Fear and Loathing in modern global history

I just finished watching part two of a three-part documentary on BBC2 called The Power of Nightmares. It is about phantom enemies, extremism, idealism and fantasy futures fueled by imagined triumphs. My own unfulfillable fantasy is that this show could be screened on American television. Somehow, I doubt that that will ever happen, and that is very depressing. This show is a masterpiece of subtle analysis and adroit connecting of the seemingly random dots in the news stories of the last decade. Watching it, I was overwhelmed by a cascade of "aha!" moments, as bits of knowledge were imparted that comprised missing pieces of the moral puzzles of modern life. I got answers (or at least possible answers) to such questions as: What was the real purpose of the Clinton wars? (Not its avowed purpose.) What is going on inside the world of Islamic political philosophy? (A lot more than you'd ever guess from watching the western media.) Is there any hidden meaning to some of the terrible violence that happens in the middle east? (Yes, but not really hidden, just ignored due to some clever misdirection.) Who really won the Cold War? (It wasn't really a war, and nobody won anything. A rotten government collapsed, and thus some other people were able to change their governments for better ones, but that's part of the cycle of history and was more due to the "cold warriors" looking temporarily in another direction.) Who is John Galt? (Apparently he is this creepily insightful guy named Leo Strauss.)

I will probably have more to say on this later. This was one of those things (films, books, programs) that makes you think, and all the things you think don't come to you at first, but over days and weeks of slow rumination. If I can find the time, I need to do some research on the two prime movers behind today's ascendancy of nightmare: America's neo-cons and Arabia's extremist Islamists. It seems I know a lot less about these guys than I thought I did.