The Guardian is a great newspaper but, lord, does it ever print some claptrap. Via Messrs Geras and Worstall comes this dreadful piece by Adam Curtis. The headline, for which Mr Curtis is not responsible, is a warning of the nonsense to come: For 10 years, Osama bin Laden filled a gap left by the Soviet Union. Who will be the baddie now?
From the off we’re supposed to appreciate, I think, that bad as bin Laden certainly was, he was never as bad as you were led to believe and, gosh, certainly not as bad as the people for whom he was a useful, even necessary, enemy. The world, you see, is complicated and if you think al-Qaeda are the bad guys you’ve been duped my friend. Seriously. Curtis writes:
Bin Laden and his ideological mentor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, talked about “the near enemy” and the “far enemy”. But from 2001 onwards they became America’s “far enemy”. Neoconservative politicians, who had last tasted real power under President Reagan during the cold war, took the few known facts about Bin Laden and Zawahiri and fitted them to the template they knew so well: an evil enemy with sleeper cells and “tentacles” throughout the world, whose sole aim was the destruction of western civilisation. Al-Qaida became the new Soviet Union, and in the process Bin Laden became a demonic, terrifyingly powerful figure brooding in a cave while he controlled and directed the al-Qaida network throughout the world. In this way, a serious but manageable terrorist threat became grossly exaggerated.
Firstly, in the aftermath of 9/11 – to which Curtis, of course, only refers obliquely – the threat seemed rather more severe than just “serious but manageable”. Indeed, if we may now appreciate that the threat is actually manageable that’s at least partially a consequence of the work done to contain, minimise and marginalise the threat. It’s also because time has passed and we can see some thing more clearly now. But to suppose this was obvious on September 12th 2011 is not the way I remember it and I doubt you recall it like that either.
Note too, however, how the aggressors in this conflict (that would be al-Qaeda) are presented in the passive voice. al-Qaeda does not do anything itself; it is used by its enemies for their own ideological purposes and as a screen onto which the dastardly “neocons” may project their darkest fantasies and fears. al-Qaeda “became” America’s enemy, almost as if by accident don’t you know?
The impression we are meant to perceive – remember this is all complicated stuff – is that bin Laden suited Americans who were searching for dragons to slay. It is inconvenient that this requires history to be rewritten and awkward facts to be ignored. Among these facts: neoconservatives, as a rule, were not actually terribly concerned by al-Qaeda. That was one of the things Richard Clarke found so frustrating about the new Bush administration. Condi Rice – not a neoconservative, of course – did not focus on Islamist terrorism in her pre-election Foreign Affairs essay spelling out a putative Bush administration’s foreign policy priorities.
Furthermore, the Bush administration was going to be “realistic” about American power and interests. Rice’s essay, remember, was titled “Promoting the National Interest”. The Bushes were not interested in nation-building or humanitarian intervention. The fear, for some anyway and admittedly repeated every time there is a new president, was that it would retreat from its global leadership role. (Neoconservatives, or at least the media branch of the persuasion, Curtis might also recall, were more likely to support John McCain in 2000 than George W Bush. The latter had little conception, you see, of National Greatness Conservatism. It’s true that some saw the post-9/11 world as an opportunity for a great, unifying, patriotic project. But that too was a response to events, not part of a continuum that stretched, Curtis mistakenly suggests, stretched from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Twin Towers via Nairobi in 1998.)
September 11th, 2001 changed all that. Curtis invites us to think that all the talk of an “evil enemy” with “sleeper cells” and “tentacles” around the world is a silly, simplistic, juvenile response to 9/11 that’s also, naturally, suspiciously convenient. But what part of it is actually untrue? Ah, but you see:
The power of this simple story propelled history forward. It allowed the neocons – and their liberal interventionist allies – to set out to try to remake the world and spread democracy. It allowed revolutionary Islamism, which throughout the 1990s had been failing dramatically to get the Arab people to rise up and follow its vision, to regain its authority. And it helped to sell a lot of newspapers.
