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| Volume XIII, Spring 2006, Number 1 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundadmentalist Islam , by Robert Dreyfuss. Metropolitan Books, 2005. 388 pp. $27.50, hardcover.
Philip Wilcox
president, Foundation for the Middle East Peace
This provocative book is about America’s sometimes shortsighted and ill-informed alliances of convenience with Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and South Asia that began during and survived the Cold War. Part of the publisher’s “American Empire Project,” Devil’s Game joins a swelling tide of post-9/11 books that seek to explain how U.S. foreign policy has come to grief in the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Devil’s Game traces in detail Washington’s early contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood; its efforts to co-opt Islamist elements to counter the Soviet Union and its perceived ally, Nasser and Arab nationalism; and the U.S. alliances with fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the mujahaddin in Afghanistan. The author makes the case effectively, as others have, that because of its focus on an exaggerated Soviet threat, the United States failed to understand and anticipate the dangerous anti-Western and extremist elements in Islamic politics.
But Devil’s Game goes further. The book’s thesis is introduced in its subtitle, “How the United States Helped Unleash Islamic Fundamentalism,” and the book jacket states that “America’s historic alliance with the Islamic fundamentalist right is greatly to blame for the emergence of Islamist terrorism in the 1990s.”
Although Dreyfuss tempers and qualifies this broad claim, he pursues the thesis that U.S. policies have been the major force in the emergence of political Islam and its lethal terrorist fringe. His essential argument is that Islam acquired momentum and strength it otherwise would not have had because of early and frequent CIA contacts with and support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which he describes as the underlying movement in pan-Islamic politics; the U.S. embrace of Islamist Saudi Arabia and its opposition to Nasser and his competing secular pan-Arab movement; and American support for the Afghan mujahaddin. But Dreyfuss does not make the case persuasively for assigning primary blame to the United States for the rise of Islamism. Indeed, American policy blunders have contributed to the problem, but the historic roots of political Islam and its anti-Western manifestations are broader and deeper.
As for Dreyfuss’s main indictments of U.S. policy, the CIA did have contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood up through the 1970s as this far-flung group expanded its influence. But Dreyfuss tends to exaggerate the significance of these CIA contacts. In fact, American intelligence officers and diplomats in the region during that era gave low priority to Islamist politics in the countries where they served or to growing international links among Islamists. In fact, the United States had only a superficial knowledge of these phenomena until the Iranian revolution erupted in 1979.
As for the U.S.-Saudi alliance, which Dreyfuss regards as a major strategic mistake, there is every reason to believe that the Saudi kingdom would have carried out its aggressive efforts to spread its Wahhabi brand of Islam throughout the region, using its vast wealth, even if its relations with Washington had been more distant. The author laments the massive U.S. military support and infrastructure for the kingdom and our presence there that was ultimately a key motive of Usama bin Laden’s anti-Saudi and anti-U.S. jihad. But he fails to acknowledge that Washington had compelling interests in Saudi oil and that the buildup of U.S. security ties in the 1980s was as much to help defend Saudi Arabia against its neighbors –– a competing Islamist revolutionary Iran and militarily powerful Iraq –– than to deter a Soviet invasion. Nor does he consider that the U.S.-led rescue of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1991, surely a worthy American initiative, could not have been mounted without very strong U.S.-Saudi ties.
Dreyfuss suggests that history might have been very different had the United States supported or at least tolerated Nasser, whom he describes in positive terms as a “revolutionary” leader (p. 96), and Nasser’s secular pan-Arab movement rather than embracing “reactionary” (p. 120) Islamist Saudi Arabia, Nasser’s main regional competitor. There is much evidence that Washington mishandled its relations with Egypt and Nasser because of preoccupations with Israel and the Cold War. But it is something of a stretch to speculate that the United States should have kept Saudi Arabia at arms length and decided that Nasser’s statist economics and grandiose demagoguery offered a promising path to a secular, modernizing Arab world. In any case, Dreyfuss does not develop this revisionist thesis.
The author is on firmer ground in his lengthy treatment of the damage the United States suffered from its policies in Afghanistan. Many others have also written about the unexpected “blowback” that culminated in the 9/11 attack from U.S. financing and support of Afghan Islamist militants and assorted radical Arab volunteers that the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan helped enlist to defeat the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Dreyfuss argues that our involvement in Afghanistan against the Soviets was fundamentally misguided. He implies, though here again does not develop his argument, that “democratic, progressive” elements in Afghanistan might have prevailed if the United States had not supported “right wing” Afghan Islamists in our eagerness to enmesh the Russians in their own “Vietnam” (p. 265). In this revisionist vein, he claims that CIA- and White House-backed Islamist actions “provoked” the Russians into an invasion that was a “last ditch defensive action” (pp. 247, 256). Zbigniew Brzezinski and other U.S. officials indeed welcomed trouble for Moscow in Afghanistan. But a more balanced treatment of U.S. support for the mujahaddin would not view the USSR’s policy so charitably and would give greater weight to the needs of the Afghans, the invaded people.
