Adam Curtis: For 10 years, Osama bin Laden filled a gap left by the Soviet Union. Who will be the baddie now?

Adam Curtis is an award-winning documentary maker at the BBC. His films include the Power of Nightmares about the parallel between the rise of Islamism in the Arab world and neoconservatism in the United States.

The horrific thing about Osama bin Laden was that he helped to kill thousands of innocent people throughout the world. But he was also in a strange way a godsend to the west. He simplified the world. When communism collapsed in 1989, the big story that had been hardwired into citizens of western countries – that of the global battle against a distant dark and evil force – came to an abrupt end. Understanding the world became much more complicated until, amid the confusion of a global economic crisis in 1998 and the hysterical spectacle of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Bin Laden emerged as the mastermind behind the bombings of embassies in east Africa.

President Clinton immediately seized on it. He fired off cruise missiles, they missed, and everyone accused Clinton of using Bin Laden to take the heat off himself. But if you look back at some of the pieces television reporters did that day in Washington, you can see something else too: the murky shape of an old story slowly re-emerging, like a wreck rising up from the sea.

Bin Laden and his ideological mentor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, talked about "the near enemy" and the "far enemy". But from 2001 onwards they became America's "far enemy". Neoconservative politicians, who had last tasted real power under President Reagan during the cold war, took the few known facts about Bin Laden and Zawahiri and fitted them to the template they knew so well: an evil enemy with sleeper cells and "tentacles" throughout the world, whose sole aim was the destruction of western civilisation. Al-Qaida became the new Soviet Union, and in the process Bin Laden became a demonic, terrifyingly powerful figure brooding in a cave while he controlled and directed the al-Qaida network throughout the world. In this way, a serious but manageable terrorist threat became grossly exaggerated...