America has spoken. It wants four more years of the same. The neocons, known as "crazies" in the administrations of Reagan and Bush the elder, have been vindicated. Against all odds they have achieved their long-held agenda with the help of their partners in the religious right. What is that agenda and how similar is it to that of the militant Islamic fundamentalist movement?
An incredible BBC-2 three-part documentary entitled "The Power of Nightmares" fits the jigsaw together and a frightening picture emerges. It puts forward the premise that both international terrorists, and neocons, such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and William Kristol, share a common enemy - liberalism and the societal rot, they believe, inevitably follows in its wake.
The series traces the beginning of the ideology behind the Muslim Brotherhood (the Iqwan Muslimin), which transformed a mild-mannered doctor of aristocratic lineage Ayman Al-Zawahiri into the face of terror as Osama Bin Laden's spiritual mentor.
It starts with a visit by the influential Egyptian writer and teacher Sayyid Qutb to Colorado in 1949. The America he found wasn't to his liking. Indeed, he condemned it as a place without a soul where selfish individualism and greed for material possessions had trumped the good of the community. He was angered by the racism he encountered, the treatment of African Americans and repelled by churches, describing them as "entertainment centers..."
After fending off the advances of an inebriated American woman aboard a ship, Qutb concluded that while Americans believed they were free, they were regressing to an age of barbarity. So outraged was he that he vowed to fight the spread of this liberal disease to the shores of his own country.
Upon his return home, the Muslim Brotherhood was born. Qutb's fledgling belief that the adoption of Islamic law could ultimately save Egypt from cultural, spiritual and political decadence inspired the poor and disenfranchised.
Qutb was tortured and executed in 1966 for his anti-government activities. By that time, his message had deeply affected Ayman Al-Zawahiri, then a schoolboy, inspiring the latter to set up his own like-minded group.
As an adult Al-Zawahiri was jailed as a co-conspirator in the assassination of Anwar Sadat, considered by the Iqwan as too close to America. It was during Al-Zawahiri's incarceration that he conceived a plan to change the face of the Middle East armed with the book and the sword.
Back in the USA, the fledgling neocon movement had its own intellectual guru in the philosopher and university Prof. Leo Strauss, a Jewish-born atheist, who, nevertheless, believed that religion is necessary to control populations. Like Qutb, Strauss decried the liberal movement believing it would ultimately weaken and destroy the society. Strauss held the view that true knowledge and power should be in the hands of the intellectual elite and that it was perfectly all right to feed the masses a series of lies for their ultimate benefit.
William Pfaff writing in the International Herald Tribune says of Strauss: "He saw the United States as the most advanced case of liberalism and thus the most exposed to nihilism."
In August 2003, Irving Kristol, generally considered the father of neoconservatism, explained the new bond between neocons and traditional conservatives as well as the religious right in the "Weekly Standard": "The steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity, does unite neocons with traditional conservatives - though not with those libertarian conservatives who are conservative in economics but unmindful of culture.
"The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. They are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government's attention. And since the Republican Party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power..."
So while Ayman Al-Zawahiri and his lieutenants in Afghanistan (known as the Arab Afghans) were mobilizing Muslims to cleanse their societies from the scourge of imported liberalism as well as foreign occupiers, the ideological sons of Strauss and Kristol, using the language of the religious, were fomenting a plan to fundamentally change, not only the essence of America, but also the world.
To this end, the masses - whether Arabs or Americans - needed to be infused with a new sense of purpose and unity before they could be driven in the "right" direction. In a way, the attacks on Sept. 11, gave both sides the impetus to consolidate their bases.
Since, like a tango-dancing couple, both extremes have edged the world nearer and nearer to the precipice of Armageddon, their followers led along like lethargic sheep to the well of crafted mendacity.
This absolutely must-see BBC documentary suggests that the US government and others have deliberately hyped the threat of terrorism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, democracy has had no major enemy.
Without an enemy there can be no fear and without rampant fear in the populace, patriotism and the will to conquer is diluted. And so enter Bin Laden and his not so merry ragtag band providing the perfect pretext for America to wage endless wars in the name of democracy's spread.
Although many believe the neocons genuinely perceive US hegemony as a force for good, liberal journalist John Flynn elucidated a more skeptical - and, perhaps, more insightful - viewpoint. In 1944, he wrote: "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rape and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." Is that the bottom line? You decide.
- Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback at [email protected]
