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Writer's pictureBryan Knowles

The War on Terror: 3 Facts About its Beginning

September 11th, 2001—seventy years after Pearl Harbor, another day was made infamous in United States history. Nearly 3,000 people died in the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, almost 500 more than the 1941 attack, making it the bloodiest strike by a foreign power on U.S. soil. Nine days later, President George W. Bush announced in a speech to Congress, “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda.” The official War on Terror, the longest-lasting war in U.S. history (predating the War in Afghanistan by one month), had begun.


However, the “unofficial” war on terror began 200 years prior with a little-known conflict called the First Barbary War, pitting the pirates of the Barbary States (Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis) against a fledgling American nation. As the Barbary Pirates raided and plundered helpless American trade on the high seas, President Thomas Jefferson determined that the United States should no longer pay for peace and supported multiple measures against the Barbary States. A declaration of war from Tripoli, concurrent with the birth of the U.S. Navy, began what is now a 218-year military struggle against terrorists from the Middle East, a war lost in its place between the First and Second Revolutionary Wars, but nevertheless worthy of remembrance for several reasons. Here are three interesting observations about the beginning of the war on terror.


1) The First Barbary War was the beginning of the U.S. Navy. In 1794, in the face of increasing offenses by the pirates against U.S. merchant ships, President George Washington signed into law a bill for the creation of six frigates. One of these was the venerable USS Constitution, the longest-commissioned warship in U.S. service, launched in 1797. One year later, President John Adams formally created the United States Navy. Although the official declaration of war did not come for three more years, hostilities were commonplace throughout the 1790’s. The Barbary War was the war the U.S. Navy was created to fight. This point marked the beginning of the realization that in order to protect her interests at home and abroad, the United States must possess a strong naval force.


USS Philadelphia ablaze during the Battle of Tripoli Harbor in 1804

2) The First Barbary War marked the first time U.S. troops captured a land-based military target on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1805, a small body of U.S. Marines (another organization in its infancy) landed at Alexandria, Egypt, where their commander, Lieutenant William Eaton, joined forces with about 400 regional mercenaries and Hamet Karamanli, a contender for the rule of Tripoli. Over the next seven weeks, the makeshift army endured the desert march to Derne, capital of the Ottoman Empire, in the North African province of Cyrenaica. After a sharp fight against the superior defending force, the Americans and their allies took the city. Although a diplomatic settlement with the Barbary States stripped Eaton and his ally Hamet of their prize, the Battle of Derne remained an important statement that the United States could not long be bound by distance.


A depiction of the Battle of Derne in 1805

3) The religious motivations of terrorism have remained the same for centuries. In the spring of 1786, over a year before the U.S. Constitution was written, the Tripolitan ambassador to London Sidi Haji Abdrahaman received an unexpected visitor—John Adams, then minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain. A few days afterwards, Abdrahaman, Adams, and Thomas Jefferson (also present in London) met at the ambassador’s lodgings, where Adams attempted to strike a deal that would keep the Barbary States from interfering with American trade. The ever-blunt Adams asked the ambassador how he could justify piratic attacks on vessels of a nation who had done them no injury. Abdrahaman’s answer was simple, yet shocking: per the Qur’an (the Muslim holy book), all people who had not accepted the teachings of the prophet Muhammed were infidels, whom it was the duty of all Muslims to destroy and enslave. Any Muslim who died in this pursuit was guaranteed an afterlife in paradise. These are the same reasons cited by radical Islamic terrorists today. The same militant ideology espoused by the terrorists who killed American soldiers and sailors in 1801 was espoused by the men who killed New York residents, workers, and emergency responders in 2001.


For this information and more, check out Brian Kilmeade’s book Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War that Changed American History. Although perhaps too optimistic in his estimation of the results of the war, Kilmeade’s work offers an action-packed, story-driven narrative of the conflict and the politics surrounding it.

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