Curtis says this was no conspiracy, merely the convenient (again!) confluence of interest. Even so, there’s an argument – made by some neoconservatives too – that bin Ladenism had to be seen to fail before it could be thoroughly rejected.
But because we, and our leaders, retreated into a Manichean fantasy, we understood the new complexities of the real world even less. Which meant that we completely ignored what was really going on in the Arab world.
As journalists and Predator drones searched for the different al-Qaida “brands” across the regions, and America propped up dictators who promised to fight the “terror network”, a whole new generation emerged in the Middle East who wanted to get rid of the dictators. The revolutions that this led to came as a complete shock to the west. We have no idea, really, who the revolutionaries are or what, if any, ideologies are driving them. But it is becoming abundantly clear that they have nothing to do with “al-Qaida”. Yet ironically they are achieving one of Bin Laden’s main goals – to get rid of the “near enemy”, dictators such as Hosni Mubarak.
Again, he misses the point. George W Bush’s second inaugural speech and Condi Rice’s famous Cairo speech explicitly acknowledged that the age of propping up tired and authoritarian dictators was coming to an end. The complexities of the world, however, compromised that ideal. Far from simplfying the world or American policy, the disputes between “realists” and “idealists” (to use a convenient if imperfect shorthand) reflected the difficulties of simplifying the world into Good Guys and Bad Guys. So, yes, the Bush administration put pressure on Mubarak but thought twice about doing so again when it looked as though the Muslim Brotherhood and other unpalatable types might take advantage of the space created by that American pressure.
Curtis is hardly the first person to observe the irony that the American idealist foreign policy school and al-Qaeda each diagnosed the likes of Mubarak and Assad as part of the problem (though, obviously, for different reasons and with very different aims in mind).He could go further! The Americans wanted a way to get their troops out of Saudi Arabia and so did Osama bin Laden! This doesn’t make them allies, not even of convenience.
Nor is he right to suggest that the revolutions (incomplete as they are) came “as a complete shock”. The timing and the sparks that lit the fires may not have been predicted but there have been many people who have long thought that something like this would happen at some point. Again, however, the need to balance short-term needs (help against radical Islamism) agains t a longer-term diagnosis (the political, social and economic liberalisation that might, eventually, help limit al-Qaeda’s appeal) is a complicated business and, actually, recognised as such in Washington. That’s one reason why the foreign and security policy matrix is so hard to resolve.
Moreover, Curtis’s caricature of neoconservatism is itself simplistic even as he condemns the “neocons” for their simplistic view of the world. There are at least some neoconservative thinkers – Reul Marc Gerecht is one obvious example – who’ve long maintained that Islamic politics will be needed to defeat Islamist politics. Perhaps this is mistaken but it acknowledges that the world is actually much more complicated than Adam Curtis thinks it is.
For in the end it’s Curtis who takes a childishly simple view of matters:
With Bin Laden’s death maybe the spell is broken. It does feel that we are at the end of a way of looking at the world that makes no real sense any longer. But the big question is where will the next story come from? And who will be the next baddie? The truth is that the stories are always constructed by those who have the power.
This, I suggest, is the road that eventually leads to wars being fought for Halliburton and other corporate interests. A world in which nothing is ever as it seems except, of course, for the enduring constant that the Americans are simultaneously gauche and conniving, simpletons who yet contrive to hoodwink everyone except the brave truth-seekers who can perceive through a glass wrongly and courageously reveal that Osama bin Laden is America’s useful enemy, implying in the end that he’s been so useful he’d have had to be created had he not in fact actually existed. And, lo, perhaps he was. Thinking otherwise is just too simple, you see.
Of course mistakes have been made. Some of them have been desperately, damagingly, serious. Sometimes Washington has spoken foolishly or behaved wickedly, frustrating its friends and unwittingly assisting its enemies. Nonetheless, those enemies are real and not just a figment of fevered neoconservative imaginations looking for useful foes to help their great project to do, well, god knows what but something I’m sure.
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