet Union then they wouldn't have let loose this Frankenstein's monster known as Islamic fundamentalism and our world would likely be a lot safer than it is.

Why four stars? Dreyfuss's book is a real page-turner packed with some great information. But he seems to contradict himself in the last chapter in which he states that this insatiable force of politicized fanatical religion can be placated and that's an argument I just don't buy. Dreyfuss shows the reader just how crazy and anti-Western some of these fundamentalists are and then suggests that we could reach a compromise with them. Sorry, I wish it were so but I just don't see it.
This book is well worth reading for the historical knowledge that it contains and for the insight into what's behind the headlines. I would just recommend taking Dreyfuss's suggestions in the last chapter and contrasting them with the information he's provided in earlier chapters.

Finally, I would love to see Dreyfuss update this book to take into account the "Arab Spring" and the current situation in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

2 people found this helpful

R CAMUS

excellent ! and easy to read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 16, 2018

Verified Purchase

if you should read ONE book on how/why of the turmoils in the middle east, this is the one. This explain clearly that religion is only a political instrument

Overall, this is an amazing, detailed account of facts (supported by various references) to understand the role and interventions of the West in the middle-east, and the events unfolded there.
And it is easy to read :-)

Sayo

Understanding American Foreign Policy

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on August 9, 2015

Verified Purchase

I haven't even finished reading this book yet, but it is certainly a worthy read. I was warned to check out the authors background, which I did in some measure. And it appears that Robert has ties to Lyndon LaRouche which has a rather complicated track record. Never the less, this book appears to have its facts straight. It dovetails with a lot of other historically verifiable material and fills in gaps to boot. It is another piece of the jigsaw in obtaining the bigger picture on American foreign policy.

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