http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,7-2001323713,00.html
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 19 2001 A war of noble retaliation BY BEN MACINTYRE This is not the first time that America has been at war with Muslim terrorists. Our correspondent looks at the lessons to be learnt from Thomas Jefferson in 1801 The President of the United States faces a daunting enemy: a loose-knit, ill-defined group of barbarous Muslim terrorists armed with knives, bankrolled by a wealthy extremist who has declared war on America. American citizens have been hijacked and murdered with horrible ingenuity and careful planning, and American commerce has been savaged by pirates without scruple. Something must be done to avenge the atrocities and prevent their repetition. The President sends in a multinational force overland, combined with a ferocious bombardment using the latest military technology. The enemy is routed, and the world has lurched into a new era.

The year is 1801, exactly 200 years before terrorists destroyed the World Trade Centre; the president is Thomas Jefferson, not George W. Bush, and the enemy is not Osama bin Laden, but the Pasha of Tripoli.

As America and the world anxiously prepare to mount a future war against Islamic terrorists, one might also look back two centuries, for the parallels between America’s first war and the one now looming, are remarkable and instructive. Bush has often cited Jefferson in his speeches, but now is the moment when he may need his example most.

Like Bush, Jefferson’s mandate was a fragile one, and, like Bush, he was determined that an assault on American lives and commerce demanded an overwhelming military response.

Long before the United States came into existence, the Barbary states — Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli — had preyed on shipping in the Mediterranean, extracting “tribute” in return for immunity from the pirates in a massive, multinational protection racket, an early form of state-sponsored terrorism. After American independence, Britain ensured that the Barbary pirates knew that American ships were fair game. Prisoners were horrendously treated, and often died or “took the turban” by converting to Islam, before any ransom was paid. On Jefferson’s accession, almost $2 million, one fifth of the entire annual revenue of the United States, was being paid out in tribute, or to retrieve Americans captured by the corsairs.

Some felt that paying off the pirates was the only civilised way — just as some would now prefer to use financial rather than military muscle to attack terrorism. As one official of the young republic argued: “Bribery and corruption answer the purpose better than a noble retaliation.” The very brutality of the North African pirates, their refusal to abide by the normal rules of warfare, made them unworthy adversaries in the minds of many. Nations fought nations, not tinpot pirates, it was thought.

Jefferson believed otherwise. When he heard from the US consul in Tripoli, James Cathcart, that the Arab “cruisers are now fitting out for sea . . . probably to capture Americans”, he seethed. “When this idea comes across my mind, my faculties are absolutely suspended between indignation and impatience.” he wrote.

But, like last week’s attack, it was the shadowy enemy who brought war to America. The powerful Pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, feeling his tribute was insufficient and determined to bully a fledgeling nation, declared war on America in May 1801, in effect announcing “open season” on all American ships unless the US paid a massive lump sum of $250,000 and an annual tribute of $25,000.

America faced a conundrum that has shadowed her international stance ever since: whether to fight or withdraw; to isolate herself from the “foreign entanglements” of Europe, as independence from Britain inclined her to do, or acknowledge that American interests and obligations extended far beyond her shores.

Armed with the popular cry “Millions for defence, not one cent for tribute”, Jefferson broke with the accommodating policy of his predecessors and struck with what was, for the time, massive military force. On May 16, 1801, he ordered the US Navy to set sail for Tripoli to defend, for the first time, America’s interests abroad. Jefferson was adamant that he would make the world safe for America to trade and travel in: “We mean to rest the safety of our commerce on the resources of our own strength and bravery in every sea.”

The Tripolitan War did not start well. An attempt to blockade the port failed, and the frigate Philadelphia ran aground on a reef, with the result that Pasha Yusuf captured Captain William Bainbridge (henceforth to be known as “Bad Luck Billie”) along with his 300-man crew and a valuable ship. The potentate of Tripoli was preparing to use the ship against the Americans when Lieutenant Stephen Decatur stole into the harbour at night with a handful of men, boarded the Philadelphia and set fire to it, before making his getaway.

Admiral Nelson called it the most daring act of the age, and in gratitude Decatur had towns named after him in Georgia, Illinois and eight other states. But America was nonetheless on the way to losing its first war, when a most unlikely hero appeared in the form of William Eaton, a former army officer who had been made consul of Tunis.

Bad-tempered, foul-mouthed and a hard-drinking habitué of the local brothels, Eaton was hardly the shining lead actor beloved of Hollywood, but then, to quote Vice-President Dick Cheney, foreign war is a “mean, nasty, dangerous and dirty business”.

Eaton personally detested the Pasha of Tripoli with a passion that rendered him semi-coherent. “Shall America, who, when an infant state, destitute of all apparatus of war, without discipline and without funds, dared to resist the whole force of the lion’s den of Great Britain to establish freedom, now that she has acquired manhood (sic), resources and experience, bring her humiliation to the basest dog kennel of Barbary?” he thundered.

