Piracy and Empire

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

Only a month after the September 11 attacks, the drawing of parallels was significant enough to warrant a Washington Post article that highlighted the views of a number of historians on the topic. Among those cited was George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who explicitly used the historical analogy in his advice to Congress. "He invoked the precedent of the Barbary pirates, saying America had every right to attack and destroy the terrorist leadership without declaring war," the article reported.

Three years later, with enthusiasm for the Iraq War still strong among conservative ranks, Christopher Hitchens penned a high-profile paean to Thomas Jefferson and his treatment of the Barbary pirates in Time magazine. The takeaway point for Hitchens was Jefferson's decisiveness. "Taken together with some of Jefferson's other ambitious and quasi-constitutional moves — the Louisiana Purchase and the sending of the Lewis and Clark expedition to the West — the Barbary war exposed him to some Federalist and newspaper criticism for his secrecy, high-handedness and overly 'presidential' style. But there was no arguing with success," he wrote with a clear nod at the Bush administration.

In their mining of American history, conservative journalists, historians, and activists found the nuggets they wanted: the humiliations of diplomacy, the importance of individual displays of bravery (thymos!), the contributions of a powerful president, and the militant perfidy of Muslims. This drawing of parallels between the Taliban and al-Qaeda on one hand and the Barbary pirates on the other accomplished several goals. First, it established that the very founding fathers of the United States had gone to war against Islamic terrorists, giving the global war on terror an unimpeachable pedigree. Second, it revealed that from the very beginning, appeasement in the form of sterile diplomacy and paying blackmailers was ineffectual, and only a robust military response could secure victory. Third, these battles required new approaches (preventive war) and new capabilities (an expanded navy, web-centric warfare). Finally, this was no mere local conflict but a global battle between backward fundamentalists and those who championed the rule of law.

The very same themes reappeared in the more recent linking of the Obama administration's response to the Somali pirates with Jefferson's approach to the Barbary pirates. The Somali pirates are Muslims and linked to fundamentalists, appeasement doesn't work, and war is the answer. And the pundits are using the pirates as an argument for a transformation of Pentagon capabilities. The marriage of pirates and terrorists is just as improbable today in Somalia as it was in the historical misreading of the Barbary wars.

The "discovery" of the Barbary pirates was almost too good to be true — as if an anti-abortion activist discovered an overlooked ruling by the 18th-century Supreme Court on conception as the beginning of life. By projecting their prejudices onto the past, the neoconservatives warped history to their purposes. There are indeed parallels between the Barbary wars and today's conflicts. But they aren't the parallels seized upon by Jewett, London, and others.

Counterterrorism's True History

Despite the neoconservative readings, the Barbary wars weren't about religion. The states in North Africa, distant tributaries of the Ottoman Empire, weren't Islamic caliphates but secular governments ruled by a dey and his Turkish janissaries. Muslim clerics controlled the ecclesiastical sphere but had little real political power. Moreover, the attacks on commercial vessels had nothing to do with jihad. Rather, locked out of European markets, Algiers, Tripoli, and Morocco turned to piracy for economic survival. The United States, meanwhile, didn't enter into a holy war against these states. Instead, it was fighting the Revolutionary War after the fact in order to secure open markets for American products. This was, as Thomas Paine argued in Common Sense, a key to the survival of the newly independent country. But Britain didn't welcome the newly independent United States into its markets. Worse, the British essentially turned the Barbary pirates loose on U.S. commercial shipping in the Mediterranean. What some contemporary readers see as an early confrontation between the West and the Rest — a prototype of the clash of civilizations — was in fact the continuation of a battle between the United States and its European rivals.

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

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