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Crusade:
Chronicles of an Unjust War
by James Carroll
From Crusade: In the Gothic splendor
of the National Cathedral, three days after
the events of September 11, George W. Bush
made the most stirring-and ominous-declaration
of his presidency. "Americans do not yet
have the distance of history," he said,
"but our responsibility to history is
already clear: to answer these attacks and
rid the world of evil."
Most Americans, perhaps, heard the statement
as mere rhetoric of the high pulpit, but as
the "distance of history" lengthens,
we can see that with that declaration the President
redefined his raison d'etre and that of the
nation-nothing less than to "rid the world
of evil." The initiatives taken by Washington
in the last two years are incomprehensible
except in the context of this objective. Clearly
President Bush meant exactly what he said.
Something entirely new, for America at least,
is animating its government. The greatest power
the earth has ever known is now expressly mobilized
against the world's most ancient mystery. What
human beings have never before been able to
do, George W. Bush has taken on as his personal
mission, and he aims to accomplish it in one
election cycle, two at most.
Book Description
A devastating indictment of the Bush administration's
war policies from the bestselling author and
respected moral authority
With the words "this Crusade, this war on
terror," George W. Bush defined the purpose
of his presidency. And just as promptly, James
Carroll-Boston Globe columnist, son of a general,
former antiwar chaplain and activist, and recognized
voice of ethical authority-began a week-by-week
argument with the administration over its actions.
In powerful, passionate bulletins, Carroll
dissected the President's exploitation of the
nation's fears, invocations of a Christian
mission, and efforts to overturn America's
traditional relations-with other nations and
its own citizens.
Crusade, the collection of Carroll's searing
columns, offers a comprehensive and tough-minded
critique of the war on terror. From Carroll's
first rejection of "war" as the proper
response to Osama bin Laden, to his prescient
verdict of failure in Iraq, to his never-before-published
analysis of the faith-based roots of current
U.S. policies, this volume displays his rare
insight and scope. Combining clear moral consciousness,
an acute sense of history, and a real-world
grasp of the unforgiving demands of politics,
Crusade is a compelling call for the rescue
of America's noblest traditions.
A cry from the heart, a record of protest, and
a permanently relevant analysis, Carroll's
work confronts the Bush era and measures it
against what America was meant to be.
James
Carroll was born in Chicago in 1943 and raised
in Washington, D.C., where his father was an
Air Force general and the director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency. He was educated at Washingtons
Priory School and at an American high school
in Wiesbaden, Germany. He attended Georgetown
University before entering St. Pauls
College, the Paulist Fathers seminary,
where he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees.
Carroll has been a civil rights worker, an
antiwar activist, and a community organizer
in Washington and New York. He was ordained
to the priesthood in 1969. Carroll served as
Catholic chaplain at Boston University from
1969 to 1974. During that time, he studied
poetry with George Starbuck and published books
on religious subjects and a book of poems.
He was also a columnist for the National Catholic
Reporter (1972-1975) and was named Best Columnist
by the Catholic Press Association. For his
writing on religion and politics he received
the first Thomas Merton Award from Pittsburghs
Thomas Merton Center in 1972. Carroll left
the priesthood to become a writer, and in 1974
was a playwright-in-residence at the Berkshire
Theater Festival. His plays have been produced
at the BTF and at Bostons Next Move Theater.
In 1976 he published his first novel, MADONNA
RED, which was followed by--among others--MORTAL
FRIENDS (1978), PRINCE OF PEACE (1984), and
MEMORIAL BRIDGE (1991). THE CITY BELOW (1994)
is now available in a Houghton Mifflin trade-paperback
edition. He has written for numerous publications,
including THE NEW YORKER, and his op-ed column
appears weekly in the BOSTON GLOBE. He won
a National Book Award for AN AMERICAN REQUIEM.
James Carroll lives in Boston with his wife,
the novelist Alexandra Marshall, and their
two children.
