Politics of ' Fear over Vision" explored on British television.(good)

[MissMarple]

Hmmm....Curiouser and curiouser. Reference to neo-Straussians or neocons is really weird.

http://csmonitor.com/2004/1018/dailyUpdate.html

"New documentary series says danger from Al Qaeda is 'dramatically overstated.'

by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com


It seems that the United States is not the only country with a high profile filmmaker ready to take on the question of the official response to terrorism. The Guardian reported Sunday that documentarian Adam Curtis (who has been called by media critics "the most acclaimed maker of serious television programs in Britain") attacked British television, including the BBC, for its "obsession" with Islamic terrorism. Mr. Curtis says that British TV has done nothing to "dispel myths surrounding Al Qaeda and is too willing to take the government line on the 'high' level of the threat.
.....

"Knowing that the Bush administration is full of neo-Straussians – including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz – I guessed half the pay-off but not the rest, which is that Qutb's views became a leading influence on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Therefore, as Curtis presents it, "the war on terror" is being fought between a government and an organization rooted in a similar hatred of liberal pluralism, who both encourage support by raising fears of invasion and immigration.
.....

'The grand concept of the war has not succeeded,' says Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute. 'In purely military terms, it has been an inconclusive war ... a rather haphazard operation. Al Qaeda managed the most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the way that we rather cavalierly stick the name Al Qaeda on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it.'
.....
'Much of the rhetoric from Washington appeared to depict Saddam's regime as something separate from Iraqi society,' said Dr. Dodge . 'All you had to do was remove him and the 60 bad men around him. What we wanted to get across was that over 35 years the regime had embedded itself into Iraqi society, broken it down and totally transformed it. We would be going into a vacuum, where there were no allies to be found, except possibly for the Kurds. We were saying: "Be prepared to spend a great deal of time and money. This could take a generation." '
The six men told the Independent that they were "staggered" by Blair's "apparent naivety" of the consequences of going to war. Ultimately what struck the men about the meeting was the "lack of response" to their presentation. "You sensed they were heading into a war they couldn't avoid," said one. "Although we were sitting at the cabinet table, the decisions were being taken on the other side of the Atlantic."

[whistle]

1. Uhmmm, why weren't these people staggered six months ago?

....Makes for good theatre now, but how will this help the election here and in UK.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Why do you find the reference 'really weird'?

It's a basic description of much of the Bush team, and widely known.

[MissMarple]

3. I was obscure. These guys are nastier than I thought.

I've never read much about Strauss, but, apparently, he thinks philosophy is dangerous and that he discovered the real Plato.
If you click on Strauss in the article you get this very interesting piece from the International Herald Tribune:

This is from the third thru fifth pages. http://www.iht.com/articles/96307.html

"The ostensibly hidden truth is that expediency works; there is no certain God to punish wrongdoing; and virtue is unattainable by most people. Machiavelli was right. There is a natural hierarchy of humans, and rulers must restrict free inquiry and exploit the mediocrity and vice of ordinary people so as to keep society in order.
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This is obviously a bleak and anti-utopian philosophy that goes against practically everything Americans want to believe. It contradicts the conventional wisdom of modern democratic society. It also contradicts the neoconservatives' own declared policy ambitions to make the Muslim world democratic and establish a new U.S.-led international order, which are blatantly utopian.
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Strauss, who died in 1973, was no friend of hegemony, American or otherwise. He said that "no human being and no group of human beings can rule the whole of the human race justly." His concern during the Cold War was that Soviet universalism invited an alternative American claim to world rule.
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His real appeal to the neoconservatives, in my view, is that his elitism presents a principled rationalization for policy expediency, and for "necessary lies" told to those whom the truth would demoralize."