In the past, politicians promised to create a better world.
They had different ways of achieving this.
But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions
they offered to their people.
Those dreams failed.
And today, people have lost faith in ideologies.
Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as
managers of public life.
But now, they have discovered a new role
that restores their power and authority.
Instead of delivering dreams
politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares.
They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers
that we cannot see and do not understand.
And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism.
A powerful and sinister network
with sleeper cells in countries across the world.
A threat that needs to be fought by a war on terror.
But much of this threat is a fantasy
which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians.
It's a dark illusion
that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world
the security services, and the international media.
This is a series of films
about how and why that fantasy was created
and who it benefits.
At the heart of the story are two groups:
the American neoconservatives, and the radical Islamists.
Both were idealists
who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream
to build a better world.
And both had a very similar explanation
for what caused that failure.
These two groups have changed the world
but not in the way that either intended.
Together, they created today's nightmare vision of a secret
organized evil that threatens the world.
A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power
and authority in a disillusioned age.
And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.
The Power of Nightmares
The Rise os the Politics of Fear
Part 1 Baby it's cold outside
The story begins in the summer of 1949
when a middle-aged school inspector from Egypt
arrived at the small town of Greeley, in Colorado.
His name was Sayyed Qutb.
Qutb had been sent to the U.S. to study its educational system
and he enrolled in the local state college.
His photographs appear in the college yearbook.
But Qutb was destined
to become much more than a school inspector.
Out of his experiences of America that summer
Qutb was going to develop a powerful set of ideas
that would directly inspire those
who flew the planes on the attack of September the 11th.
As he had traveled across the country
Qutb had become increasingly disenchanted with America.
The very things that, on the surface
made the country look prosperous and happy
Qutb saw as signs of an inner corruption and decay.
This was Truman's America
and many Americans today regard it
as a golden age of their civilization.
But for Qutb, he saw a sinister side in this.
All around him was crassness, corruption
vulgarity. Talk centered on movie stars and automobile prices.
He was also very concerned
that the inhabitants of Greeley
spent a lot of time in lawn care.
Pruning their hedges, cutting their lawns.
This, for Qutb, was indicative of the selfish
and materialistic aspect of American life.
Americans lived these isolated lives surrounded by their lawns.
They lusted after material goods.
And this, says Qutb quite succinctly
is the taste of America.
What Qutb believed he was seeing
was a hidden and dangerous reality
underneath the surface of ordinary American life.
One summer night, he went to a dance at a local church hall.
He later wrote that what he saw that night
crystallized his vision.
He talks about how the pastor played on the gramophone
one of the big-band hits of the day
"Baby, It's Cold Outside."
He dimmed the lights so as to create a dreamy, romantic effect.
And then, Qutb says that
"chests met chests, arms circled waists
and the hall was full of lust and love."
To most people watching this dance
it would have been an innocent picture of youthful happiness.
But Qutb saw something else:
The dancers in front of him were tragic lost souls.
They believed that they were free.
But in reality
they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires.
American society was not going forwards;
it was taking people backwards.
They were becoming isolated beings
driven by primitive animal forces.
Such creatures, Qutb believed
could corrode the very bonds that held society together.
And he became determined that night
to prevent this culture of selfish individualism
taking over his own country.
But Qutb was not alone.
At the same time, in Chicago
there was another man
who shared the same fears about the destructive force
of individualism in America.
He was an obscure political philosopher
at the University of Chicago.
But his ideas would also have far-reaching consequences
because they would become the shaping force
behind the neoconservative movement
which now dominates the American administration.
He was called Leo Strauss.
Strauss is a mysterious figure.
He refused to be filmed or interviewed.
He devoted his time to creating a loyal band of students.
And what he taught them was
that the prosperous liberal society they were living in
contained the seeds of its own destruction.
He didn't give interviews, or write political essays
or appear on the radio
there wasn't TV yet-or things like that.
But he did want to get a school of students
to see what he had seen:
that Western liberalism led to nihilism
and had undergone a development
at the end of which it could no longer define itself
or defend itself.
A development which took everything praiseworthy and admirable
out of human beings
and made us into dwarf animals.
Made us into herd animals-sick little dwarves
satisfied with a dangerous life
in which nothing is true and everything is permitted.
Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom
led people to question everything
all values, all moral truths.
Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires.
And this threatened to tear apart the shared values
which held society together.
But there was a way to stop this, Strauss believed.
It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths
that everyone could believe in.
They might not be true, but they were necessary illusions.
One of these was religion;
the other was the myth of the nation.
