It is important to start by noting that Islamist groups were not always seen by the US government as enemies. As we will see in the following chapter, during the Cold War the United States supported the parties of political Islam against secular nationalist and leftist parties it believed to be in the pocket of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Iranian revolution of 1979, which deposed the US-backed Shah and brought a Shi'a Islamist government to power, meant that the United States had Islamist enemies at the same time as it had Islamist allies. In a nutshell, the foreign policy establishment's view of political Islam has been neither uniform nor consistent.

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 214