Barack, Barbary Pirates and Rebuilding the U.S. Navy

Irony hung heavily yesterday over Barack Obama’s lecturette on race & slavery, but only for those with a knowledge of slavery’s history. To hear Barack tell it, America invented slavery and is uniquely bad at mitigating racial friction. Neither is true.

Long before the first white Pilgrim set foot on America’s shores on November 11, 1620, black muslim cities on North Africa’s Barbary Coast –including Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Salé — made fortunes through piracy, kidnapping entire European coastal towns, enslaving thousands of their inhabitants and holding them for ransom. 166 years later, in 1786, they were still at it, now enslaving citizens of the nascent American republic. How did they justify this anti-social behavior? As Thomas Jefferson and John Adams then reported to Congress:

“It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave . . .”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Few modern Americans realize that America’s war on global terror began in earnest over two hundred years ago, in March 1794, when Congress authorized the construction of six naval frigates including the United States, the Constellation, and the Constitution. These ships were built specifically to war against the chief Islamic terrorists of the age, the so-called Barbary Pirates who were then in the habit of kidnapping and enslaving white Americans and demanding ransom for them from the U.S. government. The U.S. Navy was born to fight Islamic slave-trader terrorists. Think about it.

By 1815, U.S. marines carried aboard these vessels had put the superficially religious slave-trading mullahs in their place. But not for the last time. As John Philpot Curran famously said, in 1790, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”

With few exceptions over the intervening 200 years, the U.S. Navy and its sister armed forces have remained vigilant, ready and willing to defend American liberty. Today, while they are still willing, readiness has become a growing issue because of the constant demands on men and materiel over the past twenty years.

Yet, if we’ve learned nothing else about the world over the past two centuries, it should be that the Barbary Pirates are not going away. And with cash-rich China and Russia resurgent, the foreign policy stakes have never been higher. It’s high time to rebuild not just the Navy, but the entire U.S. military. The current edition of National Journal provides important insights into this serious challenge to American liberty.

Here’s a teaser:

Since 1991, the United States has been the world’s sole superpower. Now, 17 years later, the armed forces that underwrite that status have begun to fray. Nowhere are the limits of the U.S. military more evident than on the ground in Iraq, and so Congress and the media have focused their attention on the stretched ground forces of the Army and Marine Corps. U.S. control of the seas and skies is something that the public and policy makers tend to assume, as they have since the fall of the Soviet Union. But on the sea and in the air, America has coasted for two decades on investments made in the 1980s. Now, after a generation of heavy use around the globe, from Somalia and the Balkans in the 1990s to Afghanistan and Iraq today, hardware bought during the Reagan buildup is simply wearing out. . . .

Click on the coverpage graphic above for full text.

HT: Chris “Ox” Harmer, CDN U.S. Navy