Our friend Political Islam

Today's Salon has a review of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, and an interview with its author, Robert Dreyfus. James Norton, the reviewer and interviewer, describes this book as an account of "the Machiavellian use of political Islam as a sword and shield against communism and Arab nationalism. Contextualized by the modern-day neoconservative push for war with Iraq, "Devil's Game" records the long and sordid history of right-wing and hard-line elements in the U.S. government finding common cause with fundamentalist groups in the Middle East." In the interview, Dreyfus provides us with a historically informed critique of the long term and empirically uninformed policy of cooperation between American policy makers and Political Islamicists. I'm eager to read this book.