<p>"The next pillar of Curtis’s thesis is that the neocons and their allies exaggerated the Soviet threat, a precursor of their later inflation of the menace posed by Al Qaeda. It is positively eerie to watch then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deliver a supremely self-assured speech in a 1976 press conference about the gathering strength of the Soviet war machine that just as easily could have been one of his gung-ho Pentagon briefings decades later. Curtis explains that the CIA found Rumsfeld’s view of the Soviet military buildup to be a “fiction”; but that did not stop Rumsfeld from establishing a commission of inquiry into the putative buildup that was known as Team B and was run, in part, by Wolfowitz. In one of the strongest sections of the documentary, Curtis explains:</p>
<p>Team B made an assumption that the Soviets had developed systems that were so sophisticated they were undetectable. 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. </p>
<p>This was an early formulation of the Rumsfeldian doctrine that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. To devastating effect Curtis deploys Dr. Anne Cahn, a government arms-control expert during the 1970s, who explains, “If you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about [Soviet] weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong.”</p>
<p>I’m going to repeat this. “This was an early formulation of the Rumsfeldian doctrine that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”</p>
<p>The translation… we can say whatever we want, never prove anything, do what we want, and we always are right. </p>
<p>I don’t want these neo-cons doing anything for the public except maybe perform in a circus with large shoes.</p>
<p>BTW, the Nation article is written by Peter Bergen, author of two books on Bin Laden and one of the few people around who has actually met Bin Laden. It’s a good read.</p>
<p>I don’t think Bergen really undermines the BBC documentary’s view of Bin Laden. It is not so much a dismissal of Bin Laden or a losely aligned group of jihadists, but rather a picture of Bin Laden as the Wizard of Oz – the little man behind the curtain. The whole Tora Bora incident hightlights this. I mean, here we have an image of Dr. Evil, not moving from fantastic futurama high tech lair to lair, but rather running for his life on the back of a flea-bitten mule, dodging artillery shells.</p>
<p>By turning the miserable little man into a bigger than life Wizard, do we empower his message and, in fact, give him the only power he has?</p>
<p>Obviously the neocons do not believe that Al Queda is the end-all-and-be-all threat or they wouldn’t have diverted resources from that battle to a costly invasion of Iraq.</p>
<p>BTW, on the subject of funny moments in the BBC documentary:</p>
<p>Obviously, the images of a young Rumsfeld describing the all-encompassing threat of the Soviet Union was hilarious.</p>
<p>But, I also loved the footage of the home-grown British imbecile Inmam with the cockney accent. I could barely watch his sermonizing because it felt just like an episode of Da Ali G Show – it sounded THAT stupid.</p>
<p>I understand what you’re saying about nitpicking Dstark - I just think the series would have been more effective if he hadn’t exaggerated some of the info. It’s a really important message and I agree with you about the neocons. People who voted for Bush, that I know don’t really understand the neocon philosophies and how they manipulate power. When I tried to tell my sister about it, she said, “no one has that much power.” Here is the neocon website, which I don’t believe was linked on the wikipedia site:
<a href=“PREDIKSI168: Situs Judi Slot Online Gacor Hari Ini Dan Slot88 Gampang Menang”>PREDIKSI168: Situs Judi Slot Online Gacor Hari Ini Dan Slot88 Gampang Menang;
<p>And I would also add that YES, we did empower Al Quaeda by going into Iraq. We are far less safe now. The neocons exaggerated the weapons of mass destruction to perpetuate their myth of Good vs Evil and it played perfectily into the hands of the religious right who believe this is all a part of God’s plan. The film is especially good in pointing out the danger of extreme ideologies whether they be on our side or the Jihadists.</p>
<p>Okay one more link. I feel like Dstark and ID misunderstood my post when I expressed reservations. As I was watching I kept wishing that the piece had been done by PBS Frontline. Frontline is authoritative, serious and balanced and while the BBC piece has some of those elements, I think stylistically it can turn off a lot of people to it’s message. As ID said in another post, it is cartoonish. I got tired of the Danny Elfman style music to portray the message, “oh, oh here comes the bad guy”. What I do really like about the BBC piece is the depth of historical information presented regarding the Islamic radicals as well as the analysis of the neocons. </p>
