Piracy and Empire

By John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted April 27, 2009.

The conventional story of U.S. overseas expansion has focused on rolling back other empires and nation-states: the Spanish, the Soviets, the Vietnamese, the North Koreans. Noticeably absent from this lineup, except for a brief period during the Reagan administration, have been non-state actors and the Muslim world. As such, the campaign inspired by the September 11 attacks appeared to be a detour in U.S. history: an unprecedented response to an unprecedented event. The Global War on Terror risked appearing to be un-American in its singularity. After all, weren't the Crusades a European thing? Wasn't terrorism a local problem for London, Madrid, Moscow, and Beijing? Didn't only totalitarian states wage global wars?

So, after the initial shock of the September 11 attacks subsided, the architects of the new counterterrorism campaign scrambled to establish historical continuity. To sustain what would become the most expensive military campaign in U.S. history, it was important to fabricate a genealogy — much as a family of the nouveau riche constructs a bogus coat of arms to assert a proud, aristocratic lineage. The Global War on Terror had to become an essential expression of U.S. destiny rather than a detour on the road toward a liberal, global market economy.

In this fashion, the proponents of the global war on terror discovered the Barbary pirates. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the United States waged a two-decades-long conflict with several states along the North African coast. This campaign inspired the expansion of the Marines and the creation of the modern U.S. Navy. At a time of America's general weakness — fighting with little success against the French and the British — the Barbary wars were a rare success for the young republic. It was, in short, history ripe for the misuse: a war against Muslim terrorists avant la lettre that resulted in U.S. military victory and an early triumph for free trade.

The misreading of this episode in American history reveals much about the aims of the global war on terror. And it serves as a useful jumping-off point for a consideration of the future of the dispute between neoliberals and neoconservatives over the trajectory of U.S. global power in what Thomas Friedman has called an "age of piracy."

Forced Pirate Parallel

It didn't take long for advocates of a Global War on Terror to dig through their history books after September 11 to find what they needed. Thomas Jewett, in the Winter/Spring 2002 issue of Early America Review, wrote that September 11 "is not the first conflict in which America has faced such deprivations against life and property. There was another time when it was determined that diplomacy would not only be futile, but humiliating and in the long run disastrous. A time when ransom or tribute would not buy peace. A time when war was considered more effective and honorable. And a time when war would be fought, not with large concentrations of military might, but by small bands peopled with individuals of indomitable spirit. Almost 180 years ago our infant country attacked Tripoli under circumstances that are eerily similar to contemporary times."

Pamphleteers were quick to pick up on the religious parallels. Rick Forcier, the executive director of the Christian Coalition of Washington state wrote in November 2001 about terrorism: "It is quite ancient, and so is it's [sic] employment by Islamic fundamentalists, who for centuries, have bombed, hijacked, kidnapped, murdered and extorted for the furthering of their religion and the glory of their god Allah. Known in times past as 'Barbary pirates,' Islamic terrorists made the world of old tremble at the thought of being captured on the high seas and killed or sold to the slave-traders of Timbuktu."

Conservative journalist Joshua London also harped on the Holy War theme. Writing in The National Review, he opined, "Although there is much in the history of Ameri­ca's wars with the Barbary pirates that is of direct relevance to the current global war on terrorism, one aspect seems particularly instructive to inform­ing our understanding of contemporary affairs. Very simply put, the Barbary pirates were commit­ted, militant Muslims who meant to do exactly what they said."

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John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

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