And in America, that was the idea
that the country had a unique destiny
to battle the forces of evil throughout the world.
This myth was epitomized, Strauss told his students
in his favorite television program: Gunsmoke.
Strauss was a great fan of American television.
Gunsmoke was his great favorite
and he would hurry home from the seminar
which would end at, you know, 5:30 or so
and have a quick dinner
so he could be at his seat before the television set
when Gunsmoke came on.
And he felt that this was good, this show.
This had a salutary effect on the American public
because it showed the conflict between good and evil in a way
that would be immediately intelligible to everyone.
Let's see what happens!
No!
The hero has a white hat;
he's faster on the draw than the bad man;
the good guy wins.
And it's not just that the good guy wins
but that values are clear.
That's America!
We're gonna triumph over the evils of
that are trying to destroy us
and the virtues of the Western frontier. Good and evil.
Leo Strauss' other favorite program was Perry Mason.
And this, he told his students, epitomized the role that they
the elite, had to play.
In public, they should promote the myths
necessary to rescue America from decay.
But in private, they didn't have to believe in them.
Perry Mason was different from Gunsmoke.
The extremely cunning man who, as far as we can see
is very virtuous and uses his great intelligence
and quickness of mind to rescue his clients from dangers
but who could be fooling us - because he's cleverer than we are.
Is he really telling the truth? Maybe his client is guilty!
In 1950, Sayyed Qutb traveled back to Egypt from America.
He too was determined to find some way of controlling
the forces of selfish individualism.
And as he traveled, he began to envisage a new type of society.
It would have all the modern benefits
of Western science and technology
but a more political Islam would have a central role to play
keeping individualism in check.
It would provide a moral framework
that would stop people's selfish desires from overwhelming them.
But Qutb realized
that American culture was already spreading to Egypt
trapping the masses in its seductive dream.
What was needed, he believed, was an elite
a vanguard who could see through these illusions of freedom
just as he had in America
and who would then lead the masses to realize the higher truth.
The masses need to be led.
And it is this vanguard group that will be responsible
for the task of leading the people out of the darkness
and into the light of Islam.
Because the masses had succumbed to their own selfish desires
and he wanted the vanguard to be different, to be pure
to be standing together outside all of this corrupt situation
bringing people back to the truth.
On his return, Qutb became politically active in Egypt.
He joined a group called the Muslim Brotherhood
who wanted Islam to play a major role
in governing Egyptian society.
And in 1952
the Brotherhood supported the revolution led by General Nasser
that overthrew the last remnants of British rule.
But Nasser very quickly made it clear
that the new Egypt was going to be a secular society
that emulated Western morals.
He quickly forged an alliance with America.
And the CIA came to Egypt to organize security agencies
for the new regime.
Faced with this
the Muslim Brotherhood began to organize against Nasser
and in 1954 Qutb and other leading members of the Brotherhood
were arrested by the security services.
What then happened to Qutb
was going to have consequences for the whole world.
In the 1970s, this film was made
that showed what happened in Nasser's main prison
in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
It was based on the testimony of survivors.
Torturers who had been trained by the CIA
unleashed an orgy of violence
against Muslim Brotherhood members
accused of plotting to overthrow Nasser.
At one point
Qutb was covered with animal fat
and locked in a cell with dogs trained to attack humans.
Inside the cell, he had a heart attack.
Sayyed Qutb thought of himself as a superior sort of person.
He saw himself as an important Islamist thinker
and a strong character.
And so on and so on.
But at the end of the day
when he was in the military prison
he gave us the exact details about his secret group
and the orders he had given.
The most dangerous was the order
to flood the whole of the Nile delta
and drown this corrupt land of infidels.
Qutb survived, but the torture
had a powerful radicalizing effect on his ideas.
Up to this point
he had believed that the Western secular ideas
simply created the selfishness and the isolation
he had seen in the United States.
But the torture, he believed
showed that this culture also unleashed
the most brutal and barbarous aspects of human beings.
Qutb began to have an apocalyptic vision of a disease
that was spreading from the West throughout the world.
He called it jahilliyah - a state of barbarous ignorance.
What made it so terrifying and insidious
was that people didn't realize that they were infected.
They believed that they were free
and that their politicians were taking them forward
to a new world.
But in fact, they were regressing to a barbarous age.
The sense is that jahilliyah is so dangerous now
because not only is it advanced by Western powers
but Muslims - this is like a charge of false consciousness -
Muslims have become infected with this jahilliyah
so now the threat to Islam is also from within.
It's from without, and within.
It's a state of emergency
because jahilliyah is a condition
that pervades everything and everybody.
