from a book review of Robert Dreyfuss's
Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam"...The United States spent decades cultivating Islamists, manipulating and double-crossing them, cynically using and misusing them as Cold War allies, only to find that it spawned a force that turned against its sponsor and with a vengeance. Like monsters imbued with artificial life, radical imams, mullahs, and ayatollahs stalk the landscape, thundering not only against the United States but against freedom of thought, against secular science, against nationalism and the left, against women's rights. Some are terrorists, but far more are just medieval-minded religious fanatics who want to turn the calendar back to the seventh century.
During the Cold War, from 1945 to 1991, the enemy was not merely the USSR. According to the Manicheann rules of that era, the United States demonized leaders who did not wholeheartedly sign on to the American agenda or who might challenge Western and in particular U.S. hegemony. Ideas and ideologies that could inspire such leaders were suspect: nationalism, humanism, secularism, socialism. But subversive ideas such as these were also the ones most feared by the nascent forces of Muslim fundamentalism. Throughout the region the Islamic right fought pitched battles against the bearers of these notions, not only in the realm of intellectual life but in the streets. During the decades-long struggle against Arab nationalism -- along with Persian, Turkish, and Indian nationalism -- the United States found it politic to make common cause with the Islamic right.
More broadly, the United States spent many years trying to construct a barrier against the Soviet Union along tis southern flank. The fact that all of the nations between Greece and China were Muslim gave rise to the notion that Islam itlsef 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 policy makers 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.
The United States played not with Islam -- that is, the religion, the traditional, organized system of belief of hundreds of millions -- but with Islamism. Unlike the faith, with fourteen centuries of history behind it, Islamism is of more recent vintage. It is a political creed with its origins in the late nineteenth century, a militant, all-encompassing philosophy whose tenets would appear foreign or heretical to most Muslims of earlier ages and that still appear so to many educated Muslims today. Whether it is called pan-Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, it is an altogether different creature from the spiritual interpretation of Muslim life as contained in the Five Pillars of Islam. It is, in fact, a perversion of that religious faith. That is the mutant ideology that the United States encourages, supported, organized, or funded. It is the same one variously represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, by Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, by Saudi Arabia's ultra-orthodox Wahhabism, by Hamas and Hezbollah, by the Afghan jihadis, and by Osama bin Laden..."
American Empire ProjectNotice how whenever the US gets involved in any of these countries, they end up even closer to Islam fundamentalism that was the case. But in all fairness, Haig usually gets tacked with the 'grand strategy' when in fact it was Ziggy's big plan. (Haig's speech writer for a time was Wesley Clark and he thought it was a boffo idea BTW. He was also NATO commander when the US thought it a great idea to invite al-qaeda into Bosnia, to help train the Bosnia muslim minority...but that's a whole other story)
In fact it was Ziggy and Carter that funnelled support to the Ayatollahs, including support Khomeini in Paris. Shortly after the revolution in Iran, Ziggy met with the new Iranian PM in Morocco to talk about support. This was the short period where Andrew Young, US ambassador to the UN, called Khomeini 'a 20th century Saint'.
It was suspected that these talks were what triggered the Embassy attack. Student elements in the revolution didn't want any more dealings with the US, so they figured taking the Embassy would put the kibosh to any further talks. The administration figured it would be over shortly and Khomeini figured that it might be good for leverage to get a better deal.
The fact of the matter is that it should have been a wake up call to the US, but it wasn't. It would appear that nothing is a 'wake up' call anymore.