Crusaders R’ Us

This crusade…this war on terrorism. — George W. Bush

Early on in the American occupation of Iraq, gruesome video of Americans being beheaded by their captors surfaced, fueling worldwide outrage against the perpetrators. A thousand years earlier, Christian crusaders, laying siege to fortified Muslim cities, used as missiles for their catapults the severed heads of Muslims.

Karma has a nasty way of rearing its ugly head that way, and in the case of crusader karma, twice this week alone.

Firstly, we have the remarkable release by GQ Magazine of the SECDEF Rumsfeld war briefing cover sheets featuring Biblical quotes that could have been used in the Middle Ages to send the Knights off to slaughter. Apparently, our messianic and deluded former Crusader in Chief, who once told Palestinian leaders that God had instructed him to smite down Saddam, was getting a bit despondent over the fiasco that his divinely ordained “liberation” had become and needed a little bucking up.

During his re-election campaign,  George the Anointed told a group of Amish in Lancaster County, PA (reported in the 7/16/04 edition  of the Lancaster New Era, original link expired):

I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.

A few months earlier, SECSTATE and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell did his part to keep alive his wartime president’s signature campaign issue,  the Iraq war (aka the front line of the war on terra), pleading:

We need you as part of this campaign, this crusade.

Secondly, there’s the additional torture photos that President Obama had promised to release, and then reneged on. During Amy Goodman’s D-Mock-racy Now show this morning, Philippe Sands, former British Queen’s counsel and author of Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, said the following:

And it includes photographs, I’m told, of people’s heads being partly shaved, so that a cross is placed on the head of a Muslim man.

And the karmic beat goes on. US forces on the ground in Afghanistan are still being encouraged to convert the heathen:

The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hounds of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Bush’s former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, General William Boykin, whom Wapo military analyst Bill Arkin described as “an intolerant extremist who has spoken openly about how his belief in Christianity has trumped Muslims and other non-Christians in battle,” while he was showing slides of Usama bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, and Saddam Hussein,  boldly proclaimed;

Our spiritual enemy [Satan] will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.

And then we have the ongoing problem of the US Air Force Academy indoctrinating its officers to become Christian warriors.

Plotting the karmic vectors from 8 years of the Bush-Cheney regime would prove a challenge to even Issac Asimov’s legendary hero, Harry Seldon. As Robin Williams might put it:

Future history— what a concept.

Genuine religion takes nothing away from human existence, but it does add new meanings to all of life; it generates new types of enthusiasm, zeal, and courage.  It may even engender the spirit of the crusader, which is more than dangerous if not controlled by spiritual insight and loyal devotion to the commonplace social obligations of human loyalties.
–The Urantia Book