Not being a regular reader of The Nation, I've only just discovered that the magazine has run a detailed review of that much-hyped BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares, the film that claims neocons and Islamists are soul-mates, and that ideologically bankrupt politicians conjured up the terror threat in order to preserve their grip on power. The article is by Peter Bergen who is, as you'll know, one of the world's leading experts on Al Qaeda. I hope as many people as possible read his piece, because it blows holes in Curtis's main arguments.
He isn't wholly critical. For instance, he (rightly) praises the film's archive material and its desire to tackle the big issues:
Despite my many disagreements with The Power of Nightmares, which sometimes has the feel of a Noam Chomsky lecture channeled by Monty Python, it is a richly rewarding film because it treats its audience as adults capable of following complex arguments.
Fair enough. The programme is certainly a more sophisticated piece of work than Fahrenheit 9/11 - for what little that's worth. Bergen also endorses Curtis's account of the ham-fisted prosecution of alleged terror cells in America in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
So much for the good points. The negatives are damning. Here's Bergen's assessment of Curtis's remarkable claim that the US authorities belatedly "invented" the notion of Al Qaeda as a fully-fledged terrorist organisation:
This is nonsense. There is substantial evidence that Al Qaeda was founded in 1988 by bin Laden and a small group of like-minded militants, and that the group would mushroom into the secretive, disciplined organization that implemented the 9/11 attacks....Indeed, when Al Jazeera broadcast a major documentary about bin Laden in 1999, the network called it The Destruction of al Qaeda, an odd choice of title if Al Qaeda did not in fact already exist.
And what about the other central conceit - that Leo Strauss and Sayyid Qutb are really brothers in the struggle against liberal democracy? Bergen is unimpressed. The comparison is, he says, "emblematic of Curtis's occasionally questionable polemical methods".
The parallel is provocative, to be sure, but Curtis takes it several steps too far when he argues that Strauss "would become the shaping force behind the neoconservative movement, which now dominates the American Administration." In fact, Qutb and Strauss are not of equal weight for the Islamists and the neocons...
[A]ll Islamists are well versed in, and deeply influenced by, Qutb. By contrast, while it's true that former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz took a couple of courses from Strauss at the University of Chicago, and a number of Straussians have found jobs in the Bush Administration, Strauss's work as a political philosopher has had little impact on the world outside the academy. Indeed, the key drivers of American foreign policy--Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--are in all likelihood more familiar with the works of Johann Strauss than with the dense, recondite works of Leo Strauss.
Remember, this is a review from a left-wing journal, not a neocon chat room. I wouldn't even waste cyber-ink on Curtis's arguments if it weren't for the fact that they've been taken up as gospel by the anti-American Left in Britain. (So far the programme has only had a few screenings at film festivals in the US.) Only the other day, Harry's Place detected Curtis' fingerprints all over the latest polemic from Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Thanks to the Beeb's relentless publicity campaign for the series, this kind of conspiracy theorising is now common currency around Middle England's dinner tables. Next time you hear your friends recycle this stuff, point them in Bergen's direction.
