Television - Is the threat of al-Qaeda just a convenient myth? By Andrew Billen The Power of Nightmares (BBC2)

What if the nightmare of global terrorism were a daymare dreamt up by politicians to keep us voting for them? It is a dangerous contention. If you call the terrorist threat exaggerated, the example of Madrid makes you look foolish. But terrorism's physical, if not psychological, impact is certainly exaggerated. An article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs examines the US State Department's global terrorism report of 2003. The report under-reported the number of terrorist attacks but, the article noted, even the corrected data puts the threat in perspective. In 2003, 625 people - including 34 Americans - were killed by international terrorists, while 43,220 died in car accidents in the US and three million worldwide of Aids. Have we declared war against the wrong menace?

In his dazzling new three-part series (Wednesdays, 9pm), Adam Curtis, who previously brought us The Century of Self, goes much further. He asserts that we are fighting a largely imaginary war on terror for the sake of two formerly discredited groups of politicians: America's neoconservatives and the Middle East's radical Islamists. His argument builds towards the conclusion that al-Qaeda - so far as Curtis accepts it exists - and the neo-cons not only deserve each other, but need each other to survive, both movements having, until 9/11, swum so long and to so little avail against the tide of western liberalism.

The story of the Islamists, as he calls them, begins in 1949, when a schools in-spector from Egypt, Sayyid Qutb, makes a visit to Colorado. He returns from Truman's America shocked by its selfishness, vulgarity and materialism. Predicting a breakdown in communal morality in the west, he also perceives (correctly) a threat to the hegemony of Islamic law in his region. Qutb comes to believe that Egypt's rulers are now so corrupt that they are no longer true Muslims, and he is executed for treason by Nasser in 1966. By then, however, he has spawned a succession of still more fanatical disciples, the most famous being Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden. The year 1998 finds the pair in full retreat in Afghanistan, their campaigns of regional terror having failed to shift a single country towards Islamic fundamentalism. They announce a desperate new strategy: attack the Great Satan America itself.

But if we imagine that fanaticism is born exclusively of crackpots in a sandstorm (as Jonathan Miller, in his Brief History of Disbelief on BBC 4, described the origins of the three great religions), we would be wrong. In 1940s Chicago, the mysterious academic Leo Strauss is filling students such as Francis Fukuyama and Paul Wolfowitz with rubbish about how individual liberty will destroy American cohesion. His solution is that the elite must create a sustaining myth for the masses.

The neoconservatives, as his followers became known, first gain office under Gerald Ford in the 1970s. A clip of a young Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, shows him warning: "The Soviets have been busy." In fact, as the CIA reports, they had not been, but the scaremongering continues through Ronald Reagan's Eighties until the Soviet Union implodes, thus shooting the neo-cons' fox. Desperate for a new nightmare, they form an alliance with the Christian right to convince the American people that the enemy within is their libido. But even with Bill Clinton as an exemplar, the majority get on with partaking of the fruits of the sexual revolution.

By 2001, both Islamists and neo-cons find themselves at the wrong end of history's barrel. On 11 September, however, comes deliverance. A group of fanatics inspired by, but not connected to, Bin Laden gives the neo-cons the enemy they so needed. Bush announces: "Al-Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime." But neither in the US nor Britain has there been any evidence of a worldwide al-Qaeda organisation, of a global network or of local "sleeper cells". Indeed, Bin Laden never used the phrase "al-Qaeda" until after 9/11, when America insisted that he led it. As for the terrorists' sneaky weaponry, Curtis supplies experts to say that the radiation from a dirty bomb let off in Trafalgar Square would kill no one.

I was reminded of Peter Beaumont's observation in the Observer that al-Qaeda is like the punk movement in the Seventies: anyone who stuck a safety pin through their nose could claim to belong. Yet some objections followed that thought: Islamic terrorism does not need to be a network to be deadly; there may be no WMDs in terrorist hands, but look what they did with aeroplanes; and can Curtis be sure that all politicians act from the same motive?

But this is a beautifully made documentary, with each step of the argument substantiated by witnesses and archive footage, and then wittily reinforced by imagery from nutty old films - genies coming out of bottles, westerners riding across sand dunes, a Russian girl coming towards the camera bearing the gift of a cake - that acts almost subliminally on our imaginations. It is narrated by a wonderfully cynical and doomily authoritative voice, a parody of Orwell's (rather than Endemol's) Big Brother. It belongs to Curtis himself. Me, I can't get enough of it.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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