“AQ [al-Qaida] is on our side in Syria,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was advised in a February 2012 email from her deputy chief of staff. Journalist Max Blumenthal opens his latest book, The Management of Savagery, with this telling epigraph.
The statement to Clinton reveals the kinship between US military interventionist policy in the Middle East and the rise of radical Islamist forces like al-Qaida and Islamic State. It also captures one of the essential themes of this startling study that spans decades of events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Blumenthal’s principal thesis is that the election of President Donald Trump and the rise of Islamophobic white nationalism in both Europe and the United States are a direct result of US intervention in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 through arming the mujahideen and, following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the subsequent invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq.
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