Order
the book
The following excerpt from TOM'S
DISPATCH was written by Tom Engelhardt.
James
Carroll on Bush's war
To my mind, Boston Globe columnist James Carroll,
along with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman,
has consistently been the strongest voice in
the op-ed page media mainstream of our country.
In his first post-9/11 column, aptly titled
"Law not War," Carroll promptly asked
whether "the launching of war [is] really
the only way to demonstrate our love for America?"
In his column last March on the first anniversary
of the invasion of Iraq, he wrote, "Whatever
happens from this week forward in Iraq, the
main outcome of the war, for the United States,
is clear. We have defeated ourselves."
These two columns are the bookends of his remarkable,
just published record of Bush's war -- Crusade,
Chronicles of an Unjust War (Metropolitan Books,
2004). In that very first essay, written on
September 15, 2001, he concluded: "How
we respond to this catastrophe will define
our patriotism, shape the century, and memorialize
our beloved dead." How painfully prophetic
that sentence has proved.
Below is a shortened version of Crusade's introduction
(which will appear in print in the new issue
of the Nation magazine). A deeply moral voice,
Carroll picks up on a presidential slip of
the tongue, the sort that reveals a basic truth
-- George Bush's single use of the word "crusade."
Carroll, the author of a bestselling history
of Catholic anti-Semitism, Constantine's Sword,
has a powerful understanding of the roots of
religious conflict. From Bush's slip to Mel
Gibson's Passion, he takes us places we need
to go by routes we might not think to take
ourselves. He has been on leave from the Globe
and returns to its pages this Tuesday. Read
the essay that follows, but don't miss the
book. It's a powerful tale of loss. Tom
The Bush
Crusade
By James Carroll
At the turn of the millennium, the world was
braced for terrible things. Most "rational"
worries were tied to an anticipated computer
glitch, the Y2K problem, and even the most
scientifically oriented of people seemed temporarily
at the mercy of powerful mythic forces. Imagined
hobgoblins leapt from hard drives directly
into nightmares. Airlines canceled flights
scheduled for the first day of the new year,
citing fears that the computers for the traffic-control
system would not work. The calendar as such
had not previously been a source of dread,
but all at once, time itself held a new danger.
As the year 2000 approached, I bought bottled
water and extra cans of tuna fish. I even withdrew
a large amount of cash from the bank. Friends
mocked me, then admitted to having done similar
things. There were no dances-of-death or outbreaks
of flagellant cults, but a millennial fever
worthy of medieval superstition infected the
most secular of cultures. Of course, the mystical
date came and went, the computers did fine,
airplanes flew and the world went back to normal.
Then came September 11, 2001, the millennial
catastrophe--just a little late. Airplanes
fell from the sky, thousands died and an entirely
new kind of horror gripped the human imagination.
Time, too, played its role, but time as warped
by television, which created a global simultaneity,
turning the whole human race into a witness,
as the awful events were endlessly replayed,
as if those bodies leaping from the Twin Towers
would never hit the ground. Nightmare in broad
daylight. New York's World Trade Center collapsed
not just onto the surrounding streets but into
the hearts of every person with access to CNN.
Hundreds of millions of people instinctively
reached out to those they loved, grateful to
be alive. Death had shown itself in a new way.
But if a vast throng experienced the terrible
events of 9/11 as one, only one man, the President
of the United States, bore a unique responsibility
for finding a way to respond to them.
George W. Bush plumbed the deepest place in himself,
looking for a simple expression of what the
assaults of September 11 required. It was his
role to lead the nation, and the very world.
The President, at a moment of crisis, defines
the communal response. A few days after the
assault, George W. Bush did this. Speaking
spontaneously, without the aid of advisers
or speechwriters, he put a word on the new
American purpose that both shaped it and gave
it meaning. "This crusade," he said,
"this war on terrorism."
