The Making
Of The Terror Myth
By Andy Beckett
15 October, 2004
The Guardian
Since
the attacks on the United States in September 2001, there have been
more than a thousand references in British national newspapers, working
out at almost one every single day, to the phrase "dirty bomb".
There have been articles about how such a device can use ordinary explosives
to spread lethal radiation; about how London would be evacuated in the
event of such a detonation; about the Home Secretary David Blunkett's
statement on terrorism in November 2002 that specifically raised the
possibility of a dirty bomb being planted in Britain; and about the
arrests of several groups of people, the latest only last month, for
allegedly plotting exactly that.
Starting next Wednesday, BBC2 is to broadcast a three-part documentary
series that will add further to what could be called the dirty bomb
genre. But, as its title suggests, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise
of the Politics of Fear takes a different view of the weapon's potential.
"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.
During the three
years in which the "war on terror" has been waged, high-profile
challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer number of incidents
and warnings connected or attributed to the war has left little room,
it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this context, the central theme
of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive and provocative.
Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism,
the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and
distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned
through governments around the world, the security services, and the
international media." The series' explanation for this is even
bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility,
fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain
their power."
Adam Curtis, who
wrote and produced the series, acknowledges the difficulty of saying
such things now. "If a bomb goes off, the fear I have is that everyone
will say, 'You're completely wrong,' even if the incident doesn't touch
my argument. This shows the way we have all become trapped, the way
even I have become trapped by a fear that is completely irrational."
So controversial
is the tone of his series, that trailers for it were not broadcast last
weekend because of the killing of Kenneth Bigley. At the BBC, Curtis
freely admits, there are "anxieties". But there is also enthusiasm
for the programmes, in part thanks to his reputation. Over the past
dozen years, via similarly ambitious documentary series such as Pandora's
Box, The Mayfair Set and The Century of the Self, Curtis has established
himself as perhaps the most acclaimed maker of serious television programmes
in Britain. His trademarks are long research, the revelatory use of
archive footage, telling interviews, and smooth, insistent voiceovers
concerned with the unnoticed deeper currents of recent history, narrated
by Curtis himself in tones that combine traditional BBC authority with
something more modern and sceptical: "I want to try to make people
look at things they think they know about in a new way."
The Power of Nightmares
seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden
and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international
network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper
cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely
exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through
religious violence.
Curtis' evidence
for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells the story of
Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an unbreakable political
framework, as half a century of mostly failed, short-lived revolutions
and spectacular but politically ineffective terrorism. Curtis points
out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the
American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and
had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal
organisation.
Curtis also cites
the Home Office's own statistics for arrests and convictions of suspected
terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the 664 people detained up to
the end of last month, only 17 have been found guilty. Of these, the
majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or members of other
groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody has been convicted
who is a proven member of al-Qaida.
In fact, Curtis
is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but increasingly,
other observers of the war on terror have been having similar doubts.
"The grand concept of the war 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-Qaida managed the most spectacular
attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the way that we rather
cavalierly stick the name al-Qaida on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines.
There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a
threat, then you exaggerate it."
Bill Durodie, director
of the international centre for security analysis at King's College
London, says: "The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west]
has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed
world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There's no real evidence that
all these groups are connected." Crispin Black, a senior government
intelligence analyst until 2002, is more cautious but admits the terrorist
threat presented by politicians and the media is "out of date and
too one-dimensional. We think there is a bit of a gulf between the terrorists'
ambition and their ability to pull it off."
Terrorism, by definition,
depends on an element of bluff. Yet ever since terrorists in the modern
sense of the term (the word terrorism was actually coined to describe
the strategy of a government, the authoritarian French revolutionary
regime of the 1790s) began to assassinate politicians and then members
of the public during the 19th century, states have habitually overreacted.
Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford, says that
governments often believe struggles with terrorists "to be of absolute
cosmic significance", and that therefore "anything goes"
when it comes to winning. The historian Linda Colley adds: "States
and their rulers expect to monopolise violence, and that is why they
react so virulently to terrorism."
Britain may also
be particularly sensitive to foreign infiltrators, fifth columnists
and related menaces. In spite, or perhaps because of, the absence of
an actual invasion for many centuries, British history is marked by
frequent panics about the arrival of Spanish raiding parties, French
revolutionary agitators, anarchists, bolsheviks and Irish terrorists.
"These kind of panics rarely happen without some sort of cause,"
says Colley. "But politicians make the most of them."
