A major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat [of a terrorist
attack] is a politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion.
...[T]he central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive
and provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international
terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and
distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread
unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services,
and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even
bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of
a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."
...The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed
about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an
organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It
does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In
fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt
world through religious violence.
Curtis' evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells
the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an unbreakable
political framework, as half a century of mostly failed, short-lived
revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective terrorism. Curtis
points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when
the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and
had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal
organisation.
Curtis also cites the Home Office's own statistics for arrests and
convictions of suspected terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the 664
people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been found
guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or
members of other groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody
has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.
In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but
increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having
similar doubts.
In one sense, of course, Curtis himself is part of the al-Qaida industry.
The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of something else, the
rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested in Leo
Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 50s
who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought
that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America's unique
role to battle evil in the world. Strauss's certainty and his emphasis on
the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created a
group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy
defence secretary....
As Curtis traced the rise of the "Straussians", he came to a conclusion
that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian
conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism:
from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the
enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against
the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both movements
have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the
Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks
on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way,
Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the "fantasy" of the
war on terror.
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