[mpweiher]

That's a good summary of the introduction, but the real stuff is a lot more fun (and awful):

Curtis traces two failed socio-political movements, the US neocons and the islamic jihadists, who both have similar and similarly idiotic ideologies. The reason they failed is that they relied on the masses adopting their idiotic ideologies, but the masses simply saw no reason to do that.

Then they found each other, and the rest is history. Each movement could use a grotesquely distorted and magnified projection of the other to justify its existence and power, the power of the nightmare represented by The Other.

Each bit (the idiocy, the similarities, the parallel failures, early practice with projections, the finding each other, the magnified projection etc.) is fleshed out in great detail.