Politics of 'fear over vision' explored on British television
New documentary series says danger from Al Qaeda is 'dramatically overstated.'
It seems that the United States is not the only country with a high profile filmmaker ready to take on the question of the official response to terrorism. The
Guardian reported Sunday that documentarian
Adam Curtis (who has been called by media critics "the most acclaimed maker of serious television programs in Britain")
attacked British television, including the
BBC, for its "obsession" with Islamic terrorism. Mr. Curtis says that British TV has done nothing to "dispel myths surrounding Al Qaeda and is too willing to take the government line on the 'high' level of the threat."
Mr. Curtis' comments are interesting, since he is about to debut a controversial three-part series on
BBC-TV called "
The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear," which examines the growth of the idea that an "dedicated band of international terrorists" is out to destroy the West. The
Daily Telegraph says that Curtis's film makes the case that "in a post-ideological age,
politicians increasingly use fear, rather than vision, to bolster their positions."
(The
BBC defended its programming criticized by Curtis, and also defended Curtis's right to make a controversial documentary, saying that it felt there was a need to examine the issue of terrorism "from all possible angles.")
Curtis also believes that the danger from Al Qaeda has been dramatically overstated. There are certainly terrorists in the world, Curtis says, but not a huge terrorist organization "run by a small man with a beard in a cave." For instance, Curtis says, the group didn't even have a name until early 2001 when the US government decided to prosecute the small group and needed to give it a name in order to use anti-Mafia style laws against it.
The
Guardian's Mark Larson says Curtis's film starts last century with two men:
Sayyid Qutb in Egypt and
Leo Strauss in America. Both, Curtis's film explains, believed that liberalism was weakening the moral certainties of the societies in which they lived.
Knowing that the Bush administration is full of neo-Straussians [or
neoconservatives] – including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz – I guessed half the pay-off but not the rest, which is that Qutb's views became a leading influence on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Therefore, as Curtis presents it, "the war on terror" is being fought between a government and an organization rooted in a similar hatred of liberal pluralism, who both encourage support by raising fears of invasion and immigration.
Another issue that Curtis tackles is the making of "dirty bombs" and how lethal they would actually be. Curtis film interviews radiation experts who say that the threat is
being overstated by both the US and British governments.
'I don't think it would kill anybody,' says Dr Theodore Rockwell, an
authority on radiation, in an interview for the series. 'You'll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise.' The American department of energy, Rockwell continues, has simulated a dirty bomb explosion, 'and they calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not life-threatening.' And even this minor threat is open to question. The test assumed that no one fled the explosion for one year. The
Guardian reports that security experts are starting to agree with Curtis's point of view.
'The grand concept of the war [on terrorism] has not succeeded,' says
Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute. 'In purely military terms, it has been an inconclusive war ... a rather haphazard operation. Al Qaeda managed the most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the way that we rather cavalierly stick the name Al Qaeda on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it.' Finally, on the issue of Britain's
role in the war in Iraq, the
Independent reported Sunday on the meeting in November of 2002 when six of Britain's top experts on Iraq went to see Prime MInister Tony Blair to talk to him about the invasion of Iraq. They were not there to dissuade Mr. Blair from making the invasion, the paper reports, but to tell him realistically what would happen after the war.
'Much of the rhetoric from Washington appeared to depict Saddam's regime as something separate from Iraqi society,' said Dr. Dodge [of London University's Queen Mary College]. 'All you had to do was remove him and the 60 bad men around him. What we wanted to get across was that over 35 years the regime had embedded itself into Iraqi society, broken it down and totally transformed it. We would be going into a vacuum, where there were no allies to be found, except possibly for the Kurds. We were saying: "Be prepared to spend a great deal of time and money. This could take a generation." ' The six men told the
Independent that they were "staggered" by Blair's "apparent naivety" of the consequences of going to war. Ultimately what struck the men about the meeting was the "lack of response" to their presentation. "You sensed they were heading into a war they couldn't avoid," said one. "Although we were sitting at the cabinet table, the decisions were being taken on the other side of the Atlantic."
Also...
•
This futile fundamentalism (
Guardian)
•
US chides 'hostile' Karzai private security guards (
BBC)
•
On Patrol: Finding only shadows in hunt for insurgents (
New York Times)
•
Star Wars deal places US missiles on UK soil (
Independent)
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Tom Regan
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