The great military failures of the past have been retold in film fairly regularly over the last 100 years. I think you can lay their enduring popularity more to the appeal of their sentiments than any trend of the 21st century. There's something tremendously appealing about Leonidas' pointless death due to poor strategy at the hands of the Persians. It's that whole 'honour before reason" thing which is applicable to nearly any conflict of the last 60 years.

The Crusades cause such scandal now because those who took part in them are close to us in terms of chronology, but also in terms of values, thoughts, ways of life

The more I studied the Crusades the more I felt certain I as an individual would have felt much more at home in the Arab or Chinese world than in the cesspool of iniquity and barbarity that was the West. It was the Arabs who were the first true post-Fall successors to the Romans and the Greeks, not the Crusading barbarian tribes.

Of course it also puts the current state of the Middle East and China into a particularly sad and horrendous light. They once held shining cities on their hills and now look at them.

I think that's where you have a point - once a state abandons a vast communal identity in favour of something more fractured they spend the rest of eternity on a knife's edge.

Nonetheless, Homer and his tales of the Trojan War, and the history of Leonidas and his 300 who died resisting (and defeating) thousands, are part of the deepest cultural roots of Europe, and since America has its roots deeply embedded in Europe, they are part of the cultural development of America also.

Leonidas was no hero. He and his 300 were utterly defeated by a vastly superior Persian force who had a much more advanced knowledge of tactics, and it was all to little more purpose than to assuage his foolish pride. That particular war was decided by the freemen of Athens, whose naval victory sealed Persia's fate. Leonidas' death is a monument to tremendous yet ultimately stupid bravery.

The very fact that they all died, and died resisting vastly greater forces, is also a success - spiritually and psychologically - and makes of the incident something badly needed in the West of today, an example of selfless resistance to the Enemy.

It's an interesting idea but with modern media technologies it's increasingly useless. Sending troops to their deaths for no reason save psychological effect didn't work in Korea or Vietnam. Why? Because when the public back home sees how these men die the example withers; they'd rather have them back home than that jolt of maudlin adrenalin the public gets when their lives are directly threatened by the incompetence of your military commanders.

Did their miserable Caliphate endure for almost a thousand years? No.

Actually yes. From the start of the first caliphate circa 632 to the fall of the Ottomans in the 1900s it was well over 1000 years.

Did they codify laws that remain the basis of much of the jurisprudence of the regions they ruled to this day? No.

Yes. The sharia and the four great schools have had enormous influence on the practice of law in the Muslim world and continue to do so. I'm unsure of your basis for denying this.

Did they create the legal concept of citizenship and endow it with rights and obligations? No.

Yes. The Qur'an itself sets out the rights and responsibilities of A Muslim citizen. In this way it is both a holy book and a legal framework for Islamic civilisation.

I suppose you could be arguing that it was written with ancient Roman, Greek or Indian notions of citizenship in mind, but personally I consider such a possibility unlikely. Mecca was a small town surrounded by desert. It had a small Jewish minority but I doubt the Jews were all that influential in spreading the political science of Roman rule.

Was it barbaric of them to attack their enemies and slaughter them ruthlessly - and what were the Muslims doing?

The Crusaders were barbaric. They consumed human flesh, unnecessarily killed innocent civilians (and so turned a neutral population against them), were utterly inefficient in their pursuit of tactics and, in general, were outshone in every aspect of civilisation by their Arab betters.

The aspects I'm talking about are science - Arab knowledge of maths and astronomy were even exported to Europe.

medicine - Arab doctors were vastly superior to the butchers of Europe

art - this is a personal thing I suppose but there's a childish quality to 11th-13th century European art that I dislike. Arab poetry from that period in particular is quite beautiful.

history - Golden age Arab historians had some very interesting and sophisticated views on history and development. The cyclical view of dynastic rule, as proposed by Rashid, was hardly mirrored by the heavily revisionist and dogmatic tomes coming out of superstitious Europe.

The phrase 'barbarian tribes' is only intelligible if one looks back at the period through the lens of a modern sensibility - a sensibility in no way applicable to that time.

Yes, and I explicitly stated that's how I was looking at it. Crusades era Islam was in many ways superior and preferable for a 21st century westerner than crusades era West. It's certainly telling that many westerners chose to live in the Arab manner after only a few years of living in the Middle East.

The West has come a long way since then; I don't think it's shameful to accept that there was a period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance where our civilisation was in decline. I also think it's stupid to deny the influence the Caliphates had as the storehouses of our ancient knowledge. You may not like it but it was the West's failures to take on the superior Arab world that made a Western revival possible.

Or were they, at every opportunity, attacking their attackers with the same ruthless violence?

The great Saladin had a reputation for generosity towards civilian populaces and captured enemy soldiers. The Crusaders were known for their brutality. But then Saladin fully understood how useful a grateful civilian can be. Of course he died eventually and over time the Arab armies came to take on some aspects of the Crusaders. To be fair though the Arabs were being invaded; it was hardly expected for them to just put up with it indefinitely.

We've prospered so long we've become detached from the ground of that prosperity, and the nature of the costs incurred in possessing that ground.

I'd fully agree with that, and I must admit I wasn't aware you were focusing so exclusively on myths over facts. You threw me with your denials of Islamic cultural foundations like law, history and citizenship.

In terms of myths I cannot speak for the western world outside my own, but in Australia the role of myths is so powerful it could not possibly be considered reduced. Words like ANZAC, Gallipoli and even East Timor speak so powerfully to the Australian psyche that their influence as myths cannot be denied. In modern Australian society the mere mention of the sacrifice at Gallipoli is enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of an Australian's neck. It brings to mind the futility of fighting the wars of others and the demand we must make of all our betters that they have our interests in mind. It guides our choice of wars, our choice of commanders, and it guides our public identity - suspicious of authority, untrusting of allies, but unshakable in the support of a friend in genuine need.

East Timor is different; there is a collective guilt and the idea of a debt unpaid in that myth. During World War II the East Timorese fought and died alongside Australian soldiers and since that point there has been a blood-debt. The shame of collusion with Indonesia merely intensified it. The current prime minister drew on that notion of the debt to justify our involvement in the ET independence movement and it united the country in a way it had rarely been before and not once since.

Modern myths such as these - myths that have existed only since our grandfather's day (the old 3 generations rule of collective history) - are vastly more powerful than anything Australians might reach for from the old Western collective history.

Hmmm. I have a feeling I've gone off the point a little here. But I honestly don't think Western culture will be reborn through wallowing in the dusty past of Europe. The future lies in doing what the West has always done best - taking the best parts of every culture it touches and using them to strengthen the whole. The West is practical and adaptable and its power is currently centred in the US, the focus of nearly every civilisation on earth. What will emerge from the future US will be different to that of Europe, there is no denying it. But it will still be identifiably Western for all the influence of India and China and the Middle East.