Crusade. I remember a momentary feeling of vertigo
at the President's use of that word, the outrageous
ineptitude of it. The vertigo lifted, and what
I felt then was fear, sensing not ineptitude
but exactitude. My thoughts went to the elusive
Osama bin Laden, how pleased he must have been,
Bush already reading from his script. I am
a Roman Catholic with a feeling for history,
and strong regrets, therefore, over what went
wrong in my own tradition once the Crusades
were launched. Contrary to schoolboy romances,
Hollywood fantasies and the nostalgia of royalty,
the Crusades were a set of world-historic crimes.
I hear the word with a third ear, alert to
its dangers, and I see through its legends
to its warnings. For example, in Iraq "insurgents"
have lately shocked the world by decapitating
hostages, turning the most taboo of acts into
a military tactic. But a thousand years ago,
Latin crusaders used the severed heads of Muslim
fighters as missiles, catapulting them over
the fortified walls of cities under siege.
Taboos fall in total war, whether crusade or
jihad.
For George W. Bush, crusade was an offhand reference.
But all the more powerfully for that, it was
an accidental probing of unintended but nevertheless
real meaning. That the President used the word
inadvertently suggests how it expressed his
exact truth, an unmasking of his most deeply
felt purpose. Crusade, he said. Later, his
embarrassed aides suggested that he had meant
to use the word only as a synonym for struggle,
but Bush's own syntax belied that. He defined
crusade as war. Even offhandedly, he had said
exactly what he meant.
Osama bin Laden was already understood to be
trying to spark a "clash of civilizations"
that would set the West against the whole House
of Islam. After 9/11, agitated voices on all
sides insisted that no such clash was inevitable.
But crusade was a match for jihad, and such
words threatened nothing less than apocalyptic
conflict between irreconcilable cultures. Indeed,
the President's reference flashed through the
Arab news media. Its resonance went deeper,
even, than the embarrassed aides expected--and
not only among Muslims. After all, the word
refers to a long series of military campaigns,
which, taken together, were the defining event
in the shaping of what we call Western civilization.
A coherent set of political, economic, social
and even mythological traditions of the Eurasian
continent, from the British Isles to the far
side of Arabia, grew out of the transformations
wrought by the Crusades. And it is far from
incidental still, both that those campaigns
were conducted by Christians against Muslims,
and that they, too, were attached to the irrationalities
of millennial fever.
If the American President was the person carrying
the main burden of shaping a response to the
catastrophe of September 11, his predecessor
in such a grave role, nearly a thousand years
earlier, was the Catholic pope. Seeking to
overcome the century-long dislocations of a
postmillennial Christendom, he rallied both
its leaders and commoners with a rousing call
to holy war. Muslims were the infidel people
who had taken the Holy Land hundreds of years
before. Now, that occupation was defined as
an intolerable blasphemy. The Holy Land must
be redeemed. Within months of the pope's call,
100,000 people had "taken the cross"
to reclaim the Holy Land for Christ. As a proportion
of the population of Europe, a comparable movement
today would involve more than a million people,
dropping everything to go to war.
In the name of Jesus, and certain of God's blessing,
crusaders launched what might be called "shock
and awe" attacks everywhere they went.
In Jerusalem they savagely slaughtered Muslims
and Jews alike--practically the whole city.
Eventually, Latin crusaders would turn on Eastern
Christians, and then on Christian heretics,
as blood lust outran the initial "holy"
impulse. That trail of violence scars the earth
and human memory even to this day--especially
in the places where the crusaders wreaked their
havoc. And the mental map of the Crusades,
with Jerusalem at the center of the earth,
still defines world politics. But the main
point, in relation to Bush's instinctive response
to 9/11, is that those religious invasions
and wars of long ago established a cohesive
Western identity precisely in opposition to
Islam, an opposition that survives to this
day.
