Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (American Empire Project)

Robert Dreyfuss has produced the most comprehensive and accurately sourced evidence of the monster that was artificially created by first the British and later by our flawed and disastrous intelligence apparatus to protect big oil and arms dealers at the expense of millions of lives lost, displaced refugees, cultures decimated and terrorism worldwide. This is a must read for all who are in search of the true origins of the artificially created Moslem Fundamentalism.

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.

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."

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.

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....!!!

Any time anyone starts talking about the middle east and Islam, the first question I ask is have you read this book? Without reading this book, any discussion of Islam in the middle east is neglectfully incomplete. There are some really smart analysts in the CIA. When policy makers don't listen to them, historically bad stuff happens in the world and ironically, the CIA often gets the blame. This book is written by one such expert insider.

Informative, but not all factual in areas

Deep global enlighten historical information engineered to be scattered within the writer boarders of basidiomycetes at the outset and engineered too to flow ,in the final analysis, ,all, in the Muslim Brothers basin the ultimate target of the book ; unbiased ,lucrative in frame of references and very well informed writer.