Devil's Game (book)

2006 book by Robert Dreyfuss

Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam is a 2006 book by Robert Dreyfuss, an American investigative journalist. It discusses how Western governments supported the growth of Islamic fundamentalism for several purposes.

The book addresses a number of different Middle Eastern interventions made by the West, as outlined below.

The book discusses how Western governments supported the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood in order to sabotage the efforts of Pro Soviet Arab Nationalist leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. The goals of Nasser were to end Western domination and control in the Middle East. This was a great threat to Western interests, who used the Muslim Brotherhood to destabilize the Nasser government.

<blockquote>"[T]he United States spent many years trying to construct a barrier against the Soviet Union along its southern flank. The fact that all of the nations between Greece and China were Muslim gave rise to the notion that Islam itself might reinforce that Maginot Line style strategy. Gradually the idea of a green belt along the "arc of Islam" took form. The idea was not just defensive. Adventurous policymakers imagined that restive Muslims inside the Soviet Union's own Central Asian republics might be the undoing of the USSR itself, and they took steps to encourage them." (Introduction of Devil's Game)

Vanessa Bush for the American Library Association described it as "well researched and insightful."