<p>{quote]As ID said in another post, it is cartoonish. I got tired of the Danny Elfman style music to portray the message, “oh, oh here comes the bad guy”.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yes. The documentary did get a little “breathless” in its exuberant style. It was most effective in its treatment of historical timelines and philosophical developments.</p>
<p>Worth the time to watch. It’s always interesting to get a view from the outside, as it were. I have a feeling that the attempt to find linkage to Strauss on the one hand and the Egyptian guy on the other was falling into the same trap that the neocons have - trying to make too much “sense” of a complicated situation - minimizing the contributing factors so as to make a complex set of events more understandable. But is does cast some light on something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while – before 9/11 there were several references in the Presidential briefings to “bin Laden” but none to “al Qaeda”. Where did the term “al Qaeda” come from, anyway? Come on, CC brain trust - someone must know the answer to this.</p>
<p>’ In 1988, toward the end of the Soviet occupation, bin Laden, Azzam, and other associates began contemplating how, and to what end, to utilize the Islamist volunteer network they had organized. U.S. intelligence estimates of the size of that network was about 10,000 - 20,000; however, not all of these necessarily supported or participated in Al Qaeda terrorist activities.7 Azzam apparently wanted this Al Qaeda (Arabic for the base) organization as they began terming the organization in 1988 to become an Islamic rapid reaction force, available to intervene wherever Muslims were perceived to be threatened."</p>
<p>Well, that is you believe this report:</p>
<p>CRS Report for Congress</p>
<p>Al Qaeda: Profile and Threat Assessment</p>
<p>August 17, 2005
Kenneth Katzman
Specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs
Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division</p>
<p>Thanks for the link, Xiggi - a little googling reinforced the impression that al Qaeda may well be less of an “organization” than a “movement” - an important distinction when developing a strategy to counter its aims and activities - and also something to consider when contemplating how to wage a “war on terror.” Lots of stuff to mull over there.</p>
<p>Kluge,
There is quite a bit of information about the origins and organization of Al Qaeda in the Nation article on page 3 and 4: It seems to support Xiggi’s link. Here is an excerpt:</p>
<p>Bin Laden himself recounted how the name “Al Qaeda” first emerged in an interview with an Al Jazeera correspondent shortly after the 9/11 attacks: “Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri established the training camps for our mujahedeen against Russia’s terrorism [during the 1980s]. We used to call the training camp al Qaeda. And the name stayed.” As early as 1999, in an interview with leading Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, bin Laden started publicly referring to Al Qaeda, at one point explaining that he didn’t personally know everyone in his organization: “The number of brothers is large, thank God, and I do not know everyone who is with us in this base or organization.” Bin Laden went on to note that someone named Mamdouh Salim, who had recently been extradited from Germany to the United States on terrorism charges, was “never a member of any jihad organization. He is not a member of the base.” Indeed, when Al Jazeera broadcast a major documentary about bin Laden in 1999, the network called it The Destruction of al Qaeda, an odd choice of title if Al Qaeda did not in fact already exist.</p>
<p>There’s a fair bit of ambiguity there, involving translation as well as anything else, I imagine. From “the base” - apparently with the same meaning as “Army base”, i.e. a physical encampment - to “the base” - with the same meaning as GW Bush referring to the “haves and have-mores”, i.e. the group of loyal supporters of a person or ideology. Still, I’m left with the impression that “al Qaeda” has a meaning more akin to what the term “the movement” meant in the 60’s than to, say, “the Provos.” And I think it’s an important distinction.</p>
<p>I have now watched all three episodes and I would like to thank Overseas for pointing them out and for the BBC in producing them.</p>
