Title pretty much says it all. Crusades are now generally acknowledged to be a bad idea, even among Christians. Crusades = killing Arabs to bring Christianity to their lands. Now we’re killing Arabs to bring ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ to their lands. I put those in quotes because forcing people into a ‘free democracy’ doesn’t really make sense (you can’t force someone to be free, being free is, like, defined, as not being forced into something you don’t want).
That being said, freedom and democracy are far worthier things to spread than Christianity in my books. There are two problems with forcibly spreading them though: 1) due to modern Arab history, evolution of a popular, effective government is wayyyy more likely and better off coming from within, rather than having it imposed on them by the West against their will. The West has been shaping Arab governments for far too long. The turmoil these days in Egypt et all is a great example. Egypt is evolving today, and if we hadn’t invaded Iraq, maybe a popular movement would have done the same there. Arab governments are all relatively new (colonial era/slave era weren’t that long ago, and slave era didn’t die out there till after it did here, cause the slave traders still had tons of power), and the modern governments there have been propped up/established by international powers. It took a long time for democracy to evolve in the West, so it was wrong to dismiss the chance that Iraq’s government was going to evolve on its own. Now we have a blood-stained, (unpopular?), foreign-imposed democracy in Iraq that may not last past our withdrawal, whereas in Egypt there is real hope (though there’s a good chance it won’t work out).
Reason 2) is that it’s wrong to think along the lines of: we have things good, we should be willing to use force to spread our ideals to places that have it bad, and that will share our goodness. One reason this is wrong is because we don’t necessarily have it good b/c of our ideals. The US rose economically to the top b/c WW1 and 2 wrecked Europe, which previously had been on top. Even today, it’s not necessarily freedom, democracy and capitalism that are responsible for having it good here: we exploit cheap foreign labor like it’s no one’s business, foreign powers make gigantic purchases from US companies as part of diplomacy with the most powerful nation in the world. I don’t really know how things work at that level, but if you don’t either then you should not be confident that we have things good b/c of our ideals, b/c there are so many other possible explanations.
Another reason for 2) is that what works in one nation/economy may not work in another. The wealth of Arab countries is oil. That is radically different from countries whose wealth is based on business (of course, Arab wealth is based on more than just oil, but comparatively speaking). The work of drilling/refining oil is important, but the wealth of that oil belongs more to the country than to the drillers, b/c the oil is a resource of that country, and drilling for it is something anyone with a right mind would do given the chance (like if you had a pile of rubies buried in your backyard, and your brother staked out that area so no one else in the family could dig, then dug them up and said he was entitled to them all b/c he did the work of digging for it). So basically, if the wealth belongs to the state, then more socialist policies should probably be in place.
And actually this last is applicable to Hawaii. So much of the money here is from tourism. What percentage of the profits does a hotel deserve, if the reason people come here is because the island is paradise? It isn’t the hotel that makes it paradise, it’s the island: the weather, the nature, and the people. So shouldn’t the government of the island, and the people who help make it paradise, deserve a larger percentage than, say, for a hotel in New Jersey? (hot girls shld get tax money)