The excessive deference the United States paid to Pakistan in the arming of the mujahaddin and Pakistan’s close ties with unsavory Afghan Islamists like Gulbaddin Hekmatyar are amply documented in Devil’s Game. Yet, despite these misjudgments, there is a strong case that America’s failure in Afghanistan, which led to the rise of the Taliban, Usama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, was not the decision to support the mujahaddin against the Soviets, but to walk away from a ruined Afghanistan after the war and to continue to subcontract our policy to Pakistan. A major American and international effort to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan after the war might have prevented it from becoming the principal safe haven and breeding ground for radical Islam and anti-Western terrorism and might well have prevented 9/11.
Devil’s Game does not claim to be a comprehensive history of U.S. policy in the region after World War II. But, by focusing only on episodes of U.S. support for right-wing Islamism and how these policies went astray, it suggests this dominated U.S. policy. In fact, Washington’s policies toward Islamists were hardly uniform and were, more often than not, hostile. For decades, the United States has supported secular regimes at odds with Islamism, such as those in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Jordan. The United States also supported the secular shah of Iran, a resolute opponent of Islamism, until the bitter end. After the shah’s fall, Washington tilted toward Saddam Hussein’s secular Iraq in its war on Iran, and it has always treated the Islamist Hezbollah in Lebanon as an enemy.
Dreyfuss claims it was only after 9/11 that Washington grasped the dangers of Islamism and U.S. miscalculations of the past. Needless to say, almost no one anticipated the magnitude of the threat, much less the scale of the attack. But the Clinton administration knew that extremist Muslims, especially those who had graduated from the Afghan war and the training camps in Afghanistan, were the principal international terrorist danger, and that Bin Laden was looming larger as a threat. The author points out correctly, however, that Washington did not transform its policies until after the shock of 9/11. Even so, Dreyfuss believes that the Bush administration’s new policy toward terrorism and the Muslim world is “incoherent” and self-defeating. He denounces excessive reliance on military force as likely to spread rather than contain terrorism and anti-American hostility, a prediction that thus far, at least, is proving true in Iraq. He alleges starkly that the first priority of the Bush administration is not fighting terrorism, but spreading U.S. hegemony in the Arab and Islamic world through regime change and military force, although historians will probably judge that the administration’s motives were more mixed –– and muddled.
Dreyfuss sees no acceptable middle ground between entirely secular governments in the Arab and Muslim worlds and Islamist governments that are hostile to the United States and its values. But, given the depth of history and culture in those regions, it is hard to imagine that societies will erect the kind of wall between mosque and state that he advocates. Nor is it inevitable, as Dreyfuss seems to believe, that Islamism is always “right wing,” necessarily tends to extremism, and is incompatible with real democracy. Dreyfuss’s one-dimensional treatment of the dark side of Islamism ignores the diversity and evolving nature of political Islam. He laments the fact that in Turkey, a 70-year effort to banish Islam from politics has failed. But the Erdogan government in Turkey today is hardly interested in reverting to medieval Islam; it seeks instead to join the European Union. Indeed, Turkey’s synthesis of democracy and modernism within Islam seems to refute Dreyfuss’s concerns about Islam and democracy.
In this vein, the author is skeptical of the Bush administration’s newly launched democracy initiative as an antidote to terrorism and anti-American extremism. He fears the opposite result, if the United States believes what it says, though he doubts the policy will be pursued with regard to the pro-American autocracies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Going against the grain of most analysis, he believes the United States made the right decision in supporting the military overthrow of popularly elected Islamist leaders of Algeria in 1991, notwithstanding the fact that the sequel to this suppression of Islamist politics was years of horrific terror and military counterviolence.
At the end of the book, Dreyfuss warns that the United States is resuming the old “devil’s game” at its peril in Iraq. He argues that Washington has “consciously and with deliberation” encouraged Iraq’s Shia fundamentalists to take power, enhancing the prospects for Islamic revolution or ballot-box victories elsewhere in the region (p. 340). In fact, in late 2005, the Bush administration was working desperately to encourage multi-ethnic pluralism and power sharing in Iraq. Dreyfuss ventures further by speculating that the Bush administration may have bought the novel theory of neocon analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht that countries governed by right-wing Islamists, Shia and Sunni, are more likely to be less threatening to American interests over time than pro-West secular dictators (pp. 340-342). Unfortunately, Devil’s Game ends at this point, without elaborating on this eccentric analysis of U.S. intentions or discussing competing evidence.
Although Dreyfuss’s analysis sometimes raises questions, Devil’s Game is a well written, richly detailed and fascinating account of America’s encounter with political Islam. His criticism of our woeful lack of knowledge and sophistication about the Islamic world and our frequent tendency to favor short-term tactical moves without considering long-term strategic consequences is telling, no less today than in the past.
Dreyfuss’s advice that the United States should not try to force its vision of reform and democracy on the region is sound. But his strong skepticism about democracy as a theme of American policy and his fears that democracy will inevitably produce retrograde Islamist regimes are overdrawn. His other prescriptions for American policy are sound. He recommends that the United States lower the political temperature that heats up the Islamist movement by helping to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; abandon pretensions of empire and sharply reduce the American military footprint in the region; and abandon bellicose threats and diktats about regime change. These are eminently sensible recommendations.
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