Conservative Donnybrook

Having prominently in mind the linguistically-asinine phrase “Global War on Terror,” I wish to begin an exploration and discussion of the history and scope of the current military operations in which the United States of America are engaged.

The long history prior to the independence and subsequent establishment of a Constitutional, sovereign nation known as the United States of America is well worth noting with regard to warfare between Muslim regimes and Western European nations. For our purposes, the official conflict between the U.S. and Muslim started around 1784, when Morocco, which had been the first nation to recognize the U.S. as sovereign in 1777, seized an American ship. Thomas Barclay negotiated a treaty with Morocco’s sultan 2 years later, but this had no effect on the neighboring region of the Ottoman empire then known as Algiers. Algiers justified its continued siezing of American ships, sale of the cargoes and ships, and enslavement of crews by appeal to the Quranic approbation of taking infidel property and chattel. (One wonders how often pirates on the Barbary gave Americans an opportunity to “convert” to Islam before adjudging them recalcitrant infidels; I digress.)

President Jefferson opposed negotiation with the terrorists. Congress, however, saw the wisdom of John Adams who posited that absent a strong navy, tribute would be the best recourse for safety of Americans in the Med, and, over the course of several years, paid millions of dollars to Algiers in tribute.  This was common practice, and had been for centuries among Western nations and the Muslim Mediterranean sultanates. Americans languished as slaves in North Africa for a dozen years or so; eventually, after a back-door deal with Portugal, Barbary corsairs again began piracy in the Atlantic and captured a dozen ships. The typical crew then would have been approximately 30-50 men, so let us liberally estimate the human captives at around 1,000. Private American merchants demanded Congress provide them with protection. Rather than insist that merchants afford themselves whatever protections they deemed necessary at their own expense, and after great debate, the United States Navy was created and armed vessels were sent with Marines (clad with thick leather collars to defeat cutlass blows of the Barbary pirates, hence the term “leatherneck”) to do what the merchants refused to do for themselves. There were two Barbary Wars, during and after which other Western powers also engaged the nations of Muslim North Africa, and which resulted in the wholesale repression of Muslim piracy on any large scale in the Mediterranean. Speculation abounded even at the time what progress in westward expansion was lost by allocating resources to these ventures.

I propose to continue this investigation in my next installment.