Night terror

Bush and Osama: two peas in a pod.

Or so posits Adam Curtis in his unsettling three-part BBC doc The Power of Nightmares, which explores the parallels between the neoconservative and fundamentalist Islam movements.

He begins in 1949 in Colorado, where Sayyid Qutb first observed that “Western society contained the seeds of its own destruction.” Back in Egypt, Qutb preached that the answer to permissive society was authoritarian theocracy. He coined the term jahiliyah (that it’s OK to kill a fellow Muslim). His ideas pervaded Middle Eastern conflict for the next 50 years: the assassination of President Sadat, the rise of the Ayatollah in Iran, mujahedeen, Taliban, civil war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the U.S. neocon movement also gained momentum. Professor Leo “The Godfather” Strauss protégés like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney got executive-branch gigs. Manipulating Soviet submarine intelligence, funding said mujahedeen, rallying evangelicals—neocons grubbed power bit-by-bit and by any means necessary, their goal being to sustain the USSR as the evil empire.

But by the ’90s, neocons and radical Islamists both lacked a good vs. evil paradigm. So the former allies became each other’s worst nightmare. The rest is, well, your everyday Fox News, Anderson Cooper, war-on-terror-style showdown.

Curtis argues, however, that the threat of global terrorism is not real at all; neoconservative powers have grossly exaggerated the danger of terror networks. His case is at once compelling and like a chilling episode of VH1’s Where Are They Now?, former Strauss pupil Paul Wolfowitz (now president of the World Bank) being a textbook example.

He also points out that it was not Osama, but instead the U.S. government who invented the term Al Qaeda. Hmm.

The film played both the Cannes and Tribeca film festivals, but neither HBO nor U.S. networks have given it airtime. Thankfully, the BBC has set up free downloads at www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares.