Devil's Game

What It Is

A history of a policy, not of a religion. Robert Dreyfuss is an investigative journalist who has written for Rolling Stone, The Nation and Mother Jones, and he spent years in the archives and in interviews with former CIA, State Department and Pentagon officials before publishing this in 2005 with Metropolitan Books, as part of Holt's American Empire Project.

The thesis sits in the subtitle: how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam. Dreyfuss traces a repeating pattern of tactical bargains, in which Western powers and then Washington backed religious movements as a counterweight to something they feared more — imperial rivals, Arab nationalism, the secular left, the Soviet Union. The counterweight, he argues, kept growing.

It runs to about 400 pages. This is journalism rather than academic history: interviews, declassified files, and a hard narrative line.

Why It Matters

When it appeared, four years after 2001, the standard explanation for Islamist militancy was that it had welled up from inside the Muslim world for reasons of its own. Dreyfuss said: look at who funded, armed, sheltered and legitimised these movements, and look at who was in the room when it was decided. A good deal of what was contrarian in 2005 is now close to conventional, and this book deserves some of the credit.

Its deeper subject is the structure of foreign policy itself. The tactical bargain whose bill arrives twenty years later, struck by officials who will have retired by the time it does, is not a Middle Eastern phenomenon. That is why the book is still assigned.

The weaknesses follow directly from the strengths. A book organised around a single thesis makes every episode fit it, and Dreyfuss's frame slides between the claim that Washington supported these movements and the claim that it created them, which are propositions of very different weight. He treats groups separated by geography, doctrine and decades as one phenomenon, which is exactly the flattening he accuses American policymakers of. Reviewing it in Foreign Affairs, L. Carl Brown noted that the United States has also spent decades opposing Islamists, and that the sounder indictment is of a habit of intrusive, regime-changing intervention rather than a long collusion. He had a point.

Before You Read

Ten to twelve hours. Nothing in the prose will slow you down; the cast will. The density of agencies, acronyms and unfamiliar names is the only real difficulty.

You do not need a background in Middle Eastern history, but you will get far more from it with one. Knowing roughly who Nasser was and what the Muslim Brotherhood is will carry you.

Read the notes as you go rather than afterwards. In a book making claims of this size, the endnotes are where you discover how much weight each one is carrying, and it varies more than the confident prose suggests.

Which Edition to Read

• Holt Paperbacks (2006) — recommended. The standard edition: complete text, full notes, and the cheapest way to own it. There is no revised or expanded version, so this is the book. The cost: the design is plain, the maps are minimal, and for a narrative that crosses this much territory you will want an atlas beside you. View on Amazon →
• The Metropolitan Books hardcover (2005). The first edition, identical text. No reason to prefer it unless you want the object.
• The ebook. The right choice if you intend to check him. Searchable, and it makes the constant movement between argument and endnote painless, which in this book is not a small thing.

The edition is not the decision here. What you read beside it is. Take Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, which covers the Afghan portion of the story with better sources and no thesis to protect. Dreyfuss has the argument; Coll has the documents. Read them together and you can work out which parts of this book hold.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it as a brief, not a verdict. Dreyfuss is prosecuting. He is under no obligation to present the exculpatory evidence, and he does not.

Follow the mechanism rather than the outrage. The valuable thing here is not that Western governments did cynical things, which is not news. It is the specific machinery by which a short-term expedient becomes a permanent client, and then a permanent problem.

And keep asking what the alternative was. Dreyfuss rarely says. The officials he interviews were choosing between bad options in real time, and a history that never grants them that has left something out.