With the Crusades, the violent theology of the
killer God came into its own. To save the world,
in this understanding, God willed the violent
death of God's only beloved son. Here is the
relevance of that mental map, for the crusaders
were going to war to rescue the site of the
salvific death of Jesus, and they displayed
their devotion to the cross on which Jesus
died by wearing it on their breasts. When Bush's
remark was translated into Arabic for broadcast
throughout the Middle East, the word "crusade"
was rendered as "war of the cross."
Before the Crusades, Christian theology had given
central emphasis to the resurrection of Jesus,
and to the idea of incarnation itself, but
with the war of the cross, the bloody crucifixion
began to dominate the Latin Christian imagination.
A theology narrowly focused on the brutal death
of Jesus reinforced the primitive notion that
violence can be a sacred act. The cult of martyrdom,
even to the point of suicidal valor, was institutionalized
in the Crusades, and it is not incidental to
the events of 9/11 that a culture of sacred
self-destruction took equally firm hold among
Muslims. The suicide-murderers of the World
Trade Center, like the suicide-bombers from
the West Bank and Gaza, exploit a perverse
link between the willingness to die for a cause
and the willingness to kill for it. Crusaders,
thinking of heaven, honored that link too.
Here is the deeper significance of Bush's inadvertent
reference to the Crusades: Instead of being
a last recourse or a necessary evil, violence
was established then as the perfectly appropriate,
even chivalrous, first response to what is
wrong in the world. George W. Bush is a Christian
for whom this particular theology lives. While
he identified Jesus as his favorite "political
philosopher" when running for President
in 2000, the Jesus of this evangelical President
is not the "turn the other cheek"
one. Bush's savior is the Jesus whose cross
is wielded as a sword. George W. Bush, having
cheerfully accepted responsibility for the
executions of 152 death-row inmates in Texas,
had already shown himself to be entirely at
home with divinely sanctioned violence. After
9/11, no wonder it defined his deepest urge.
But sacred violence, once unleashed in 1096,
as in 2001, had a momentum of its own. The
urgent purpose of war against the "enemy
outside"--what some today call the "clash
of civilizations"--led quickly to the
discovery of an "enemy inside." The
crusaders, en route from northwestern Europe
to attack the infidel far away, first fell
upon, as they said, "the infidel near
at hand"--Jews. For the first time in
Europe, large numbers of Jews were murdered
for being Jews. A crucifixion-obsessed theology
saw God as willing the death of Jesus, but
in the bifurcated evangelical imagination,
Jews could be blamed for it, and the offense
the crusaders took was mortal.
The same dynamic--war against an enemy outside
leading to war against an enemy inside--can
be seen at work today. It is a more complex
dynamic now, with immigrant Muslims and people
of Arabic descent coming under heavy pressure
in the West. In Europe, Muslims are routinely
demonized. In America, they are "profiled,"
even to the point of being deprived of basic
rights. But at the same time, once again, Jews
are targeted. The broad resurgence of anti-Semitism,
and the tendency to scapegoat Israel as the
primary source of the new discord, reflect
an old tidal pull. This is true notwithstanding
the harsh fact that Ariel Sharon's government
took up the Bush "dead or alive"
credo with enthusiasm and used the "war
on terrorism" to fuel self-defeating overreactions
to Palestinian provocations. But some of Israel's
critics fall into the old pattern of measuring
Jews against standards to which no one else
is held, not even our President. That the war
on terrorism is the context within which violence
in Israel and Jerusalem has intensified should
be no surprise. It wasn't "Israel"
then, but conflict over Jerusalem played exactly
such a flashpoint role a thousand years ago.
The Crusades proved to have other destructive
dynamics as well. The medieval war against
Islam, having also targeted Europe's Jews,
soon enough became a war against all forms
of cultural and religious dissent, a war against
heresy. As it hadn't been in hundreds of years,
doctrine now became rigidly defined in the
Latin West, and those who did not affirm dominant
interpretations -- Cathars, Albigensians, Eastern
Orthodox -- were attacked. Doctrinal uniformity,
too, could be enforced with sacred violence.