It's even infected our powers of imagination.
We don't even know that we're sick!
That we now worship materialism, and the self
and individual truths over the real truths.
Um, so it's an incredible sense of epic confrontation
where Islam is being insulted on all fronts.
From within, from without
culturally, militarily, economically, politically.
And under those circumstances
any way of fighting it becomes justified and legitimate
and in fact has a kind of existential weight
because somehow it's doing God's will on earth.
To Qutb, this force of jahilliyah
had now gone so deep into the minds of Muslims
that a dramatic way had to be found to free them.
In a series of books he wrote secretly in prison
which were then smuggled out
Qutb called upon a revolutionary vanguard to rise up
and overthrow the leaders
who had allowed jahilliyah to infect their country.
The implication was
that these leaders could justifiably be killed
because they had become so corrupted
they were no longer Muslims, even though they said they were.
Faced with this, Nasser decided to crush Qutb and his ideas
and in 1966 Qutb was put on trial for treason.
This is the only known film of Qutb as he awaits sentence.
The verdict was a foregone conclusion
and on August 29, 1966, Qutb was executed.
But his ideas lived on.
The day after his execution
a young schoolboy set up a secret group.
He hoped that it would one day become the vanguard
that Qutb had hoped for.
His name was Ayman Zawahiri
and Zawahiri was to become the mentor to Osama Bin Laden.
But at the very moment
when Sayyed Qutb's ideas seemed dead and buried
Leo Strauss' ideas about how to transform America
were about to become powerful and influential
because the liberal political order
that had dominated America since the war started to collapse.
Law and order have broken down in Detroit, Michigan.
Pillage, looting, murder.
Only a few years before.
President Johnson had promised policies
that would create a new and a better world in America.
He had called it "the Great Society."
The Great Society is in place
where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind.
It is a place where the City of Man.
But now
in the wake of some of the worst riots ever seen in America
that dream seemed to have ended in violence and hatred.
One prominent liberal journalist called Irving Kristol
began to question
whether it might actually be the policies themselves
that were causing social breakdown.
If you had asked any liberal in 1960
we are going to pass these laws, these laws, these laws
and these laws, mentioning all the laws
that in fact were passed in the 1960s and ‘70s
would you say crime will go up, drug addiction will go up
illegitimacy will go up, or will they get down?
Obviously, everyone would have said, they will get down.
And everyone would have been wrong.
Now, that's not something
that the liberals have been able to face up to.
They've had their reforms
and they have led to consequences
that they did not expect and they don't know what to do about.
In the early ‘70s, Irving Kristol became the focus
of a group of disaffected intellectuals in Washington.
They were determined to understand
why the optimistic liberal policies had failed.
And they found the answer in the theories of Leo Strauss.
Strauss explained that it was the very basis of the liberal idea
"the belief in individual freedom"
that was causing the chaos
because it undermined the shared moral framework
that held society together.
Individuals pursued their own selfish interests
and this inevitably led to conflict.
As the movement grew
many young students who had studied Strauss' ideas
came to Washington to join this group.
Some, like Paul Wolfowitz
had been taught Strauss' ideas at the University of Chicago
as had Francis Fukuyama.
And others, like Irving Kristol's son William
had studied Strauss' theories at Harvard.
This group became known as the neoconservatives.
Well, many of them couldn't get academic jobs
and the political science and philosophy faclities
were not terribly friendly to those
of a conservative or moderately conservative disposition.
And the truth is that a lot of people
who ended up in Washington started out as academics.
I did; Paul Wolfowitz did; and decided
they probably didn't have very good prospects in the academy.
What we all had in common, I think
was a certain doubt about
what once seemed a kind of great certainty
and confidence in liberal progress.
The philosophic grounds for liberal democracy had been weakened.
So I think Straussians who came to Washington
they didn't think of themselves as Churchill or Lincoln
let me assure you, but they did that, you know
there's something noble about public life, and about politics
and they tried to make a contribution in many different areas.
The neoconservatives were idealists.
Their aim was to try and stop the social disintegration
they believed liberal freedoms had unleashed.
They wanted to find a way of uniting the people
by giving them a shared purpose.
One of their great influences in doing this
would be the theories of Leo Strauss.
They would set out to recreate the myth of America
as a unique nation
whose destiny was to battle against evil in the world.
And in this project
the source of evil would be America's Cold War enemy:
the Soviet Union.
And by doing this, they believed
that they would not only give new meaning
and purpose to people's lives
but they would spread the good of democracy around the world.
