The Power of Nightmares

I have discovered a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden! Thus permanently putting to rest all the silly speculation and posturing…

Both of them are friends with George Bush senior, who installed Saddam and sold him arms and educated Osama and gave him arms.

Must be difficult for Dubya trying to wage war on global terror when his own dad is a key component of the international network.

What’s the primary force: Kennan-style realism or Podhoretz-style messianic idealism?

Lenin or Trotsky?

I say Lenin/Kennan is ‘da man’ and Trotsky/Podhoretz is only a useful idiot.

I too had read that kind of hype about it and was pleased the actual film wasn’t exactly as it had been described, well, the first episode at least. The interviews were interesting, and all those stories that I’ve never heard before, like that one on the submarine and Team B.

Plus, the sight and sound of the young Donald Rumsfeld, that was priceless. He was just the very same as today, speaking the same way, using the same rhetorics and cadence of speech, you can’t even imagine he ever did anything else even as a child.

There is an interesting review of the programme on the Guardian too.

I think the claim that Al Qaeda is not some single unified structure shouldn’t even be that controversial. I mean, even some of those who support the US strategy acknowledge that. It’s the implications of that acknowledgement that can be taboo.

I’m looking forward to the next instalment to see where it goes from there. But so far, I wouldn’t classify it as conspiracy theory. Definitely not of the Illuminati-lizard kind, it’s really ridiculously easy to dismiss it like that. It is a bit simplistic in drawing that parallel between neocons and Islamists, yes, but after all, many others have observed how extremist political Islam and the neoconservative / religious right ideology have similar similar attitudes towards modernity, secularism, etc., that tendency to define themselves and their respective ‘audiences’ (national or religious grouping) by defining enemies, to ascribe to themselves a mission with religious implications, etc. It’s interesting, though I think more from a psychological or sociological point of view than strictly political. (Then again, there’s not such a watertight divide between those categories.)

I definitely see how easy it is to cry outrage at such arguments, there is a provocative intent in the film, but I didn’t get the feeling of it being clearly identifiable in terms of political positions, so far, at least. I think it’s a good thing to get documentaries like these, if anything, whatever arguments they end up presenting, they contain a lot of great footage and interviews and bits and bobs from recent history. The scenes from that film on the torture camps in Egypt was impressive.

Also I don’t think the intent was to show who were the “good” guys and who were the “bad” guys, I certainly didn’t get that feeling, otherwise, one could say even the way they talked of the CIA as debunking the Team B hype and lies would mean the CIA are seen as the guardians of truth and honesty, which I don’t think was the implication.

The most fascinating part was precisely about those struggles between different factions of a same goverment or group – that is in some ways mirrored also in relation to the Islamic extremists, you get one group that ascribes to themselves the right to speak for everybody else and show the one and only true path. When in reality it’s just different political factions competing for power. The bit about the origins of the politicisation of the Christian fundamentalists in the US was very enlightening in this respect.

Do you think that late at night Rumsfeld looks over his list of political opponents, provided by the CIA, softly laughs to himself and says “suckas”?

60 million murdered in the Ukraine (20 from outright murder, 40 more from state planned famines). One side of this debate, at the time, was busy denying or lying about their deaths. Another side of the debate was having those deaths “seared into their brains”. You think this debate is over? Google up the Ukraine famine and see if some crazzy-assed conspiracy theory site doesn’t come up first. This debate isn’t over by a long shot.

And you wonder why it is so hard to find common ground.

Slightly off the main topic, but I’ve always been a bit leery of that Brzezinki quote, since there’s such a strong element of self-interest and the smack of retrospective spin to it.

It also doesn’t seem to match up to the story told in the book Charlie Wilson’s War, which portrays most of the funding to the Afghans, and the motivation for it, coming from Congress, not the White House.

jet – the population of Ukraine (no “the”, thank you) is less than 60 million.

Brilliant. It isn’t 30 minutes and Abb1 has alluded to Stalin’s “1 death a tragedy…” line and another made a knee jerk argument against my numbers.

