Crusade is a dirty word
President Bush talks of a 'crusade'. It's an unhappy word. All this started eight centuries ago when renascent Europe unleashed a colonialising campaign to reclaim the holy places. Venice and France were lead culprits. And this was when 'Islam' was first invented by the west as a single entity, as the face of the other which could be demonised. The security of emergent European states was consolidated by aggression and terrorism.
The Pentagon and the World Trade Centre were American holy places now desecrated. The language of a holy league comes easily to the great power, animated by a puritan sense that the world is divided between the light and the dark, between righteousness and wickedness. And that perception lies behind the instability of America's foreign policy, the violence of its oscillation in history between extremes of isolation and intervention.
Today we suffer the consequences not just of an 800-year-old crusading tradition but also an 80-year-old effect: the joint British-American dismantling of the Ottoman empire after the first world war.
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