The United States would not only
according to these - the Straussians
be able to bring good to the world
but would be able to overcome
the fundamental weaknesses of American society
a society that has been suffering, almost rotting
in their language, from relativism, liberalism
lack of self-confidence, lack of belief in itself.
And one of the main political projects of the Straussians
during the Cold War
was to reinforce the self-confidence of Americans
and the belief that America
was fundamentally the only force for good in the world
that had to be supported, otherwise evil would prevail.
But to do this, the neoconservatives were going to have
to defeat one of the most powerful men in the world.
Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State under President Nixon
and he didn't believe in a world of good and evil.
What drove Kissinger was a ruthless
pragmatic vision of power in the world.
With America's growing political and social chaos
Kissinger wanted the country to give up its ideological battles.
Instead, it should come to terms with countries
like the Soviet Union
to create a new kind of global interdependence.
A world in which America would be safe.
I believe that with all the dislocations we know - now experience
there also exists an extraordinary opportunity to form
for the first time in history, a truly global society
carried by the principle of interdependence.
And if we act wisely and with vision
I think we can look back to all this turmoil
as the birth pangs of a more creative and better system.
Kissinger had begun this process in 1972
when he persuaded the Soviet Union
to sign a treaty with America limiting nuclear arms.
It was the start of what was called "detente."
And President Nixon returned to Washington
to announce triumphantly that the age of fear was over.
Last Friday, in Moscow
we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era
which began in 1945.
With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations.
We have begun to reduce the level of fear
by reducing the causes of fear - for our two peoples
and for all peoples in the world.
But a world without fear was not
what the neoconservatives needed to pursue their project.
They now set out to destroy Henry Kissinger's vision.
What gave them their opportunity
was the growing collapse of American political power
both abroad and at home.
The defeat in Vietnam
and the resignation of President Nixon over Watergate
led to a crisis of confidence in America's political class.
And the neoconservatives seized their moment.
They allied themselves with two right-wingers
in the new administration of Gerald Ford.
One was Donald Rumsfeld, the new Secretary of Defense.
The other was Dick Cheney, the President's Chief of Staff.
Rumsfeld began to make speeches
alleging that the Soviets
were ignoring Kissinger's treaties
and secretly building up their weapons
with the intention of attacking America.
The Soviet Union has been busy.
They've been busy in terms of their level of effort;
they've been busy in terms of the actual weapons
they've been producing;
they've been busy in terms of expanding production rates;
they've been busy in terms of expanding
their institutional capability
to produce additional weapons at additional rates;
they've been busy in terms of expanding their capability
to increasingly improve the sophistication of those weapons.
Year after year after year, they've been demonstrating
that they have steadiness of purpose.
They're purposeful about what they're doing.
Now, your question is
what ought one to be doing about that?
The CIA, and other agencies
who watched the Soviet Union continuously
for any sign of threat
said that this was a complete fiction.
There was no truth to Rumsfeld's allegations.
But Rumsfeld used his position
to persuade President Ford to set up an independent inquiry.
He said it would prove
that there was a hidden threat to America.
And the inquiry would be run
by a group of neoconservatives
one of whom was Paul Wolfowitz.
The aim was to change the way America saw the Soviet Union.
And Rumsfeld won that very intense
intense political battle
that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976.
Now, as part of that battle, Rumsfeld and others
people such as Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to get into the CIA.
And their mission was to create
a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions
Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war.
The neoconservatives chose, as the inquiry chairman
a well-known critic and historian
of the Soviet Union called Richard Pipes.
Pipes was convinced that whatever the Soviets said publicly
secretly they still intended to attack and conquer America.
This was their hidden mindset.
The inquiry was called Team B
and the other leading member was Paul Wolfowitz.
And the idea was then
to appoint a group of outside experts
who have access to the same evidence as the CIA
used to arrive at these conclusions
and to see if they could come up with different conclusions.
And I was asked to chair it
because I was not an expert on nuclear weapons.
I was, if anything, an expert on the Soviet mindset
but not on the weapons. But that was the real key
was the question of the Soviet mindset
because the CIA looked only at -
they were known as "bean counters,"
always looking at weapons.
But weapons can be used in various ways.
They can be used for defensive purposes
or offensive purposes.
Well, all right, I collected this group of experts
and we began to sift through the evidence.
Team B began examining all the CIA data on the Soviet Union.
But however closely they looked
there was little evidence of the dangerous weapons
or defense systems they claimed the Soviets were developing.
Rather than accept that this meant
that the systems didn't exist
Team B made an assumption
that the Soviets had developed systems
that were so sophisticated, they were undetectible.