Granted my numbers also include Russian deaths, but since a majority of them were in “the” Ukraine, you’ll forgive my minor glossing over of an irrelevant detail.

Since we’re counting from 1919 into the 40’s, the 60 million is probably low as there is no way to count the deaths from the forced labor shops that existed in every city and weren’t as bad as the gulags, but were close.

Why are there so many posts here sounding like KKK members saying not that many Jews were killed?

And maybe Chris Bertram needs to take a closer look at post war politics in Western Europe and how close Italy and several others came to joining the Iron Curtain and being satellite states. What was so different in 1980 than in 1950? Had the KGB stopped meddling in other countries, trying to influence them? Wasn’t it about this time that a proxy USSR army was marching in Africa partaking in the slaughter of thousands?

But in Chris’s world, even though the Afghanis obviously did not want the USSR involved or in control of their country, the US’s aid to Afghanistan was morally invalidated because, while helping Afghanistan, it also helped US interests. People die every day. We all die. But in Chris’s world, if someone dies for your cause, your cause loses all merit. As far as millions dieing in that war, it is more than ridiculous to think that in the absence of US aid, the Jihad against the USSR would have ended. Blaming the US for the war and for the deaths is similar to blaming the US for lend-lease act and all the German deaths it caused.

Mac, I agree that a far larger effort should have been made (not that there was really any effort at all), but maybe the conclusion was more obvious then than it is now. That when the jihadi’s said they were allieing with one satan to remove another, what they realy meant was once Russia was gone, they wouldn’t hesitate to kick the US’s ass too.

A lot more effort could have been made, but what do you think the odds of success were? Don’t forget the alliance with Saudi greatly complicated matters. And don’t forget that in 1988 Russia was still upping military spending and there were much larger fish to fry.

But in hindsight, there was money to spare, and it should have been spent on making Afghanistan call the US their sugar-daddy.

I know most of you probably think I am way off topic, but how do you discuss the CIA and US foreign policy without starting at 1917? Every 10 years should the US just forget what happened before as irrelevent to current politics? Wasn’t there a major operation in the late 90’s where the US intervened in Europe because of occurances 50 years beforehand?

It’s hilarious to read the claims made these days about Leo Strauss.

Adam Curtis or that commentor above have certainly never tried to read a book by Strauss. If they had, they would know that his very dense writings consist mostly of (controversial) readings of Plato, Xenophon, Aquinas and the like.

The lack of evangelizing about Western decadence, going to conquer other countries etc. would undoubtedly disappoint them.

“But there was a good deal of highly suggestive and illuminating material amid the polemic.”

and a good numer of highly suggestable and un illuminated individuals amid the audience it would see. there’s always an audience for the jewish conspiracyhey.

Jet, the subject of the film was not the breadth and width of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, or the numbers of victims in Ukraine. It also wasn’t about how the Cold war was wrong and the Soviet Union was great. I’m not sure what your point is, but if you had actually seen the documentary, maybe you’d have got the points being made there, to which your comments have no relevance.

Russkie: Did you watch the film, its actual contents?

Crap – I would have like to have seen that. I was even at home.

As for the rest, not having seen it, I don’t know what the documentary claims. It is certainly true that terrorists ability to create fear far exceeds their ability to actually kill and damage directly. (Hence the name.) This does not make them insignificant, but it should give people pause when considering the drastic nature of many anti-terrorism measures.

And, while I can hardly claim to be an expert on Middle Eastern terrorist organisations, quite a few people claim that Al-Qaeda is more a brand name than an organisation, and such claims strike me as likely to be true. There is a line in the film Sneakers where one character discovers another is involved with organised crime, to which the second responds: “Don’t kid yourself. It’s not that organised.” Since Al-Qaeda was, as I understand it, structured in order to resist exactly the kinds of “kill the head” anti-terrorist tactics Israel uses, the idea that it is more a loose network of money-men and hiding places than a top-down structured organisation certainly seems plausible.

