Bob Dreyfuss has just kicked off our latest TPMCafe Book Club, explaining why he wrote his new book Devil’s Game.
Here’s the beginning of Bob’s kick-off post …
I wrote Devil’s Game to fill in a gap amid the millions of words that have been written about political Islam and U.S. policy since September 11, 2001.
It’s the story before the story, and it helps answer the question: How did we get into this mess? It’s my contention that part of the answer to that question, at least, is that for half a century the United States and many of its allies saw what I call the “Islamic right” as convenient partners in the Cold War.
I approached this book not as an historian, but as a journalist. A great deal of it is based on scores of interviews with men and women from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. military, and the private sector who participated in many of these events. And I relied on dozens of published works. Most of the sources I interviewed are quoted on the record, and virtually every fact in the book is footnoted.
Click here to read the rest of Bob’s post and join us all this week for a lively discussion of Bob’s argument.
