The 3-part documentary, with the same name as my headline, by Adam Curtis, an award winning documentary-maker, start with the war in Afghanistan, when Soviet invaded Afghanistan. How CIA responded to this, and the growth of Neo-Conservative politics in the US and Islamic Extremism in in the Middle-East. After Soviet lost in Iran, the Mujaheddin created the idea that brave Muslims armed only with AK-47’s and RPG’s could defeat a superpower, even though they received enormous military support via the CIA, even anti-aircraft weapons like the Stinger-Missile to shoot down the earlier invincible MIG-jets. The CIA set up Koranic Schools – Madrases – and poured Korans and cash into the nation.
So also the USA thought they had defeated the Soviet Union, with people like Zbigniew Brzezinski telling he was the only Polish person that had been able to “stick it to the Russians”, after 2oo years since their last victory over Russia. They said this “Soviet Vietnam” they had lured the USSR into, had finally broken the back of the Russia. A myth that particularity stayed with the Neo-Conservative school of Leo Strauss, with people like Donald Rumsfeld and his later Coworker Dick Cheney, as well as Paul Wolfowitz that all served during several administrations, he last one of Bush Jr.
A rare picture of the media-shy Leo Strauss, that later would have enormous effect on US politics, via his students.
In reality however it was most probably low oil-prices and economics. It was a saying in the country, Gorbachev said: “We cannot go on living like this anymore”. That made Gorbachev start reforms like Glasnost and Perestroika, but it were too little and too late. Also in relations to USA the last Soviet leader went so far in a meeting at Reykjavik as to suggest the total elimination of all nuclear weapons, if the plans for SDI (popularly known as Star Wars) would be limited to the laboratory for 10 years. SDI were a vision Reagan had, to create a rocket-shield in space that made USA immune against nuclear attacks, but in reality something that would start a new, extremely expensive space race (that the USSR certainly could not afford). So in the end Ronald Reagan answered “I’m very sorry” to the proposal that would change the world completely, into what people around the world really wanted, and make these two politicians truly great people of historical proportions, and left back to USA, where SDI never hardly left the drawing board and still to this day have remained a pipe-dream.
The documentary explains plainly that there never were any organization called Al-Qaeda neither before and after the attacks on 911. It was an invetion in a Manhattan courtroom where in order to prosecute both the terrorist of the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, and his connections with people like Osama Bin Laden, they would have to use the same paragraph as they used with mafia-organizations that made it possible to prosecute the leader of the organization and not just the people part of it, caught in criminality. The problem was that there were no such organization, so they had to invent one, Al-Quada meaning “The Base”, probably referring to the Afghan training camps, to prosecute the other suspect in this case.
Neo-Conservatives in the same way as they said under Reagan that the Russians had superior weapons to the US, like energy-beam weapons and so far advanced technology that the US didn’t even understand it, while the Red Army was really crumbling, far behind the United States in all types of weapons. In the same way as Bush Sr. told lies about Saddam in the first Gulf War, with a massive propaganda-campaign, the same way Bush Jr. were lying to the public, and used propaganda to form the public opinion in USA that Saddam not only needed to be overthrown because of being a Hitler-like dictator, but was also accused of supporting this “Al-Qaeda” and not least having weapons of mass destruction that posed a direct threat to the USA, even if Iraq were in fact one of very few countries in the Middle-East that actually didn’t have any WMD’s, and the secular Saddam Hussein would never cooperate with religious extremists.
But because of 911 and a neo-con wish to invade Iraq, and because “Iraq supported terrorism, had weapons of mass-destruction and thus were a danger to the US”, they got their wish with the invasion “Operation Iraqi Freedom” however it fast became clear that there were no WMD’s, and instead – as most people in the world with some common sense understood – they were there for the oil, having soldiers guarding the oil fields, but not doing anything about the looting of things like priceless artifacts of the oldest civilization on earth, since police officers or soldiers didn’t get any payment to do their normal work.
It’s worth mentioning however that the demonstrations in Europe against the war, made it into the Guinness World of Records by all the millions that didn’t want war. Bush visiting London almost required to shut down the city , with the demonstrations being so far away that he didn’t see nor hear them. He even cancelled a trip to Switzerland, because he was afraid they would prosecute him as a war-criminal once he got out of the plane. In this propaganda campaign for a new war, these protests barely got mentioned by media in USA, and instead they were saying what the White House said to them, and the White House thus said to the public what the newspapers said about Iraq.
The documentary show the rise of the surveillance-state in America, the degeneration of public rights. As the title “The Power of Nightmares” suggest, this is what Western politicians now, in an age where people have lost faith in ideologies, don’t present ideas of utopias anymore, or promise grand things, but instead use these nightmares – the public fear of terror and war – to put themselves up as leaders that say they will protect us all against these sinister forces, in order for them to stay in power.
https://dailymotion.com/video/x20vgms
https://dailymotion.com/video/x20xke2
Support the film-maker by buying the movie.
For the story about how Al-Qaeda really was invented read Jason Burke “Al-Qaeda The True Story About Radical Islam”
The Clash of Civilizations 