They are not the
only ones who find opportunities. "Almost no one questions this
myth about al-Qaida because so many people have got an interest in keeping
it alive," says Curtis. He cites the suspiciously circular relationship
between the security services and much of the media since September
2001: the way in which official briefings about terrorism, often unverified
or unverifiable by journalists, have become dramatic press stories which
- in a jittery media-driven democracy - have prompted further briefings
and further stories. Few of these ominous announcements are retracted
if they turn out to be baseless: "There is no fact-checking about
al-Qaida."
In one sense, of
course, Curtis himself is part of the al-Qaida industry. The Power of
Nightmares began as an investigation of something else, the rise of
modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested in Leo Strauss,
a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 50s who
rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought
that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America's unique
role to battle evil in the world. Strauss's certainty and his emphasis
on the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created
a group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US
deputy defence secretary. They came to prominence by talking up the
Russian threat during the cold war and have applied a similar strategy
in the war on terror.
As Curtis traced
the rise of the "Straussians", he came to a conclusion that
would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian conservatism
had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism: from origins
in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the enemy, to
an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against the Soviet
Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both movements have
proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the Islamists
and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks on America
in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way, Curtis concludes,
collaborating still: in sustaining the "fantasy" of the war
on terror.
Some may find all
this difficult to swallow. But Curtis insists,"There is no way
that I'm trying to be controversial just for the sake of it." Neither
is he trying to be an anti-conservative polemicist like Michael Moore:
"[Moore's] purpose is avowedly political. My hope is that you won't
be able to tell what my politics are." For all the dizzying ideas
and visual jolts and black jokes in his programmes, Curtis describes
his intentions in sober, civic-minded terms. "If you go back into
history and plod through it, the myth falls away. You see that these
aren't terrifying new monsters. It's drawing the poison of the fear."
But whatever the
reception of the series, this fear could be around for a while. It took
the British government decades to dismantle the draconian laws it passed
against French revolutionary infiltrators; the cold war was sustained
for almost half a century without Russia invading the west, or even
conclusive evidence that it ever intended to. "The archives have
been opened," says the cold war historian David Caute, "but
they don't bring evidence to bear on this." And the danger from
Islamist terrorists, whatever its scale, is concrete. A sceptical observer
of the war on terror in the British security services says: "All
they need is a big bomb every 18 months to keep this going."
The war on terror
already has a hold on western political culture. "After a 300-year
debate between freedom of the individual and protection of society,
the protection of society seems to be the only priority," says
Eyal. Black agrees: "We are probably moving to a point in the UK
where national security becomes the electoral question."
Some critics of
this situation see our striking susceptibility during the 90s to other
anxieties - the millennium bug, MMR, genetically modified food - as
a sort of dress rehearsal for the war on terror. The press became accustomed
to publishing scare stories and not retracting them; politicians became
accustomed to responding to supposed threats rather than questioning
them; the public became accustomed to the idea that some sort of apocalypse
might be just around the corner. "Insecurity is the key driving
concept of our times," says Durodie. "Politicians have packaged
themselves as risk managers. There is also a demand from below for protection."
The real reason for this insecurity, he argues, is the decay of the
20th century's political belief systems and social structures: people
have been left "disconnected" and "fearful".
Yet the notion that
"security politics" is the perfect instrument for every ambitious
politician from Blunkett to Wolfowitz also has its weaknesses. The fears
of the public, in Britain at least, are actually quite erratic: when
the opinion pollsters Mori asked people what they felt was the most
important political issue, the figure for "defence and foreign
affairs" leapt from 2% to 60% after the attacks of September 2001,
yet by January 2002 had fallen back almost to its earlier level. And
then there are the twin risks that the terrors politicians warn of will
either not materialise or will materialise all too brutally, and in
both cases the politicians will be blamed. "This is a very rickety
platform from which to build up a political career," says Eyal.
He sees the war on terror as a hurried improvisation rather than some
grand Straussian strategy: "In democracies, in order to galvanize
the public for war, you have to make the enemy bigger, uglier and more
menacing."
Afterwards, I look
at a website for a well-connected American foreign policy lobbying group
called the Committee on the Present Danger. The committee features in
The Power of Nightmares as a vehicle for alarmist Straussian propaganda
during the cold war. After the Soviet collapse, as the website puts
it, "The mission of the committee was considered complete."
But then the website goes on: "Today radical Islamists threaten
the safety of the American people. Like the cold war, securing our freedom
is a long-term struggle. The road to victory begins ... "
· The Power
of Nightmares starts on BBC2 at 9pm BST on Wednesday