For example, they could find no evidence
that the Soviet submarine fleet
had an acoustic defense system.
What this meant, Team B said
was that the Soviets
had actually invented a new non-acoustic system
which was impossible to detect.
And this meant that the whole of the American submarine fleet
was at risk from an invisible threat that was there
even though there was no evidence for it.
They couldn't say that the Soviets
had acoustic means of picking up American submarines
because they couldn't find it. So they said
well maybe they have a non-acoustic means
of making our submarine fleet vulnerable.
But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system.
They're saying, "We can't find evidence
that they're doing it the way
that everyone thinks they're doing it
so they must be doing it a different way.
We don't know what that different way is
but they must be doing it."
Even though there was no evidence?
Even though there was no evidence.
So they're saying there
that the fact that the weapon doesn't exist
Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
It just means that we haven't found it.
Now, that's important, yes.
If something is not there, that's significant.
By its absence.
If you believe
that they share your view of strategic weapons
and they don't talk about it, then there's something missing.
Something is wrong. And the CIA wasn't aware of that.
What Team B accused the CIA of missing
was a hidden and sinister reality in the Soviet Union.
Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn't found
but they were wrong about many of those they could observe
such as the Soviet air defenses.
The CIA were convinced that these were in a state of collapse
reflecting the growing economic chaos in the Soviet Union.
Team B said that this was actually
a cunning deception by the Soviet regime.
The air-defense system worked perfectly.
But the only evidence they produced to prove this
was the official Soviet training manual
which proudly asserted that their air-defense system
was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly.
The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world.
The CIA was very loath to deal with issues
which could not be demonstrated in a kind of mathematical form.
I said they could consider the soft evidence.
They deal with realities, whereas this was a fantasy.
That's how it was perceived.
And there were battles all the time on this subject.
Did you think it was a fantasy?
No! I thought it was absolute reality.
I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean
they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said
"This is a laser beam weapon,"
when in fact it was nothing of the sort.
They even took a Russian military manual
which the correct translation of it is "The Art of Winning."
And when they translated it and put it into Team B
they called it "The Art of Conquest."
Well, there's a difference between "conquest" and "winning."
And if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations
about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one
they were all wrong.
All of them?
All of them.
Nothing true?
I don't believe anything in Team B was really true.
The neoconservatives set up a lobby group
to publicize the findings of Team B.
It was called the Committee on the Present Danger
and a growing number of politicians joined
including a Presidential hopeful, Ronald Reagan.
Through films and television
the Committee portrayed a world
in which America was under threat from hidden forces
that could strike at any time
forces that America must conquer to survive.
A concentration of world evil, of hatred for humanity
is taking place.
And it is fully determined to destroy your society.
Must you wait until the young men of America have to fall
defending the borders of their continent?!
This dramatic battle between good and evil
was precisely the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had taught
his students would be necessary to rescue the country
from moral decay.
It might not be true, but it was necessary
to re-engage the public in a grand vision of America's destiny
that would give meaning and purpose to their lives.
The neoconservatives were succeeding
in creating a simplistic fiction -
a vision of the Soviet Union
as the center of all evil in the world
and America as the only country that could rescue the world.
And this nightmarish vision was beginning to give
the neoconservatives great power and influence.
The Straussians started to create a worldview which is a fiction.
The world is not divided into good and evil.
The battle in which we are engaged is not a battle
between good and evil.
The United States, as anyone who observes understands
has done some good and some bad things.
It's like any great power. This is the way history is.
But they wanted to create a world of moral certainties
so therefore they invent mythologies - fairytales -
describing any force in the world
that obstructs the United States as somehow Satanic
or associated with evil.
By the late 1970s, Egypt had been transformed.
On the surface, it had become a modern
Westernized state with a prosperous middle class
who were benefiting from a flood of Western capital
that was being invested in the country.
One member of this prosperous Egyptian elite
was Ayman Zawahiri. He was now a young doctor
just starting his career.
Ayman, he was an ideal person
who was a doctor coming from a very good family.
His father was a professor in the university
his grandfather was an ambassador
his other grandfather was Sheikh of Al-Azhar;
very well-respected family.
He used to be the the sort of person
that acted by the book. Not looking for prestige
not looking for money, not looking for propaganda.
Ayman became a leader because of his attitudes.
In reality
Zawahiri was the leader of an underground Islamist cell.
The group that he had started as a schoolboy
which he had modeled on the ideas of Sayyed Qutb, had grown.
Sayyed Qutb's ideas were now spreading rapidly in Egypt -
above all, among students -
because his predictions about the corruption from the West
seemed to have come true.
