crusading then and now

Perhaps we could compare the crusades to the current middle east situation.  First crusade good, everything after that, not so good.  Desert Storm was pretty good.  Myself I didn't like it so much at the time, being a peacenik, but in retrospect it was pretty good.  Iraq had invaded and taken Kuwait, which is just not done in international diplomacy anymore. Subverting and backing puppet governments and stuff like that is okay, but to just march your guys in is just not done.

The whole world rather disapproved and Bush I wisely used that.  He got everybody to get together in this grand coalition.  Of course the US did most of the heavy lifting, but most of the world was on the same page.  And remember the mission was to free Kuwait and give the Iraqis a black eye and go home.

Which turned out to be pretty easy.  Hussein kept his good troops at home to protect him and sent the recently drafted and ill prepared troops to the front where they couldn't surrender fast enough.  They died like flies.  It was almost embarrassing to the guys killing them.  We chased them 150 miles into Iraq, not that far from Baghdad I reckon, and then we stopped.  Geez some of the hotter heads at home cried out, why don't we hang that sumbitch.  Not prudent said Bush I, and history certainly has proven him right.  We did err a bit in calling on the kurds and shias to revolt when we had no plans to help them out when they did and they got slaughtered.

So that was like the first crusade which set out to conquer the Holy Land and did.  The rest of them were just clusterfuck.  My favorite was of course the Fourth when they sacked Byzantium the protection of which was one of the goals of crusaderdom

The second invasion of Iraq was out of mixed motives, revenge for 911 (the Iraqis looked a lot like the guys who flew the planes into the towers), the hyped fear of weapons of mass destruction, the neocon dream of the creation of free market democracies across the mideast, some even thought we could use their oil to pay for the damn thing and maybe even make a profit.because what the fuck.  It all tuned into a clusterfuck like the latter crusades.  Afghanistan didn't make much sense after we had driven out Al Qaeda, then we sort of helped and sort of didn't help much the Syrian rebels.  We fell in love with those cuddly Kurds who aren't near so cuddly close up, and we have a finger in the pie where the Saudis are using our shiny weapons to blast the fuck out of Yemen,

I don't have that level of detail on subsequent crusades, but a lot of bad shit happened to the folk in the lands the crusaders passed through on the way to fight the infidels though sometimes they teamed up with them to fight other Christians who were teamed up with other infidels, which I guess you could call going native. 

In conclusion, I don't see much difference between the two.    I would discuss this further but I fear that brother Beagles' Robe of Contemplation is at the cleaners and he has not made it to the Hall of Truth to discuss Wagner and Martin Luther vs Cecil B Demille and John Hus, and the place of the Swedish Bikini Team and the Fantanas in the matter.  Well he has a whole weekend to consider it, and to get those Robes of Contemplation out of the dry cleaners.