More “Nightmares”: Qutb & Strauss

I’ve made 2 postings (first & second) on the CBC’s airing of “Nightmares,” which draws a frivolous comparison between Islamist Sayyid Qutb and political philosopher Leo Strauss.

The documentary runs over 3 nights. Fortunately, Monday night’s broadcast ran only 1 hour (instead of 2, like Sunday night).

Monday’s night’s broadcast was a little more balanced. It covered the rise of Islamism since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and helpfully drew links between the two (in terms of geostrategy) that the public needs more awareness of. It also covered a radical Islamist group in Algeria who’s leader so wanted a purified nation that he wanted to murder everyone in Algeria except for himself and his little group of terrorists.

It covers the Clinton years, and focuses on the “neocons’” attempt to destroy his presidency. It repeats the old line that the Republicans persecuted Clinton for his adultery, instead of treating the impeachment as a consequence of Clinton’s obsessive lying (which Clinton himself confesses in his autobiography). Even so, I thought its coverage of the American Spectator’s attacks on him were more or less balanced. A lot of conservatives during that 1990s were bent on a politics of personally destroying the president. Ironically, I think they helped get Clinton re-elected. Today, they find their left-wing counterparts among the Michael Moores of the world.

One of the more contentious of the documentary’s claims is that the US invented al-Qaeda. It doesn’t go so far as to claim that the Pentagon organized 9/11. After all, the director’s British, not French. Rather, it claims the administration needed a monolithic enemy, a la Cold War Manichaean rhetoric of good versus evil, us versus them, to wage its war, and to further its rulership style of portraying itself as the protector of the people from their nightmares. It claims that the administration portrays al-Qaeda as monolithic with Usama bin Laden presiding at its top, like a Lord of Darkness. It even provides some kitschy video montage of old films portraying Arabic evildoers as a way of mocking Americans.

However, even the video clips they provide don’t validate this claim. While they do focus on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, one of the clips they show is Bush referring to al-Qaeda as a network. Anyone who’s paid attention to strategic thinking in the last while will know that the administration knows the difference between a network and a monolithic organization. A network is a loose assortment of militant groups, unified by shared ideology and perhaps financing. When it comes down to it, even the documentary treats al-Qaeda in these terms.

The other reason it claims the US invented al-Qaeda was so it could prosecute cell members in the wake of the 1993 WTC bombing, and the 1998 bombing in Nairobi, Kenya. Bin Laden was charged in absentia for the Nairobi bombing. The documentary claims prosecutors thought they could get a prosecution if they followed the model of previous prosecutions of criminal gangs like the Mafia. Simple membership is enough to get a conviction. And so the documentary claims that US prosecutors invented al-Qaeda to fit the cause.

I don’t know enough about the history of these cases. However, the claim that al-Qaeda was invented by US politicians and prosecutors in the late 1990s doesn’t fit with a lot of histories of al-Qaeda that I’ve seen (samplings here and here).

Moreover, the “creation” of al-Qaeda to serve a legal purpose is beside the point. For purposes of law, it may be necessary to “create” such an organization (rather: to convince a court that such an organization is in existence, on the basis of sketchy evidence).

However, the attempt to prove that al-Qaeda exists in a legal sense is unrelated to its existence in the pragmatic sense because people calling themselves al-Qaeda, including bin Laden and his associates, had been active before the late 1990s. Moreover, scholarship on networks already demonstrates that these organizations are amorphous, despite the law’s requirement that they be not.

Well, here’s some news: netwarriors don’t act as US domestic law would like them. So there’s no point wishing they did. And there’s no point in arguing that the “creation” of al-Qaeda for the purpose of US legal categories means that al-Qaeda does not exist.

The documentary bases its claim that the US administration has hyped up the al-Qaeda threat because it has confused legal and strategic categories of thinking.

***

Oh, and what does all this have to do with Qutb and Strauss? Well, as I explained in the previous posts, both, especially Strauss, serve as useful tropes for the documentary’s simplistic and, frankly, Manichaean, narrative.

It’s not altogether surprising that the documentary adopts a Manichaean view of reality, while accusing Islamists and neocons of doing the same. And just as US (and Western) politicians are said to promise to protect us from our “nightmares” while simultaneously creating them, so too will leftist documentary directors do the same.

UPDATE: If you haven’t fallen asleep yet, you can read my musings on the 3rd and final part of “Nightmares”