The government of President Sadat
was controlled by a small group of millionaires
who were backed by Western banks.
The banks had been let in by
what Sadat called his open-door policy.
To the Western media, Sadat denied any corruption.
All Egyptians knew that this was a blatant lie.
Who has benefited now from the open-door policy?
Taxi drivers. The liberals.
All of those have benefited from the open-door policy.
It is not like they say
that there are millionaires here and so.
No, not at all. This is pure, um
pure black propaganda from the side of the Soviet Union
and agents here in the country.
Zawahiri was convinced that the time
was now approaching to fulfill Qutb's vision.
The vanguard should rise up and overthrow this corrupt regime.
And the man who would give the Islamists that opportunity
would be Henry Kissinger.
As part of his attempt to create a stable and balanced world
Kissinger had persuaded President Sadat
to begin peace negotiations with the Israelis.
To Kissinger, the ruthless pragmatist
religious divisions and hatreds were irrelevant.
The most important thing was to create a safer world.
And in 1977, Sadat had flown to Jerusalem
to start the peace process.
To the West, it was a heroic act. But to the Islamists
it was a complete betrayal.
It showed that Sadat's mind had become so corrupted by the West
that he was now completely under their control.
And under the theories of Sayyed Qutb
this meant that he was no longer a Muslim
and so could justifiably be killed.
And then, in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini showed Zawahiri
that his dream of creating an Islamist state was possible.
God is Great! that his dream of creating an Islamist state was possible.
God is Great!
God is Great! Khomeini had inspired an uprising against the Shah of Iran.
Khomeini had inspired an uprising against the Shah of Iran.
The Shah was another leader
who had allowed Western banks to corrupt his country.
Armed struggle is the read to freedom! who had allowed Western banks to corrupt his country.
Armed struggle is the read to freedom!
Armed struggle is the read to freedom! Khomeini had put forth the idea of an Islamist state
Khomeini had put forth the idea of an Islamist state
Death to the Shah's mercenary army! Khomeini had put forth the idea of an Islamist state
Death to the Shah's mercenary army! that was remarkably similar to Qutb's ideas.
Death to the Shah's mercenary army!
He acknowledged this by placing Qutb's face
on one of the postage stamps of the new Islamic republic.
In his first sermon, Khomeini addressed the West.
"Yes," he told them, "we are reactionaries
and you are enlightened intellectuals.
You who want freedom for everything
the freedom that will corrupt our country, corrupt our youth
and freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor
freedom that would drag our country to the bottom."
You sound very dissatisfied
with what's happening in Iran now.
Not MORE than dissatisfied, this is disgraceful! Really!
I was myself
I was the Secretary-General of the Muslim Congress at one time.
This, putting the name "Islamic revolution," is a crime.
A crime against Islam in the first hand.
President Sadat, do you expect
that the Shah will accept the invitation?
It seems like a good solution right now.
Quote me: My aeroplane is ready to bring him here. Any moment.
At the end of 1980, Ayman Zawahiri
with a number of other followers of Qutb who had formed cells
came together. They created an organization
they called Islamic Jihad.
Its leader was a man called Abdel Salam Faraj.
And Faraj argued that they should kill Sadat
in a spectacular way that would shock the masses.
It would make them see
the true reality of the corruption surrounding them
and they would rise up and overthrow the regime.
The jihadi movement – some of the leaders are still alive – I was one and so was Ayman Zawahiri.
We spearheaded the jihadi state of mind rather than the earlier more moderate ideas..
in the liberal era that simply accepted reality.
Psychologically we thought we were superior to reality.
We despised the everyday vision of the world. And we wanted to transform or change this reality.
Therefore our dream was to get rid of Sadat.
Those who carried out the assassination
were a group of Army officers who were a part of Islamic Jihad.
They were immediately arrested
and the regime launched a massive manhunt for those
behind the plot.
But the effect of the assassination on the Egyptian people
was not what Zawahiri had hoped for.
That night, Cairo remained calm. The masses failed to rise up.
And in the following weeks, Zawahiri
and many other conspirators were arrested.
The assassins were tried immediately and executed.
But then, nearly 300 Islamists, including Zawahiri
were put on trial in a pavilion
in Cairo's industrial exhibition park.
It was agreed that Zawahiri would be their spokesman.
for (unintelligible), for the whole world, this is our world Doctor Ayman Zawahiri!
Now, we want to speak to the whole world! Who are we?
Who are we? Why did they bring us here? And what we want to say?
About the first question: we are Muslims!
