ABSTRACT
In his view, the comparison to the crusades is a way of legitimating the current conicts that the administration of George W. Bush lumped together under the phrase “war on terror.” No matter what course of action one supports in the series of conicts-against
Al-Qaeda, against fragmentary terror groups, against the Taliban, against poppy growers in Afghanistan, against Saddam Hussein, against Sunni militants, or with Sunni militias supporting the new Iraqi government against Sunni militias aligned with dierent groups aimed at destroying the current Iraqi government-and those conicts oen get subsumed under that one label, they are not the same as the medieval conicts, and perhaps linking them all to crusading also creates false links among current events that ought to be seen as separate. Another historian provides a more pointed critique:
For the West to label contemporary conflicts as crusades is to obscure the secular mandate of a just war and to ignore the fact that, in the Middle Ages, most westerners supported the crusades, while today there is tremendous opposition to military action.