<p>What I see is a few things. First, it provides an excellent perspective on the background of why things are the way they are. I too find many of the neo-con positions to be a bit over the top and paranoid. However, I also found it a bit too dismissive of the neo-cons perspective.</p>
<p>Basically the neo-cons are saying that there are unforseen things that we need to try to forsee. At the extremes it creates tremendous paranoia that I do not buy into. Closer in it explains the things that have happened, i.e. 9/11.</p>
<p>The real question is how can these perspectives be balanced and where do we go from here?</p>
<p>As someone who attended UChicago in the Committee on Social Thought at the time that Leo Straus was still around (along with Edward Shils and a bunch of others), and having been a classmate of Paul Wolfowitz, I can vouch for the Straus connection as being essentially on target.</p>
<p>These guys took their Plato literally, prompting Hannah Arendt (my dissertation advisor) to quip that western civilization took a wrong turn with Plato, from which it is still yet to recover.</p>
<p>Re Mini’s comment on Plato and the NeoCons:</p>
<p>With all the violence breaking out around the world right now in response to the cartoons originally published in Denmark, it strikes me that Bush’s War on Terror is being met right now, as if with an equivalent force of righteousness, by a Muslim war on error – a collective reaction to the chronic failure of the West to understand, and consequently to respect, the principles of Islam. </p>
<p>I don’t know much about Plato, but I did read snatches of The Republic for literature courses years and years ago. From what I remember, it seems to me that, ironically, this pillar of Western thought – this philosophical platform for the NeoCons – would have understood better than anyone else the Muslim taboo on representations of Mohammed. </p>
<p>Here we are, the little people, helplessly watching the wars on terror and error mess up the world, while our children are perhaps headed off to junior years abroad, right into the thick of it.</p>
<p>The point about Plato, embraced by Straus, is that the Republic has as its bedrock foundation a “noble lie”. ((Republic - 412-414)</p>
<p>"But how does he convince the rest of the citizens to accept the leadership of the guardians? The answer is that the rulers of the city must make them believe a mytha "noble lie" about their collective origins.</p>
<p>"All citizens they will be told from very early on were born of the same mother, the earth. Some have gold in their souls (the Guardians), some have silver (the auxiliaries) and some have iron or bronze (the craftsmen). The type of metal that each person is made of determines the role that they will play in the society.</p>
<p>“This myth is told purely for the sake of those being ruled. The guardian, of course, know that it is just a myth, but understand the basic principle that underlies it (e.g., the principle of specialization).”</p>
<p>“The point of this myth is to encourage the kind of absolute loyalty to the city that is akin to the kind of loyalty that one feels towards family members. Plato’s aim is to have all of the citizens accept the class structure of the city and to put the good of the city over their own individual good.”</p>
<p>The problem is, as Hannah Arendt (a staunch critic of Straus) emphasized, is that once you put a lie in as the cornerstone of the nation-state, anything and everything becomes allowable.</p>
<p>How and why should anyone respect a religion that is so intolerant of a different system of beliefs? To put it more directly–why should we have to put up with their crackpot crap? Death for a cartoon–that’s crap. Sometimes ideas are not worthy of respect.</p>
<p>In my little town three years ago, the Center for the Performing Arts put out a poster for a show it was doing on Jewish music from the Third Reich. It used an actual cartoon produced in Germany in 1935, featuring a saxophonist with a long nose. The Center was not expressing an opinion; in fact, on the contrary, the poster was illustrating the hateful climate under which the music that was to be played was produced. There were huge outcries, posters torn down, boycott launched, pickets posted, and massive letters to the editor, until the Center withdrew all the posters, and - with the mayor standing by - made a public apology to all concerned.</p>
<p>Imagine had it been in New York! (P.S. I thought the Center did the right thing.)</p>
<p>Except for the posters being torn down, it sounds like what happened in your town was an appropriate protest. How many buildings were burned down and death threats issued?</p>