We are Muslims who believed in their religion
in their broad feelings, as both an ideology and practice.
We believed in our religion, both as an ideology and practice.
And hence, we tried our best
to establish Islamic state and Islamic society!
La illah la-illallah!
Zawahiri, the man is an aristocrat.
He comes from a major Egyptian -Saudi family.
And he thinks that, you know, he is a visionary
and the means do not matter, just as in Lenin -
I mean, revolution in one country or revolution worldwide.
He was convinced that this was a means to mobilize the masses
that they had tried something, that it had not worked
then he failed that - you know
the masses that were still under the spell of ideology
the ideology of America. And he is looking for a new strategy.
At the trial, Zawahiri was sentenced to three years in prison
along with many others of Islamic Jihad.
He was taken to cells behind the Police National Museum
where, like Sayyed Qutb, he was tortured.
And under this torture, he began
to interpret Qutb's theories in a far more radical way.
The mystery, for Zawahiri, was why the Egyptian people
had failed to see the truth and rise up.
It must be because the infection of selfish individualism
had gone so deep into people's minds
that they were now as corrupted as their leaders.
Zawahiri now seized on a terrible ambiguity in Qutb's argument.
It wasn't just leaders like Sadat
who were no longer real Muslims, it was the people themselves.
And Zawahiri believed that this meant
that they too could legitimately be killed. But such killing
Zawahiri believed, would have a noble purpose
because of the fear and the terror
that it would create in the minds of ordinary Muslims.
It would shock them into seeing reality in a different way.
They would then see the truth.
Ayman Zawahiri came to the conclusion
that because you have what you believe to be a sublime objective
then the means can be as ugly as they can get.
You can kill as many people as you wish
because the end means is noble.
The logic is that "we are the vanguards
we are the correct Muslims, everybody else is wrong.
Not only wrong, but everybody else is not a Muslim
and the only means available to us today
is just to kill our way to perfection."
And at this very same moment
religion was being mobilized politically in America
but for a very different purpose.
And those encouraging this were the neoconservatives.
Many neoconservatives had become advisers
to the Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan.
And as they became more involved with the Republican Party
they had forged an alliance
with the religious wing of the party
because it shared their aim of the moral regeneration of America.
The notion that a purely secular society
can cope with all of the terrible pathologies
that now affect our society
I think has turned out to be false.
And that has made me culturally conservative.
I mean, I really think religion has a role now
to play in redeeming the country.
And liberalism is not prepared to give religion a role.
Conservatism is, but it doesn't know how to do it.
By the late ‘70s
there were millions of fundamentalist Christians in America.
But their preachers had always told them not to vote.
It would mean compromising with a doomed and immoral society.
But the neoconservatives and their new Republican allies
made an alliance with a number of powerful preachers
who told their followers to become involved with politics
for the first time.
I'm sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals
and the perverts, and the liberals, and the leftists
and the Communists coming out of the closet!
It's time for God's people to come out of the closet
out of the churches, and change America! We must do it!
The conservative movement, up to that point
was essentially an intellectual movement.
It had some very powerful thinkers
but it didn't have many troops. And as Stalin said of the Pope
"Where are his divisions?"
Well, we didn't have many divisions.
When these folks became active
all of a sudden the conservative movement had lots of divisions.
We were able to move literally millions of people.
And this is something that
we had no ability to do prior to that time.
Literally millions?
Literally millions.
And at the beginning of 1981
Ronald Reagan took power in America.
The religious vote was crucial in his election
because many millions of fundamentalists
voted for the first time. And as they had hoped
many neoconservatives were given power
in the new administration. Paul Wolfowitz became
head of the State Department policy staff
while his close friend Richard Perle
became the Assistant Secretary of Defense.
And the head of Team B, Richard Pipes
became one of Reagan's chief advisers.
The neoconservatives believed
that they now had the chance to implement their vision
of America's revolutionary destiny -
to use the country's power aggressively
as a force for good in the world
in an epic battle to defeat the Soviet Union.
It was a vision that they shared
with millions of their new religious allies.
I take a personal and public stand as a minister
a stand against Communism. To destroy it
to wipe it from the face of the Earth
because believe you me, these people are dedicated
to the destruction of the United States of America
and freedom as we know it.
But the neoconservatives faced immense opposition
to this new policy.
It came not just from the bureaucracies and Congress
but from the President himself.
Reagan was convinced that the Soviet Union was an evil force
but he still believed that he could negotiate with them
to end the Cold War.
Reagan at first didn't quite understand
that their aggressiveness is rooted in the system.
He had a rather benign view of human beings.
