The head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, is reported in the Times as warning against complacency over the prospects of an Islamist terrorist attack on Britain. She said:

‘ “There is a serious and sustained threat of terrorist attacks against UK interests at home and abroad. The terrorists are inventive, adaptable and patient; their planning includes a wide range of methods to attack us”. She suspected that there might be people in the CBI “who doubt this description of the threat or perhaps question the language used to describe its scale… But I would urge you to consider the events of 9-11 (when nearly 3,000 people were killed), in Bali (where 202 died), in Istanbul (31 dead), and in Madrid (191 killed),” she said. She added: “Be under no illusion. The threat is real and here and affects us all.” '

Her warning and observations are timely. For there is a strong current of opinion, gaining ground by the day, that not only was Saddam no threat to this country but there is no Islamist terrorist threat at all. This myth has been sedulously put about as part of the deranged conspiracy theories which are circulating through the media and have now gained serious traction, demonising President Bush and Tony Blair for having produced a massive fabrication of a danger that does not exist.

The seriousness of this great tide of irrationality was illustrated by the BBC2 series by Adam Curtis, The Power of Nightmares. Having now seen all three episodes, I can only say that the alarm that has been sounded in some quarters about this production grossly understates the case. It is hard to exaggerate the mendacity and malevolence of its argument. Episode three told us there was no such thing as al Qaeda, merely an idea — no international conspiracy, no sleeper cells across the world. Just a few disparate terrorists who have run out of steam and hardly present any great threat to anyone. 9/11 was, er, just one of those things. Nothing to get too excited about. Yet you only have to glance at Rohan Gunaratna’s scholarly book, Inside al Qaeda, to realise that while it is undoubtedly true that this is an inchoate grouping which constantly mutates and reforms itself, it is indeed a global conspiracy with cells across the world. You only have to look at the pattern of terror attacks from country to country. You only have to read what the perpetrators say about their aims in destroying western culture and restoring the medieval Muslim caliphate.

But according to Curtis, the threat of Islamist terror was instead deliberately and artificially confected by a sinister group of people, the American neo-conservatives, who have spent the past thirty years confecting one phantom enemy after another for their own power-crazed ends. Almost everything in this thesis is bogus, distorted, mendacious or wrong.

We are told that the neo-cons dominate Washington. Wrong. They are a tiny group whose opinions came to dovetail after 9/11 with those of the old-style Republicans.

We are told that they do the bidding of their teacher, Leo Strauss, who is presented as a more sinister figure and of more global impact than the leaders of al Qaeda. But Strauss was an obscure political scientist, who taught only a few of the neo-cons. We are told that he not only believed that liberal society in America was decadent, but taught that the American people had to be fed ‘noble myths’ to bring them together, even if what they were being told was a lie. I have never heard any neo-con say anything like this about expedient myths. As for Strauss himself, there have been plenty of people on the left who have tried to assassinate his character because it is undoubtedly the case that what he taught blew a hole through the moral and intellectual basis of the left’s political programmes — so much so that his daughter has protested that the diabolical picture being painted of her father bore no relation to reality.

Be that as it may, the fantasies Curtis accuses the neo-cons of inventing are indeed fantastic. He claims they wanted to create myths of good versus evil, in order to create an artificial threat so they could pose as defenders of the world. The first phantom threat they created was communism. Yup, you read it right. Communism, according to Curtis, was no big deal. By the time President Reagan (another neo-con puppet, as everyone in this story seems to be) started inveighing against the evil empire, it was already crumbling. Well, there’s something in that; but the fact that the west hadn’t realised how near to collapse the Soviet Union was does not negate the threat that it posed, nor the damage it was doing. Curtis tells us that the neo-cons persisted in seeing a threat that the CIA told them didn’t exist. Professor Richard Pipes, the distinguished Russian expert who knows infinitely more about the Soviet Union than Curtis, is made to look a fool for maintaining that the absence of visible weapons programmes indicated they had been hidden (guess where that particular thread was leading). But what Pipes said made sense — that since the Soviet Union had exactly the same know-how and wherewithal as the west, it was just not credible that it had not developed these weapons.

