WATCHING ADAM Curtis’s beguiling new series, The Power of Nightmares (BBC Two), is like swooning over a cover photo of a glamorous actress: you might wonder if her image has been computer-varnished, if blemishes have been airbrushed out, if she’s an assisted blonde, and you might suspect that if you met her she’d turn out to be a pain in the neck. But the sensation of being temporarily seduced is sufficiently pleasurable for you not to focus too clinically on the precise nature of the truth.

If The Power of Nightmares had been drafted as a play, it would be hailed as a dazzlingly thought-provoking drama. As a book, its thesis would become a debating point on talk shows round the world. Even in the form of a here-are-the-facts documentary, it is so artfully crafted, so engagingly argued, so playfully illustrated, that you happily reserve your questions and reservations until the final credits start rolling.

Here is a talented, intelligent film-maker enjoying himself and showing what you can do with an hour of television. It is deliciously spliced together, seasoned with deftly chosen archive footage from an improbale palette of sources: everything from clips from episodes of Perry Mason and Gunsmoke, to American prom dances and Egyptian television commercials.

By painting a portrait of a paranoid America — a country constantly seeking new enemies to justify its muscle-flexing around the world — Curtis’s film offers a sanctuary to those who have grown suspicious of Washington’s geo-political motives, but who find Michael Moore too smug, and too ready to ignore any nuisance facts that put a crease in his anti-Bush invective. In tandem with this, Curtis paints Islamic fundamentalists as extremists so corrupted by their own purist vision that they have successfully persuaded themselves that even killing Muslims (the wrong sort of Muslims, obviously; liberal, democracy-loving ones) is doing Allah’s work.

Curtis’s argument is so neatly structured that you don’t want anything to threaten its symmetry. It goes like this: Washington’s neoconservatives, who had President Reagan’s ear and now have George W. Bush’s, start scouring the world for a new ideologically flawed, power-hungry bogeyman following the demise of the Soviet bear; and they find an ally for their despair of incontinent liberalism in America’s Christian fundamentalists. At the very same time, various Islamic fundamentalists, repulsed by Egypt’s slide into secularism, resolve to restore Islam to its rightful place as the religious, political and cultural backbone of the Middle East.

You want irony? Try this: Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian schools’ inspector whose ideas fed the minds of those who flew the planes on 9/11, even developed his revulsion for liberal laxity while living as a young man in America. That’s to say, he was reacting to the same liberal laxity that shaped the thinking of neoconservatism’s intellectual godfather, the American political philosopher, Leo Strauss. This parallel quest for moral certainties results in two enemies, born of the same anti-liberal womb, becoming the new Cain and Abel of world politics.

Curtis’s central arguments seem to be that whereas politicians once earned office by promising to make life better, today’s politicians retain power by promising to protect voters from the menacing nightmares that prowl the world looking for easy prey; also that these nightmares are largely fictions confected by politicians to secure their legitimacy and to keep the public under their thumb — fictions that stretch all the way from the former Soviet Union having its finger in every terrorist pie from the PLO to Bader-Meinhof, to al-Qaeda today being a force capable of bringing the West to its knees even though, in Curtis’s view, it lacks the network needed to orchestrate such a logistically demanding ambition.

Moreover, it suits both sides to fuel the myth: it makes al-Qaeda look more powerful than it is, and turns Bush into Superman, roaming the world to save decent-minded people in danger. So far, Curtis doesn’t linger too long on just how 9/11, or the various atrocities and barbarities committed around the world, from Bali to Madrid, in the name of alQaeda fit in to this picture of the fanatic Islamist threat being a largely amateur, largely toothless one. Nor on the fact that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.

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