He was a very kindly man
and he attributed kind motives to others.
There was another form of mirror imaging.
And he would say on more than one occasion
something like this:
"If I could just sit down with the Soviet leaders
and explain to them that they're following a wrong ideology
and if they adopt the right ideologies
they could make their people happy and prosperous."
So we says "Mr. President..
..That is not going to do it!
You have to go after the system.
Force them to reform the system."
It took him a very long time to assimilate this view.
To persuade the President
the neoconservatives set out to prove
that the Soviet threat was far greater than anyone
even Team B, had previously shown.
They would demonstrate that the majority of terrorism
and revolutionary movements around the world
were actually part of a secret network, coordinated by Moscow
to take over the world.
The main proponent of this theory was a leading neoconservative
who was the special adviser to the Secretary of State.
His name was Michael Ledeen
and he had been influenced by a best-selling book
called The Terror Network.
It alleged that terrorism was not the fragmented phenomenon
that it appeared to be.
In reality, all terrorist groups
from the PLO to the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany
and the Provisional IRA
all of them were a part of a coordinated strategy of terror
run by the Soviet Union. But the CIA completely disagreed.
They said this was just another neoconservative fantasy.
The CIA denied it. They tried to convince people
that we were really crazy. I mean, they never believed
that the Soviet Union was a driving force
in the international terror network.
They always wanted to believe
that terrorist organizations were just what they said they were:
Local groups trying to avenge terrible evils done to them
or trying to rectify terrible social conditions
and things like that.
And the CIA really did buy into the rhetoric.
I don't know what their motive was. I mean
I don't know what people's motives are, hardly ever.
And I don't much worry about motives.
But the neoconservatives had a powerful ally.
He was William Casey, and he was the new head of the CIA.
Casey was sympathetic to the neoconservative view.
And when he read the Terror Network book, he was convinced.
He called a meeting of the CIA's Soviet analysts
at their headquarters, and told them
to produce a report for the President
that proved this hidden network existed.
But the analysts told him that this would be impossible
because much of the information in the book
came from black propaganda the CIA themselves had invented
to smear the Soviet Union.
They knew that the terror network didn't exist
because they themselves had made it up.
And when we looked through the book, we found very clear episodes
where CIA black propaganda - clandestine information
that was designed under a covert action plan
to be planted in European newspapers -
were picked up and put in this book.
A lot of it was made up. It was made up out of whole cloth.
You told him this?
We told him that, point blank.
And we even had the operations people to tell Bill Casey this.
I thought maybe this might have an impact
but all of us were dismissed. Casey had made up his mind.
He knew the Soviets were involved in terrorism
so there was nothing we could tell him to disabuse him.
Lies became reality.
In the end, Casey found a university professor
who described himself as a terror expert
and he produced a dossier that confirmed
that the hidden terror network did, in fact, exist.
Under such intense lobbying
Reagan agreed to give the neoconservatives what they wanted
and in 1983 he signed a secret document
that fundamentally changed American foreign policy.
The country would now fund covert wars
to push back the hidden Soviet threat around the world.
The specter of Marxist-Leninist controlled governments
with ideological and political loytities to the Soviet Union
proves that there's a direct challenge to which we must respond.
They are the focus of evil in the modern world.
It was a triumph for the neoconservatives.
America was now setting out to do battle
against the forces of evil in the world.
But what had started out as the kind of myth
that Leo Strauss had said
was necessary for the American people
increasingly came to be seen as the truth
by the neoconservatives.
They began to believe their own fiction.
They had become what they called "democratic revolutionaries,"
who were going to use force to change the world.
We were aiming for an expansion of the zone of freedom
in the world. And in part that had to do with fighting Communism
and in part that had to do with fighting other kinds of tyrannies.
But that's what we were about, and that's what we're still about.
When you say you were democratic revolutionaries
what do you mean?
It meant that we wanted to support the people
who wanted to carry out revolutions against tyrannical regimes
in the name of democracy
in order to install a democratic system.
As simple as that.
Yeah. It's not nuclear physics, you know.
I mean, freedom is a fairly simple thing to get.
It's a chancy job - makes a man watchful and a little lonely.
But somebody has to do it.
The neoconservatives now set out to transform the world.
In next week's episode, they find themselves joining forces
with the Islamists in Afghanistan
and together they fight an epic battle against the Soviet Union.
And both come to believe that they had defeated the Evil Empire.
But this imagined victory would leave them without an enemy.
And in a world disillusioned with grand political ideas
they would need to invent new fantasies and new nightmares
in order to maintain their power.