From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli (Barbary) to Modern Day Iran

June 23, 2006 | JBGUSA

[JBGUSA]

My view of history is that the more things change the more they stay the same. Certainly, the tale of the Barbary Pirates, and its eerily similar parellel today, in our battles with what is called "radical Islam" shows the divide between the productive West, and the parts of the world that live off plunder, extortion and baksheesh. Yesterday's "tribute" equals todays "UN" and "NGO's". This exceprted New York Times Book Review of a series of books about piracy, including the Barbary Pirates, demonstrates the striking similarities. I'm afraid we're going to have to flatten them again.

August 21, 2005 America's Pirate Wars By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS¹

Viewed from our hyperpower perspective, the decades between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 were so precarious they seem to belong almost to the history of another country. And in many ways they do. The ''United States'' at that time was to the east coast of North America what Chile now is to the west coast of the southern cone: a long and ribbonlike territory with indistinct or disputed frontiers, caught between mountains and the ocean.

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More recent angst between the United States and the Arab and Muslim world has revived interest in the half-forgotten Barbary wars, during which Jefferson and Madison dispatched successful naval expeditions to punish the piratical regimes in Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis and Morocco.

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The whole enterprise of American independence, as Lambert shows, was predicated on free trade versus mercantilism, and the related idea that American vessels should be able to trade with whomever they pleased. This aspiration was hampered during the first decades of independence by conflicts and compromises rising from Anglo-French rivalry in the Atlantic. But it was flat-out negated by the Barbary policy of extortion, ransom, blackmail and slave-taking.

When London's protection was withdrawn from the ships of the upstart former American colonies, their crews and cargoes were at the mercy of Muslim raiders who, often incited by the British, captured them with relative ease. (Anyone wanting to protest Jefferson's naval expedition against these slave states would have had to employ the slogan ''No blood for free trade'' or else ''No blood for manumission.'') Lambert is uneasy about comparisons to more recent combats, and wants to insist on the struggle for free navigation, but this leads him into the error of denial. He says religion had little or nothing to do with the matter. That may have been true as far as the United States was concerned but was emphatically not the case with the Ottoman enemy. Barbary leaders, while they were interested in gain, still explicitly claimed that the Koran gave them the right to enslave infidels, and on one occasion they told Jefferson and John Adams this to their faces.

Under American naval pressure, including bombardment, most of the Barbary States finally agreed to abandon slavery and piracy during the Jefferson administration. But a new despot in Algiers was induced by British perfidy to revive the business during the War of 1812. Intended to weaken and divert American resistance to the British Navy on the other side of the ocean at New Orleans, this cynical tactic had the opposite effect. A battle-hardened American fleet under Stephen Decatur secured a complete capitulation in Algiers, and also the release of many wretched slaves. The reign of Barbary terror was finally over. This triumph in late 1815 was somewhat eclipsed by other world-shaking events at Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna, but a shrewd European or North African would still have noticed that a whole new maritime and political and economic power had stepped firmly onto history's stage.

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¹Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor at the New School. His most recent book is ''Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.''