When the US Attorney General defines criticism
of the Administration in wartime as treason,
or when Congress enacts legislation that justifies
the erosion of civil liberties with appeals
to patriotism, they are enacting a Crusades
script.
All of this is implicit in the word that President
Bush first used, which came to him as naturally
as a baseball reference, to define the war
on terrorism. That such a dark, seething religious
history of sacred violence remains largely
unspoken in our world does not defuse it as
an explosive force in the human unconscious.
In the world of Islam, of course, its meaning
could not be more explicit, or closer to consciousness.
The full historical and cultural significance
of "crusade" is instantly obvious,
which is why a howl of protest from the Middle
East drove Bush into instant verbal retreat.
Yet the very inadvertence of his use of the
word is the revelation: Americans do not know
what fire they are playing with. Osama bin
Laden, however, knows all too well, and in
his periodic pronouncements, he uses the word
"crusade" to this day, as a flamethrower.
Religious war is the danger here, and it is a
graver one than Americans think. Despite our
much-vaunted separation of church and state,
America has always had a quasi-religious understanding
of itself, reflected in the messianism of Puritan
founder John Winthrop, the Deist optimism of
Thomas Jefferson, the embrace of redemptive
suffering that marked Abraham Lincoln and,
for that matter, the conviction of Eisenhower's
Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, that
Communism had to be opposed on a global scale
if only because of its atheism. But never before
has America been brought deeper into a dynamite-wired
holy of holies than in our President's war
on terrorism. Despite the post-Iraq toning
down of Washington's rhetoric of empire, and
the rejection of further crusader references
-- although Secretary of State Colin Powell
used the word this past March -- Bush's war
openly remains a cosmic battle between nothing
less than the transcendent forces of good and
evil. Such a battle is necessarily unlimited
and open-ended, and so justifies radical actions--the
abandonment, for example, of established notions
of civic justice at home and of traditional
alliances abroad.
A cosmic moral-religious battle justifies, equally,
risks of world-historic proportioned disaster,
since the ultimate outcome of such a conflict
is to be measured not by actual consequences
on this earth but by the earth-transcending
will of God. Our war on terrorism, before it
is anything else, is thus an imagined conflict,
taking place primarily in a mythic realm beyond
history.
In waging such a "war," the enemy is
to be engaged everywhere and nowhere, not just
because the actual nihilists who threaten the
social order are faceless and deracinated but
because each fanatical suicide-bomber is only
an instance of the transcendent enemy--and
so the other face of us. Each terrorist is,
in effect, a sacrament of the larger reality,
which is "terrorism." Instead of
perceiving unconnected centers of inhuman violence--tribal
warlords, Mafia chieftains, nationalist fighters,
xenophobic Luddites--President Bush projects
the grandest and most interlocking strategies
of conspiracy, belief and organization. By
the canonization of the war on terrorism, petty
nihilists are elevated to the status of world-historic
warriors, exactly the fate they might have
wished for. This is why the conflict readily
bleeds from one locus to another--Afghanistan
then, Iraq now, Iran or some other land of
evil soon--and why, for that matter, the targeted
enemies are entirely interchangeable -- here
Osama bin Laden, there Saddam Hussein, here
the leader of Iran, there of North Korea. They
are all essentially one enemy -- one "axis"
-- despite their differences from one another,
or even hatred of one another.
Hard-boiled men and women who may not share Bush's
fervent spirituality can nonetheless support
his purpose because, undergirding the new ideology,
there is an authentic global crisis that requires
an urgent response. New technologies are now
making it possible for small groups of nihilists,
or even single individuals, to wreak havoc
on a scale unprecedented in history. This is
the ultimate "asymmetric threat."
