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Brotherhood decadesearlier.As it gained strength in the r97os) the Islamic right grew more assertive,and parts of it were radicalized. Violence-proneoffshoots,typified by the emergenceof an Islamistterrorist underground in Egypt, emergedto challenge'STestern-oriented regimes, and the terrorist Hezbollah movement gained force in Lebanon.Even the more mainstreamIslamistgroups were inspiredby the example of Iran, and many Muslim Brotherhood-linked otganizations took on a more pronouncedpolitical character. The errors that the United Statescommitted during and after the in their tragic scope.An revolution in Iran were almost Shakespearean enormouspart of the blame falls on the U.S. intelligencesystem.The fall of the shah was the most significantfailure of U.S. intelligence betweenPearl Harbor and the attacksof Septemberrr' zoor. As the United Stateseagerlylent support to the Afghan jihadists and reached out to supposedlymoderatemullahs in Teheran,almost no one in the intelligencecommuniry was looking ar the big picture. To the American public, the dark-eyed, scowling visage of Ayatollah Khomeini symbolized the emergenceof a threatening new force on the world scene. But for U.S. diplomats and intelligenceofficers, right-wing political Islam continued to be profoundly misunderstood.Even as Islamism's power made itself felt-in the violence in Mecca, civil war in Syria, Sadat'sassassination-the United Statesfailed to grasp its implications.Even after Iran, Islamism was not seenas a worldwide movement linked by fraternal bonds and secretsocieties,but as a fragmented, country-by-country ideological movement. The narve argued that Iran was a unique case,a conservativedictatorshipthat had fallen to a peculiar form of Shiite militancy that would have no resonance among the Sunni Muslim majority. Others, naive in a different and more dangerous way, were seizedwith the notion that Iranian-style Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood could be mobilized in Afghanistan and Central Asia as a tool for dismantling the Soviet Union. Despite the pronounced anti-American feeling at the heart of Islamism, key officials-from Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Ronald Reagan'sCIA director, Bill Caseywould aggressivelypursue the idea that political Islam was just another Dawn on whatBrzezinski called "the Grand Chessboard."