And that Qutb and Strauss weren’t all that far apart doesn’t seem far-fetched to me either. Both stood for “traditional” values, as they saw them, and viewed materialism and modernism as enemies with whom no compromise was really possible. Furthermore, both propose essentially to rehabilitate premodern philosophers and give their ideas new currency without updating them. The Muslim Brotherhood in its current incarnation doesn’t seem all that far from the American religious right – in some cases I would argue the Brotherhood is less conservative – and its more intellectual end bears a more than passing resemblance to American intellectuals who are both neocons and religious conservatives.

Scott Martens:

And that Qutb and Strauss weren?t all that far apart doesn’t seem far-fetched to me either. Both stood for “traditional” values, as they saw them, and viewed materialism and modernism as enemies with whom no compromise was really possible.

Scott, where in Strauss’ writings does he say anything about “materialism” being an “enemy”? Strauss’ main issue with “modernism” was that it provided a model of rationality that he believed was inferior to the classical model.

Furthermore, both propose essentially to rehabilitate premodern philosophers and give their ideas new currency without updating them.

Haven’t read any Qutb, but my understanding from reading about him is that he is more like a Bible-thumping fundamentalist than someone who is trying to resurrect the thought of Alfarabi or Avicenna. Like a cross between Pat Robertson and Oswald Spengler.

Strauss didn’t “stand for traditional values”. On the contrary, it’s not incorrect to portray him as a kind of subversive. Please provide some indication about where your ideas about Strauss are coming from. Could it be Shania Drury perhaps?

Jet, is your position really that it was right for “Team B” to overestimate Soviet military and economic capacity in the 80’s, because the Soviet Union committed genocide in the 30’s?

If so, forgve me, but you’re not making a lick of sense.

While you’re answering Rea’s question, jet, could you confirm for me that you are still supporting the claim of 60 million deaths in the Ukrainian famine? Since this is about double the comtemporary population of Ukraine, you might want to check whether you have made a mistake somewhere. The Black Book of Communism gives a much lower figure.

[please consider the apologies made to all those gentle souls who frequent Crooked Timber and who believe that there is something monstrous about saying that six is not the same as sixty]

That states and terrorism are co-dependent is far from a novel observation, and although there was a good deal of informative and strikingly presented material in the first of these three documentaries, the polemical slant prevented the key charge of ‘terror as illusion’ from sticking.
Curtis’s earlier ‘Century of the Self’ (an absolutely outstanding set of documentaries) constructed a narrative describing the manipulative production of the modern consumer, and the adoption and manupulation by the political process of that psychological model.
Perhaps Curtis took those lessons a little too deeply to heart in the editing room for this series, because the nuances and contradictions of recent history and politics were often sidelined here where bthey might have complicated the picture. The portrayal of Kissinger (as others above have noted) in particular set alarm bells ringing for me. Unquestionably fascinating and engaging viewing, but perhaps not entirely innocent of the charge of presenting its own (ig)noble lie.

The Italian Communist Party also did very nicely by governing side by side (locally, and in parliament) with the Christian Democrats

Wasn’t the communist party in Italy banned from participating in the elections until about end of 1970s or something like that? That’s my impression, not sure how I got it.

“The efforts by “Team B”, for example, systematically to exagerrate both the offensive capability and the aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union in the 1980s”

Um, Team B produced its report in 1976. Which renders this – “the Soviets did have a non-acoustic submarine detection system of sorts in the 80s ” – somewhat irrelevant. Not to mention the fact that a spy isn’t quite what Team B had in mind, and I think they’d have found it hard to argue that the US had previously underestimated the threat from Soviet spies.

I’m finding it hard to understand what some of the documentary’s critics are saying here, apart from the allegation that it misrepresents Strauss’s positions and I’m not qualified to judge that. But I would say that the comments about Strauss were generally made or verified in interviews with Strauss’s students and adherents, so you can’t really blame Curtis too much. One of the most powerful things about the programme was how it let people like Ledeen and Pipes damn themselves with their own words.

abb1: that’s funny, that you got that impression, but no, it was banned only under Mussolini. After liberation, it regularly participated in all elections. It was the second biggest party ever since, until it split and reformed in ’89. Locally, it governed entire chunks of Italy, mostly in the northern and northern-central regions.

