When President Bush recently asked the Saudis to increase their production of oil, the media reported that the request was turned down. In fact, the Saudis offered to discuss the issue only if the president would promise a waiver of visas for Saudi students, something that Americans of all political parties would find unacceptable, given the fact that nearly all of the 9/11 terrorist hijackers hailed from the oil kingdom.
This is not the first time in our history that the Muslim Arab states have held us over a barrel. In the aftermath of independence in 1776, American merchant vessels lost the protection of the British navy, and our ships were routinely attacked and boarded by Arab pirates from Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli – a federation of coastal, semi-autonomous states within the jurisdiction of the Ottoman Empire.
The pirates looted all goods which were then carried in barrels, and the American crews were enslaved or used as hostages to extract ransom known as “tributes.”
The British and French nominally protected their ships and crews by paying huge sums in ransom to the pirate nations. The young American nation lacked naval power to protect its ships and followed suit by agreeing to pay tributes and ransoms to the Muslim pirates in order to free enslaved crews and vessels. In 1784, the new American Congress actually allocated moneys for payment to the corsairs.
In 1785, the dey (pasha) of Algiers seized two ships and demanded $60,000 in ransom for their crews. Then ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, argued that acceding to this demand would only embolden the pirates, but the congress was in no mood for confrontation, and for the next 15 years, tributes to the Arab pirate nations amounted to 20% of United States government annual revenues.
In 1786, Jefferson and John Adams went to negotiate with Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman (or Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja). Jefferson’s report to Secretary of State John Jay is chilling, and resonates to this day:
The ambassador answered us that the right (to kidnap, loot and enslave) was founded on the Laws of the Prophet (Mohammed), that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman (or Muslim) who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.
The American Consul to Tunis, William Eaton, was enraged by the escalating demands of the Barbary States. In June 1799, he wrote the following the following assessment of the character of the local Muslim population to the U.S. Secretary of State:
Taught by revelation that war with the Christians will guarantee the salvation of their souls, and finding so great secular advantages in the observance of this religious duty [i.e. keeping captured cargoes] their inducements to desperate fighting are very powerful.
When Jefferson became president in 1801, he dispatched American warships and Marines to the Mediterranean and the Muslim Barbary Coast. Jefferson was determined to prevail on the sea and on the ground. In 1805, the Americans (with a band of mercenary recruits including some Muslims) marched across the desert from Egypt into Tripolitania – incursions that forced surrender and the freedom of captured Americans.
The battle inspired the Marine hymn: “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli, We fight our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.”
The First Barbary War, known as the Tripolitanian War, lasted from 1801 to 1805. It was young America’s first foreign war and the first effort to place an ally on foreign soil. Unfortunately and shamefully, Eaton, who led the march across the desert, was betrayed when a truce was signed prematurely. Colonel Tobias Lear, Consul General to the Regency of Algiers, lulled by so-called overtures of peace, signed a treaty promising more tributes for the release of captured officers.
From Eaton’s diary we have the following bitter assessment: “We find it almost impossible to inspire these wild bigots with confidence in us or to persuade them that, being Christians, we can be otherwise than enemies to Musselmen [Muslims]. We have a difficult undertaking.” (April 8, 1805)