The attacks of 9/11, amplified by the murderous
echo of the anthrax mailer, the as-yet-unapprehended
psychopath who sent deadly letters to journalists
and government officials in the weeks after
9/11, put that new condition on display for
all the world to see. Innovations in physics,
biology, chemistry and information technology--and
soon, possibly, in nanotechnology and genetic
engineering--have had the unforeseen effect
of threatening to put in a few hands the destructive
power that, in former times, could be exercised
only by sizable armies. This is the real condition
to which the Bush Administration is responding.
The problem is actual, if not yet fully present.
So, to put the best face on the Bush agenda (leaving
aside questions of oil, global market control
and economic or military hegemony), a humane
project of antiproliferation can be seen at
its core. Yet a nation that was trying to promote
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,
especially nuclear weapons, would behave precisely
as the Bush Administration has behaved over
the past three years. The Pentagon's chest-thumping
concept of "full spectrum dominance"
itself motivates other nations to seek sources
of countervailing power, and when the United
States actually goes to war to impose its widely
disputed notion of order on some states, but
not others, nations -- friendly as well as
unfriendly -- find themselves with an urgent
reason to acquire some means of deterring such
intervention.
The odd and tragic thing is that the world before
Bush was actually nearing consensus on how
to manage the problem of the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction, and had begun
to put in place promising structures designed
to prevent such spread. Centrally embodied
in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968,
which had successfully and amazingly kept the
number of nuclear powers, actual as well as
admitted, relatively low, that consensus gave
primacy to treaty obligations, international
cooperation and a serious commitment by existing
nuclear powers to move toward ultimate nuclear
abolition. All of that has been trashed by
Bush. "International law?" he smirked
in December 2003. "I better call my lawyer."
Now indications are that nations all over the
globe -- Japan, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Brazil,
Australia -- have begun re-evaluating their
rejections of nukes, and some are positively
rushing to acquire them. Iran and North Korea
are likely to be only the tip of this radioactive
iceberg. Nuclear-armed Pakistan and India are
a grim forecast of the future on every continent.
And the Bush Administration -- by declaring
its own nuclear arsenal permanent, by threatening
nuclear first-strikes against other nations,
by "warehousing" treaty-defused warheads
instead of destroying them, by developing a
new line of "usable" nukes, by moving
to weaponize the "high frontier"
of outer space, by doing little to help Russia
get rid of its rotting nuclear stockpile, by
embracing "preventive war" -- is
enabling this trend instead of discouraging
it. How can this be?
The problem has its roots in a long-term American
forgetfulness, going back to the acid fog in
which the United States ended World War II.
There was never a complete moral reckoning
with the harsh momentum of that conflict's
denouement -- how American leaders embraced
a strategy of terror bombing, slaughtering
whole urban populations, and how, finally,
they ushered in the atomic age with the attacks
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars have debated
those questions, but politicians have avoided
them, and most citizens have pretended they
aren't really questions at all. America's enduring
assumptions about its own moral supremacy,
its own altruism, its own exceptionalism, have
hardly been punctured by consideration of the
possibility that we, too, are capable of grave
mistakes, terrible crimes. Such awareness,
drawn from a fuller reckoning with days gone
by -- with August 6 and 9, 1945, above all
-- would inhibit America's present claim to
moral grandeur, which is simultaneously a claim,
of course, to economic and political grandiosity.
The indispensable nation must dispense with
what went before.
"The past is never dead," William Faulkner
said. "It isn't even past." How Americans
remember their country's use of terror bombing
affects how they think of terrorism; how they
remember the first use of nuclear weapons has
profound relevance for how the United States
behaves in relation to nuclear weapons today.
If the long American embrace of nuclear "mutual
assured destruction" is unexamined; if
the Pentagon's treaty-violating rejection of
the ideal of eventual nuclear abolition is
unquestioned--then the Bush Administration's
embrace of nukes as normal, usable weapons
will not seem offensive.
Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the
handmaiden of tyranny. The Bush Administration
is fully committed to maintaining what the
historian Marc Trachtenberg calls our "nuclear
amnesia" even as the Administration seeks
to impose a unilateral structure of control
on the world. As it pursues a world-threatening
campaign against other people's weapons of
mass destruction, that is, the Bush Administration
refuses to confront the moral meaning of America's
own weapons of mass destruction, not to mention
their viral character, as other nations seek
smaller versions of the American arsenal, if
only to deter Bush's next "preventive"
war. The United States' own arsenal, in other
words, remains the primordial cause of the
WMD plague.
"Memory," the novelist Paul Auster
has written, is "the space in which a
thing happens for the second time." No
one wants the terrible events that came after
the rising of the sun on September 11, 2001,
to happen for a second time except in the realm
of remembrance, leading to understanding and
commitment. But all the ways George Bush exploited
those events, betraying the memory of those
who died in them, must be lifted up and examined
again, so that the outrageousness of his political
purpose can be felt in its fullness. Exactly
how the war on terrorism unfolded; how it bled
into the wars against Afghanistan, then Iraq;
how American fears were exacerbated by Administration
alarms; how civil rights were undermined, treaties
broken, alliances abandoned, coarseness embraced--none
of this should be forgotten.
Given how they have been so dramatically unfulfilled,
Washington's initial hubristic impulses toward
a new imperial dominance should not be forgotten.
That the first purpose of the war--Osama "dead
or alive"--changed when Al Qaeda proved
elusive should not be forgotten. That the early
justification for the war against Iraq--Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction--changed when they
proved nonexistent should not be forgotten.
That in former times the US government behaved
as if facts mattered, as if evidence informed
policy, should not be forgotten. That Afghanistan
and Iraq are a shambles, with thousands dead
and hundreds of thousands at risk from disease,
disorder and despair, should not be forgotten.
That a now-disdainful world gave itself in
unbridled love to America on 9/11 should not
be forgotten.
Nor, given Bush's reference, should the most
relevant fact about the Crusades be forgotten
-- that, on their own terms and notwithstanding
the romance of history, they were, in the end,
an overwhelming failure. The 1096 campaign,
the "First Crusade," finally "succeeded"
in 1099, when a remnant army fell upon Jerusalem,
slaughtering much of its population. But armies
under Saladin reasserted Islamic control in
1187, and subsequent Crusades never succeeded
in re-establishing Latin dominance in the Holy
Land. The reconquista Crusades reclaimed Spain
and Portugal for Christian Europe, but in the
process destroyed the glorious Iberian convivencia,
a high civilization never to be matched below
the Pyrenees again.
Meanwhile, intra-Christian crusades, wars against
heresy, only made permanent the East-West split
between Latin Catholicism and "schismatic"
Eastern Orthodoxy, and made inevitable the
eventual break, in the Reformation, between
a Protestant north and a Catholic south. The
Crusades, one could argue, established basic
structures of Western civilization, while undermining
the possibility that their grandest ideals
would ever be realized.
Will such consequences--new global structures
of an American imperium, hollowed-out hopes
for a humane and just internationalism--follow
in the train of George W. Bush's crusade? This
question will be answered in smaller part by
anonymous, ad hoc armies of on-the-ground human
beings in foreign lands, many of whom will
resist Washington to the death. In larger part,
the question will be answered by those privileged
to be citizens of the United States. To us
falls the ultimate power over the American
moral and political agenda. As has never been
true of any empire before, because this one
is still a democracy, such power belongs to
citizens absolutely. If the power is ours,
so is the responsibility.
James Carroll, a columnist for the Boston Globe,
is at work on a television documentary based
on his bestselling book Constantine's Sword.
The above is adapted from the introduction
to his new book Crusade, Chronicles of an Unjust
War, a collection of his columns since September
11, 2001.
Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan
Books.
Copyright 2004 by James Carroll
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