Ginger yellow – that’s exactly what I was thinking after reading objections about misinterpretations of Strauss, I think the programme did a rather good job of letting people speak for themselves, without drawing too many conclusions of its own.

Was Pipes in it? I must have missed that bit. What did he say?

“My point is that there is insubstantial evidence that “Team B” did overestimate the USSR’s military capacity. And that saying so is rehashing the 30’s debate on if there actually was a genocide.”

Oh, hell–I started and deleted more than one response to this, but it’s hard to debate somebody who has abandoned coherent thought.

We know Team B was wrong, because after the fall of the Soviet Union, we got to look at their records. And there is, of course, no connection whatever between 1930’s genocide in the Ukraine, and estimating Soviet military strenght in the 70’s and 80’s. That the Soviets were bad was no reason to misrepresent the size of their military.

(And yes, ginger, it’s probably technically inaccurate to use “Team B” to refer to these guys in the 80’s–although they were pretty much the same people doing the same things.)

Re Ginger Yellow’s post: what students/adherents of Strauss were interviewed for this documentary? I don’t know, since I’ve only read summaries of the documentary, which may well be exaggerating or misrepresenting it — though, from what I’ve seen in the online summary, it does seem to be making a Qutb/Strauss analogy, which as I said doesn’t quite hold. (Also, as Mark Lilla points out in the second of his two articles for the NY Review, not all of Strauss’s American students can be taken as accurately representing Strauss’s views; nor do they all agree among themselves. And neither Ledeen nor Pipes studied with Strauss, or, so far as I know, any of his students.)

Yes, abb1, you’re right there was tension in the 70’s, armed fight, terrorism, political assassinations, etc. – neo-fascists groups on the one hand, far-left groups on the other. Secret services in between… No party was banned in parliament, though. Well, actually, there was a ban, a law designed to prevent any reformation of an overtly nazi-facist party, and that is actually still in place today. Like in Germany, basically.

from what I’ve seen in the online summary, it does seem to be making a Qutb/Strauss analogy, which as I said doesn’t quite hold.(Also, as Mark Lilla points out in the second of his two articles for the NY Review, not all of Strauss’s American students can be taken as accurately representing Strauss’s views; nor do they all agree among themselves. And neither Ledeen nor Pipes studied with Strauss, or, so far as I know, any of his students.)

What puzzles me is why Curtis, William Pfaff, Tim Allen etc. have felt the need to seize upon an esoteric academic and turn him into the root of all evil…

Google doesn’t seem to show these neocons talking about Strauss all that much, which is pretty sensible since none of Strauss’ published writings in English contain much of an even vaguely practical political program.

Mona, I apologize for my mistake. I should have asked for clarification on what you meant.

But what was supposed to be a small building point has turned into a whole new thread. When I brought up Italy, I certainly wasn’t talking about anything that happened in the 60’s or later. And I think it would be a poor case to try to link the Italian Communist party to the candidates being fronted by the KGB in the reconstruction. And all I am going on is a US intelligence memoir about an officer’s time in Italy directly after the war. But like “Team B” maybe he is guilty of exaggerating the threat.

But I feel I’m making negative progress in my attempt to link the “calculus” used by “Team B” to events decades before. I think I had a better case before I started talking :)

Sorry for the diversion.

“On a view of moral responsibility that one frequently finds deployed in parts of the blogosphere, Brzezinski and other proponents of the Afghan “trap” bear no responsibility for the millions of dead in Afghanistan — and elsewhere — since. It isn’t a view I can share.”

What is the lesson here? That its illegitimate to aid a genuinely popular rebellion against a foreign invasion intended to prop up a local tyranny? In discussions of Afghanistan, people sometimes talk as if the Afghanis were happily marching towards Sovietization before the nefarious CIA began stirring up trouble. That’s crazy. Foreign invasion and forced secularization had already sparked revolt, and the fighting had already led to a massive refugee exodus. The CIA just provided weapons and some training so those already fighting wouldn’t get massacred quite so efficiently.

