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‘US true godfather of Islamist extremism’

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Robert Dreyfuss, an investigative American journalist, has held the United States responsible for unleashing Islamic fundamentalism.

Author of ‘Devil’s Game’, a new book that lifts the lid on this largely untold story, Dreyfuss told a meeting at the Middle East Institute on Thursday that in the 1950s and 1960s, the United States viewed Islam as a barrier against Communism. Many of the leading figures of the Islamic movement were working with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – among them Saeed Ramadan, an Egyptian who was married to the daughter of Hassan al-Banna. He was taken to meet President Eisenhower in the Oval Office in 1953. The author said that the Islamism of today has nothing to do with Islam. He cautioned that it is dangerous to play with such religious forces.

He criticised America’s hobnobbing with Shia parties in Iraq and said that if they won big in the election, there would be a civil war in Iraq. He hoped that history would not be repeated and that the US would not once again align itself with reactionary regimes and decrepit monarchies in the Middle East. He regretted that in the past, the US had failed to come to terms with legitimate nationalist movements, opting instead to support illiberal and reactionary forces. The US had resisted progressive forces, a matter of “everlasting shame” and it was only to be hoped that “we won’t be aligning ourselves with the same forces once again only to find ourselves on the wrong side again”.

One reviewer of Dreyfuss’s new book writes: “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 summarises 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.”

Another reviewer said that in an effort to thwart the spread of Communism, the US has supported – even organised 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, Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the ultra-orthodox Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and Hamas and Hezbollah to jihads in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. Fearful of the appeal of Communism, the US saw the rise of a religious right as a counterbalance. Despite the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the declared US war on terrorism in Iraq, Dreyfuss notes continued US support for Iraq’s Islamic right. He cites parallels between the cultural forces that have promoted the religious right in the US 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 US.

At the Middle East Institute, Dreyfuss described as “idiotic” the notion that Islamist forces wished to establish a Caliphate from North Africa to Southeast Asia. This was utter nonsense, he said. What was happening was that those in the administration who made such declarations based them on what they read on Al Qaeda and other jihadi websites. He reminded his audience of the 1974 Patty Hearst case – the American newspaper heiress who joined a terrorist outfit – where the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army planned to overthrow the US government. Such threats, he added, were in the nature of fantasies and should be treated as such. He also asserted that Osama bin Laden can be defeated, but the bigger problem is the growth of radical right-wing Islamist movements. The right thing to do will be to “lower the temperature” in regions of high tension which are like a kettle on the boil. Extremists are akin to the steam that escapes from that kettle, he added.

Dreyfuss said that there is need not to declare a “war on global terrorism” but to lower the temperature. The US should also help resolve such nagging conflicts as Kashmir, Chechnya, Sudan and Palestine. He also advised Washington not to “push democracy in a willy-nilly way” on other countries. Some of America’s policies were enunciated in order to make the region safe for Israel, he added. He said that Islam should not be seen as a monolith. He also cautioned against manipulating political and religious forces or playing with them, a game that he called hazardous. He disclosed that it was Israel that had given birth to Hamas. He charged that during the Iran-Iraq War, it was Israel that was supplying arms to Iran.

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