In a scene straight out of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, Eaton, with the rather nervous backing of the American naval commander in the Mediterranean, assembled a force in Egypt, with the intention of attacking the Pasha overland, and replacing him with a pretender to the throne of Tripoli. Eaton’s “army” gave new definition to the word motley, consisting of 16 US Marines and other American sailors, 40 Greeks, a number of itinerant Italians, a squad of Arab cavalry, a hundred other assorted mercenaries and 190 camels.

Commodore Edward Preble aboard The USS Constitution — known as “Old Ironsides”, and the pride of the US Navy — had already been shelling Tripoli for two months with a squadron of 15 ships when Eaton, the Rambo of his day, set off from Alexandria across 500 miles of Saharan desert, where Rommel and Montgomery would later duel. Unsurprisingly, the mercenaries mutinied three times and would probably have deserted en masse had not one Lieutenant Bannon adopted the time-honoured strategy for rallying the troops: lining up his Marines and threatening to shoot every mutineer. The claimant to the throne, Hamet Karamanli, also got cold feet, but after a 40-day march Eaton’s rabble, now numbering just 400, half-dead from dehydration and starvation, arrived at the fortified Tripolitan seaport of Derna.

Eaton, who was slightly mad before the march and considerably madder at the end of it, immediately ordered an assault on the town. Most of his exhausted troops held back, so Eaton, his Marines and a handful of hardy Greeks stormed the walls of Derna alone, while three American man-of-war brigs opened fire with cannon from the port. Astonishingly, the Arab force, far larger and better armed, surrendered, and for the first time in history, the American flag was raised above a captured outpost in a foreign land.

Before Eaton could move on Tripoli itself, the Pasha sued for peace. A treaty was negotiated, with the imprisoned Captain Bainbridge acting as broker. While favourable to the United States, the terms fell somewhat short of outright victory: the prisoners and hostages were freed, and Tripoli renounced all rights to halt or to levy tribute on American ships. But the US still agreed to pay $60,000 to the Pasha, who remained in power.

Eaton ended his days an embittered enemy of Jefferson’s Administration, but while his exploits are almost unknown in the US, they are not unsung: The Marine Corps Hymn contains the words “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shore of Tripoli” in tribute to his strange feat of arms. Jefferson could be satisfied with the outcome, for the corsairs had been shown that America could and would respond if threatened. The words of James Madison, a future President, after America’s first war of “noble retaliation”, might today be uttered by Bush: “Tho’ we prefer peace, we are prepared for war and will make no concessions of any sort to avoid it.”

And yet, like the conflict now facing Bush, the problem was complex and many-sided: Pasha Yusuf, like Osama bin Laden, was only the most provocative of the extortionist, terrorist warlords. He was neutralised, but others moved in to take his place.

When the US went to war with Britain, Algerian pirates quickly took advantage by preying on American ships. “My policy and my views,” the potentate of Algiers declared, “are to increase, not diminish, the number of American slaves . . . not for a million dollars would I release them.” The low-level war dragged on until 1815, after which the US no longer paid tribute to any Barbary state.

But the nation’s ambivalence towards “foreign entanglements” remained, and still remains. In 1816, Decatur, lauded for his covert action against the enemy in Tripoli harbour, implicitly acknowledged that the use of force to settle foreign disputes might carry a moral price, as he raised his glass to toast “Our country, in her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, but our country, right or wrong”. It is a view that precisely reflects modern American attitudes toward the Vietnam War.

The Tripolitan War changed for ever the course of US foreign policy, but like all such seminal events, the combatants framed very different histories around it. In American eyes, Eaton’s siege of Derna was a glorious feat of arms, and a righteous strike against lawless killers outside the community of nations. The North African memory is rather different, pointing out that European nations had engaged in piracy at Arab expense for centuries: Eaton’s march, in Libyan accounts, was just another piratical raid, and one that, moreover, failed in the grand scheme, since Pasha Yusuf emerged unscathed, and a lot richer.

Here again, the world might find a lesson, for if one thing may be predicted with absolute certainty about the coming fight, it is that the two sides will view its causes, course and outcome in diametrically different ways.

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001

Answers

Interesting comparison. Thanks.

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001

It was simpler when you knew where they were and more important where they were not.

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2001

The point made by CPR is correct. Still, it is not the first case. The first case of wide spread terrorism was with the Indian population on the frontier in both Canada and the US. They were aided by the traders and, so-called half-breeds, who moved freely amongst both populations. Attacks against civilian populations was common. It was terrorism for/against a way of life. Not much different than what is being discussed. History hasn't changed that much.

Best Wishes,,,,

Z

-- Anonymous, September 21, 2001

A saying that is the ultimate answer to all Doom Zombies:

"COWARDS DIE 1,000 TIMES BEFORE THEIR DEATHS"

"THE VALIANT DIE BUT ONCE".

Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" (last act)

-- Anonymous, September 21, 2001

Typical thin witted arm chair analysis and bluster.

For the stories to be comparable, the Pasha would have sacked New York.

-- Anonymous, September 22, 2001