With the agreement of the besieging Mameluk Sultan Baybars, the Crusaders were permitted to withdraw under a white flag to their coastal castle at Margat, near modern day Latakia. Margat was itself besieged 14 years later by an even more determined Mameluk sultan, and, in 1291, the mainland’s last Crusader stronghold finally fell. Having lost Acre, the Knights were forced from the Holy Land once and for all.

After the death of King Louis IX – St. Louis – the great ‘cause’ of the Middle Ages lost fervor, recruits, and financing. In 200 years, Christian rule in the Holy Land had deteriorated into a ruthless political free-for-all. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem’s throne and those in the adjoining territories of Antioch, Tripoli, and Edessa had been bought and sold like minor duchies, swapped as dowries, and plundered by usurpers.

Over the 162 years that Krac remained in Christian hands, the castle had been an impregnable post in enemy territory, resisting two sieges by Saladin himself. And when the Christians eventually left Krac, it was not the consequence of outright defeat, but rather utter exhaustion. Thus with a whimper dawned the beginning of the end of the Age of the Crusades.

A visit to Krac in instructive for any Westerner seeking a degree of Insight beyond today’s latest headline. Standing under Krac’s European-styled defenses, marked by double-walled enclosures, a steep glacis, and box machiolations through which boiling oil was poured, the castle seems invincible. But appearances can be deceptive: in the end this foreign military architecture was defeated by native political will.

Akram Ishak owns a restaurant built on the tableland where Saladin once camped outside Krac’s walls. To him, US President George W. Bush’s declaration of a “crusade” against “evildoers” in “Operation Ultimate Justice” echoes the Crusaders’ cry of “Deus lo volt” – “God wills it” – issued by their spiritual leader Pope Urban II.

“My cousins live in Oregon,” says Akram. “They – and their American neighbors – are confused about what Bush is doing and what Bush is saying. Is he a crusader or is he a liberator?”

The restaurant today is empty. Most tours have been cancelled following the March invasion of Iraq. So Akram takes me on a tour of Krac’s inner precincts.

“My father Khaled was born in the castle, in the family hut near the kitchens,” he says. “In 1925, before the French colonial army came, most of our village was built inside the walls. French archaeologists forced villagers to move out so they could restore it. But they did good things for us here too, like building a school from the rubble of the castle walls.”

The word Krac is a Crusader’s corruption of ‘Kurds,’ or ‘Akrad’ in Arabic, after the Kurdish emir who built the first castle on this site, which was overrun by the Norman hero of the first Crusade, Tancred, in 1109.

That marked the beginning of the Crusaders’ all-out building campaign, featuring state-of-the-art military defenses with lines of sight established from one castle to the next. From Krac’s western walls, Safita castle is still visible. From Safita, Tartus, and then Marqat come into view.

This castle-building archipelago brings to mind the Pentagon’s strategy of leasing a succession of military bases and prison camps – from Turkey’s airfields to Qatar’s briefing rooms and Baghdad’s Green Zone (called “Emerald City” by one media wag, tired of the bowing and scraping required before meeting the Great Oz himself, ambassador Paul Bremer), from Bagram’s ‘Camp Viper’ to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Okinawa, circling the globe to Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners picked up along the way are dropped as casually as defused cluster bombs.

The exigencies of the Crusades, much like the ‘war on terror’ today, created strange bedfellows. Not far from Krac is Masyaf castle, stronghold of the Ismaili order of the Assassins, a Shia sect. The Assassin’s chief, the so-called ‘Old Man of the Mountain,’ allied himself with the Knights against their common enemy, Saladin, and his Ayyubid dynasty.

“It is a moral trap,” Akram declares, “for anyone to call the enemy of his enemy, his friend. It is the worst bedouin custom you could ever live by.”

And indeed the Knights’ alliance with the Assassins was as out of place then as Bush’s unblinking support for some of the world’s more unsavory regimes is today. With similar disregard for common sense, Crusaders then and Americans now turned against their own.

The Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo, acting “far above his pay grade,” as US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld might put it, decided for himself to sack Constantinople while en route to Jerusalem, thus wrecking the Fourth Crusade and forever after ruining the reputation of Crusaders, even among their Byzantine allies. And so Rummy himself seems, in his shoot-from-the-hip, hit-himself-in-the-foot diplomacy, to have wrecked any chance for the French, Germans, or Russians to work closely with America in Iraq.

Long before the US and its assorted allies went into Baghdad, the Third Crusade brought together the mother of all ‘coalitions of the willing’ – King Richard of England, King Phillip II of France, and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Leading the combined armies of Europe towards a universal goal, so tightly united that not a shaft of light was visible between them as they marched, success was surely theirs. But no. Frederick died en route, Phillip got bored and departed the field of battle early, and Richard was left to negotiate terms with Saladin on his own.

Krac’s chapel is stern and dimly lit, yet nonetheless symbolizes the concord that might one day exist between Christianity and Islam. When the Mameluks took the castle, they fitted a prayer niche into the southern wall, but left the altar where it was. Christian retainers who stayed on after the Knights’ departure were allowed to pray in the chapel, entering by the main western door. Muslims entered by a side door, beside which a Koranic verse inscribed into the stone is still legible – Qul, kulla yi’mal ‘ala shaakilatu – (“Say, ‘each person should act in his own manner.’”)

Bush could do worse than pay heed to the message – and spirit – carved into the walls of Krac.Louis Werner is a freelance journalist covering the Middle East