Next, Curtis sneers at the neo-cons’ certainty that apparently disparate terrorist groups, such as the IRA, Baader-Meinhof or the Palestinians were all supported by the Soviet Union. But the release of the Stasi files has shown that this was indeed the case; indeed, it revealed that much of what was feared about the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union and dismissed as paranoid red-baiting had been true all along.

The next ‘myth’ invented by the neo-cons was — wait for it — Bill Clinton’s bad character. Forget Monica Lewinsky, Jennifer Flowers and the lies Clinton told about such events. His character was destroyed by the vast neo-con conspiracy — not even the right generally, but the neo-cons — who decided to create a fantasy enemy to make the American people realise the decadent truth about liberal America. Even if some claims made about Clinton were invented by his political opponents, one hardly needs to invent this baroque ideological conspiracy to explain ordinary dirty politics. But the purpose of this risible twisting of history is to make the neo-cons seem worse than Clinton.

As if all this isn’t bad enough, Curtis draws explicit parallels between the neo-cons and the radical Islamists. He claims that their ideologies and political trajectories are so similar they are equal partners in the vast and mendacious conspiracy to terrify the world. This grotesque analysis is based from the start on a glaringly obvious false premise. He equates Leo Strauss, who concluded that liberal society had descended into morally relativistic decadence, with a principal theorist behind radical Islamism, Sayed Qutb, who, he says, similarly concluded that the west was decadent and returned to Egypt to spread the word against western influence through the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the main inspirations of the Islamist jihad in general and Ayman al Zawahiri, the principal theorist of al Qaeda, in particular. But this is a mind-blowingly absurd comparison. Strauss inspired a return to the moral values of western civilisation which he thought had been undermined, and warned against tyrannies which threatened the freedom that characterised liberal society. Qutb’s whole purpose was to fight against such freedom, destroy such western values, and inspire instead religious tyranny.

Offensively and incredibly, Curtis draws parallel after parallel between the neo-cons and the Islamofascists. Thus he tells us that William Bennett, who served in both the Reagan and (first) Bush administrations, blamed the American public’s moral decline for not rising in revulsion against Clinton, just as al Zawahiri blamed the Arab masses for failing to rise against their corrupt rulers —which failing Zawahiri used as the pretext for slaughtering them. Neat comparison, huh? Thus the neo-cons are as bad as homicidal zealots.

Having made this odious comparison throughout, Curtis brings his anti-history to a conclusion by stating that the neo-cons deliberately invented the non-existent threat of Islamist terror in order to realise their mission to spread their ideas about good and evil. Accordingly, they invented contacts between Saddam and al Qaeda that never existed. But there is considerable evidence of these contacts (see many previous posts) — and evidence that, as with the Soviet backing of terror in the past, the CIA screwed up by never acknowledging this. As Richard Perle says on the programme, it is astonishing that people can deny this evidence — a statement of documented reality which merely elicited from Curtis gasps of incredulity.

The conclusion of this vile series, repeated at the beginning of each episode, is that the neo-cons have transformed global politics through a dark fantasy, used to terrify people and thus provide a sense of purpose for politicians who are no longer trusted to deliver the good society.

This is simply deranged conspiracy theory. There is no other adequate description. But the terrifying thing is that in Britain, this is being taken seriously and believed. It was, after all, transmitted by the BBC, our supposed guardians of journalistic standards. There are senior editors in the BBC who took the decision to transmit this garbage because they presumably thought it had a serious contribution to make — rather like the senior executives of Egyptian TV decided to transmit the multi-part TV version of the infamous anti-Jewish conspiracy libel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Disturbingly, I keep meeting people who tell me how impressed they were by the Curtis series. It has undoubtedly done much to further inflame the current climate of hysterical irrationality.

Someone should be talking very seriously about this to the BBC chairman Michael Grade and to the governors. Such a travesty of journalism, public service broadcasting and truth must not go unchallenged.

Posted by melanie at November 9, 2004