The following appears to be a longer excerpt from the Brzezinski interview referred to above. It appears on the Centre for Research on Globalisation website. According to the citation, it was originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998.

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Translated from the French by Bill Blum

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

“Torrent link, please?”

Does that mean this?

Brzezinski Interview

OK? Sorry (:-(

Someone wanted a torrent link?

And then there was the bizarre demand that the CIA provide the evidence to back up a claim that the Soviets were behind a single, interlinked global terror network (IRA + Baader Meinhof + etc). This fell down because the CIA operatives knew that what was being cited as “evidence” was, in fact, black propaganda that they themselves had concocted and planted in European newspapers!

So far as I know, the source for this claim is a brief comment in Bob Woodward’s Veil, made in response to Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network. Is there anything more authoritative?

In the last few years I’ve often wondered whether US intelligence has a long-standing policy of denying state-sponsored terrorism directed against the West, starting with the 1963 Kennedy assassination, continuing with Soviet sponsorship of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, and now reaching some sort of apotheosis with Iraq and al Qaeda. The policy would be: deny the element of state sponsorship if the sponsor is untouchable on that score. Thus it was safe to blame Libya in 1986, because Libya was weak and isolated; but the USSR was untouchable right up until 1991, and it took 9/11 to make regime change in Iraq the number-one priority. (I’ll also hypothesize that there was a relationship between North Korea and Aum Shinrikyo which remains buried.)

“So far as I know, the source for this claim is a brief comment in Bob Woodward’s Veil, made in response to Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network. Is there anything more authoritative?”

Curtis interviewed a former CIA official who said (I paraphrase): “We knew none of it was true because we made it up ourselves and planted it in the press.”

” what students/adherents of Strauss were interviewed for this documentary?”
I’m not sure which were students and which adherents, but the following all purported to be channelling Strauss on the programme, among others: Irving Kristol, Harvey Mansfield, Paul Weyrich.

Bear in mind that the twin-thrust of the Strauss thead was a) that he expounded the value of the noble lie in ancient philosphy, and that b) a lot of present day neoconservatives took that idea and applied it to US politics. I don’t think it’s fair to say that Curtis blames Strauss for this, per se. In trying to draw parallels between the neocons and radical Islamists, he finds it interesting that they both adopt the idea that it’s OK for an elite to do bad things (lie to the people, kill Muslims) to save the masses from their own selfish behaviour, and that on either side, a surprising number were influenced by a single individual. To be sure he glosses over a lot of what Strauss actually said, as opposed to how he was interpreted, but the focus is always on the interpreters and their actions. Qutb, by contrast, was very much the focus of the Islamist thread.

Does anyone have a copy of the first episode of “Power of Nightmares”? I missed it and after watching the 2nd would dearly like to view the first. Please email me on robin.trueman@btinternet.com

I missed the first part too. Any idea if there’s a transcript out there – couldn’t get one on the BBC site. No joy with the torrent link.

From what I saw tonight, it was sexy TV, but raised more questions than it cared to answer, too busy in its to and fro globetrotting between Asia, N Africa and US. Some food for thought, perhaps, especially prior to Ledeen’s lecture here in Oxford tomorrow.
(The lecture’s in honour of Isaiah Berlin. Yes, that ignoble relativist, who always displayed the full range of symptoms of a diseased modernity: spinelessness, lack of moral clarity, womanish liberal compromise over ‘manly’ assertion of absolutes, blah blah .. add your favourite neocon adjectives here …)

Reading some of these comments I think that many people miss the point when it comes to broadcasting something like this. Of all the things we hear about Al-Quaida and the war on terror, I think it is important to understand that we also need something or someone to counteract what we are being told through the media on a daily basis. While some of Adam Curtis’s theories might seem a little far fetched to some of us, I think it demonstrates a real need for mainstream television to offer the public a different perspective on the war on terror. Thus, whether it is lies or not, someone out there is willing to offer the public some semblence of the truth. At the very least, it forces those who watched the programme to question what has become the popular way of thinking since September 11th.