I just read a short note about the Crusades and the medieval legend of Prester John, and it reminded me of the Bush Administration’s policy towards the Middle East. For those of you like myself who aren’t history majors, Prester John was a mythical character that arose in the 12th Century, when the pope and the kings in Europe were sending hoards of armed peasants to deal with those Muslim Turks and Arabs who had overrun the Holy Lands. These were the Crusades. Overall, they weren’t going quite as well as had been hoped. The Christian soldiers would take Jerusalem, Antioch, Damascus, Edessa and other places in the Levant, but they couldn’t hold them for more than a few decades.

The First Crusade delivered some shock-and-awe, for a time; but by 1187 the Saracens had retaken Jerusalem. And yet, for another hundred years or so, the Christians just kept coming (and mostly didn’t get very far). The western kings and popes more-or-less knew that they were operating well beyond their logistical and political range. They needed a powerful friend in the East, and so they invented an imaginary one – Prester John. PJ (as we might call him today) was allegedly the king of a powerful pro-Christian state somewhere around India. PJ wanted to kick the Saracens out himself, and allegedly wanted to launch his own Crusades. Before long, letters seemingly sent by PJ started arriving in Rome and Paris and Venice.

Well, obviously this was just what the kings and bishops in France and Italy and Germany wanted to hear! Their Middle-Eastern blunders were going to be shored up just as soon as the western Christians could hook up with PJ’s troops. They finally had a guy who knew how to operate in western Asia. Everything was going to be OK.

Except that Prester John was just a hoax, fed by a whole lot of political wishful thinking and a bunch of jokesters who got a laugh out of writing phony letters and seeing the big guns take them seriously. The Prester John rumor allowed the kings and popes to keep on spilling blood in the Middle East, long after the nobles should have cut their losses and the peasants should have revolted. The Crusades didn’t finally end until around 1290 or so.

Funny how Middle-Eastern history repeats itself. Instead of the cause of Christendom, our present day Prester John’s are based on the noble concept of ‘democracy’. Our government keeps saying that we’ve found allies in the march for democracy (shall we say “crusade for democracy”?). In Iraq there was Chalabi and now there’s Maliki. In Afghanistan we have Karzai. These fellows are a bit more real than Prester John, but not by much. Democracy is an arguably meritorious idea and ideal, but it’s mainly being used by the Bush Administration to prop up a bad idea. America can’t build good government in Iraq or Afghanistan (or Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for that matter) any better than the popes and kings could maintain Crusader states, or the Roman Emperors maintain Babylonian proconsulates. It’s a great idea, a necessary idea, an idea that could defuse the threat of jihadist terrorism — but it’s an idea that will ultimately have to germinate and flower on its own.

Unfortunately, our present day equivalents to the popes and kings have not done the one thing that our own Western Empire can do to insulate itself from the harsh and bloody politics of the Middle East – and that is to use our powerful technology to put an end to the hydrocarbon energy economy. It would not be easy or cheap. But sending and maintaining permanent armies in Afghanistan and Iraq isn’t cheap either. Not to mention all the tax money now spent on homeland security. And heaven forbid what happens once we start mixing it up with Iran.

We should have started the energy independence “crusade” way back in 1980, after we had two economic warnings about our over-dependence on Middle-Eastern oil. But no, Ronald Reagan convinced us that everything was just fine, oil prices dropped, alternative energy research money was re-targeted to support tax cuts, and the party was on. We got another big warning on September 11, 2001. And yet — here we are, six years later, still driving big SUV’s and building huge energy-hog houses and rearranging the geography of our homes and our jobs and our shopping places so that we have no alternatives to automotive transport.

Oh well. Onward Christian soldiers! American Prosperity, like Prester John, will make everything OK . . .