Embattled Underground

[rich]

 It shows how international, like personal,
complications accumulate from an interplay of fantasies constructed by
opposing sides, each sustaining the other's dream of omnipotence, each
justifying its excesses by evoking the cleverness of its opposition,
each creating that opposition and, in some mysterious and crazy way,
the moves and the successes of the other side as a provocation of its
own further actions.
____________

this is a fair description of Rumsfeld and Co.'s Committee on Present
Danger fantasy about the superiority of Soviet military forces in the
80s which was conveniently replaced by global terrorism two decades
later

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/529

also noted in Adam Curtis' Power of Nightmares