Democracy Now! speaks with investigative reporter Robert Dreyfuss, author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

An excerpt:

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you no doubt heard the President's speech yesterday, and he talked for the first time about Islamo-fascism and the threat of domination from extremists, fundamentalist extremists. Your reaction to some of his comments?

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, you know, in the political context of Bush's collapsing poll numbers and general deterioration in public opinion, I think it was a desperatist speech. I think he was reaching out to people to try to get across the idea that we're winning somehow the war against terrorism. Instead, what he did is he bought into this idea that was put forward by neoconservatives over the past, gosh, four years now, that this is a global struggle akin to the Cold War, that this is an unending struggle against tyranny that's going to preoccupy the United States for years or decades to come. He’s inflating tremendously the scope, basically, of the war on terrorism itself, and he is ignoring utterly the fact that the war in Iraq has done more than anything else to intensify the bitterness and resentment, even hatred of the United States all across the Muslim world, which is the prime recruiting tool for Islamic radicals.

So, I think the idea that this is even a war that can be won in military terms has been rejected now by the military. A few weeks ago, when the generals tried to say -- and Rumsfeld even got into the act, saying that this is a struggle that involves primarily intelligence and diplomacy and cooperation of other countries. The President jumped into that debate to say that this was, in fact, going to be a continuing military struggle. I think he is finding it increasingly impossible to sell the idea that the war in Iraq is having any success whatsoever, and so he is making this again desperate effort to try to recast or to cast -- again to cast the war in Iraq as part of some struggle against terrorism. But as other people have observed, invading Iraq after 9/11 was the equivalent of Franklin Roosevelt invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor. There's no relationship between the two, and by going into Iraq and by continuing to fight a hopeless battle there, we're making the problem of terrorism far worse and certainly not better.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, he never mentioned at all, and we wouldn't expect him to, the role of the United States, as you document in your book, Devil's Game, in terms of feeding the development of fundamentalist movements throughout the Middle East. Could you talk about that a little bit?

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, you know, for 50 years during the Cold War, a lot of people in the United States in policy circles and in intelligence circles saw political Islam -- I call it the Islamic right, sort of analogous to the Christian right -- as allies in the struggle against the Soviet Union and also against -- in the struggle against nationalisms, that is, Arab nationalism and nationalism in India and Iran and elsewhere. So, in the sense that this was a Cold War battle, it carried over through Afghanistan into the present time.

If I were worried about Islamic extremism, I would worry first and foremost about the current government of Iraq. It's the Shiite fundamentalist extremists, as represented by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and by Al Dawa, the two main Shiite parties in Iraq, which now again have the full support of the U.S. government to the tune of billions of dollars and 150,000 troops, that are promoting an extreme right wing, I would say, fascist Islamic ideology.

So, if the President is concerned about Islamic fascism, he ought to do something about the Hakeem family in Iraq and others who are busily creating a theocratic state there, running death squads, attacking moderate Sunnis, bombing liquor stores and barber shops and movie theaters, and forcing women to adopt their distorted, weird version of what Islamic law requires women to look like, and, of course, on top of everything else, building ties to Iran's intelligence service and revolutionary guard. So, here we are, on the one hand, the President is talking about an “Islamic threat,” quote, unquote, to the United States, and on the other hand we're propping up the world's biggest extremist Islamic force in southern and central Iraq, and which is basically in control of the government in Baghdad.