Islam And The West (2)

As I wrote before, quarrels with Islam are nothing new to the United States. The US Navy was created to fight Muslim pirates on the North African coast in 1794. (Constitution, Constellation, and so forth.) American ships were being seized; Americans were being sold into slavery by the Barbary Pirates.
By 1800, as much as 20% of the federal budget was going to pay tribute to Muslim pirates so that they would not attack American shipping. It didn’t work. We just didn’t have the kind of money Britain or France could afford to pay them.
From 1801 to 1805 we fought the First Barbary War off North Africa. When Stephan Decatur made a national hero of himself by slipping into Tripoli Harbor and destroying a captured American warship in 1804, Britain’s Admiral Lord Nelson called it the most daring naval raid of the era.
We were forced to fight a second Barbary War in 1815. This finally slowed the pirates down, but we dared not withdraw our military forces until 1830 when France occupied much of the coast of North Africa and brought piracy to a momentary end.
I said “momentary end”. After the French left in 1962, piracy resumed. Ten years later, my sister-in-law was backpacking across Europe after graduation. She spent a night on the beach of the Spanish island of Majorca facing the Mediterranean. In the morning she learned the Muslim pirates had struck only a mile down the coast and kidnapped several European girls.
(The British went into East Africa in the 1880s to finally end the slave trade. Like piracy, slavery only stopped until the Europeans were gone. It has resumed today—yes, that’s the same Muslim slave trade we bought into in the 1400 and 1500s.)
There has always been piracy along the North African coast. The Romans dealt with it, and so did their later European offspring throughout the past two thousand years. The recent rash of piracy is attributed to the fall of Granada in Spain in February 1492.
The Muslim Moors were driven out of Spain—after a seven century war by the Spanish to recapture their country—and they sought revenge by attacking from their homes in exile in North Africa. They ranged as far as Iceland, attacking up and down the English Channel and rendering the whole Mediterranean coast of Europe unsafe for settlement.
Perhaps a million or more Europeans were captured and enslaved (a few wealthy ones were ransomed), and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ships were captured, looted and destroyed. Not since Viking times had there been such a seaborne threat to Christian Europe.
Of course the Muslims were free to do this because for much of this period Europe was wracked with wars and rivalries between Europeans. The Wars of Religion—between Catholics and Protestants, the wars of empire between France and Britain (involving Holland, Austria, Russia, Spain, Portugal and Prussia), and the Napoleonic Wars kept Europe too busy to worry about piracy.
In fact Europeans often encouraged the Muslim pirates to attack ships of their Christian rivals. This situation didn’t stop until after the Congress of Vienna in 1915. Then the increasingly industrialized European states could turn on their Muslim tormentors and bring piracy to a halt.
When the Europeans—notably the French and British—pulled out of this part of the world after World War II, it should not have surprised us to find ourselves facing an increasingly dangerous power vacuum into which we HAD to interpose our own forces. If nothing else, other Europeans would have.
The Russians tried during the Cold War. Today we see something similar to the machinations of the Eighteenth Century as we watch the Russians and the French salivate over oil fields in Iraq and Iran, just waiting for us to weary and pull out.
After all—as someone who has read any history at all—knows, the fight between Christians and Muslims has gone on in that area since the AD 600s.
If it hasn’t stopped in 1400 years, it is hard to see why it is going to stop anytime soon—no matter who has a “reach-out” strategy. The wars which we westerners fight with that part of the planet actually far predate Islam or Christianity.
As we slog through Iraq, we are following in ancient West European footsteps—Alexander the Great led the way; Caesar followed; then came Byzantium and the Crusaders. After them came the Spanish navies, followed by French, British and Italian colonial powers.
Now come the Americans—somehow imagining that ours is a new experience. No, the comedy has been playing itself out for about 2300 years now. It is somehow fitting that our first naval ships were built to carry on in the wake of the Romans and the Greeks.
We call ourselves Greco-Romans, and we are. This—war in the Middle East—along with Pythagoras, the Iliad and the Odyssey is part of our European heritage. Trapped by oil and history, we will not quickly shake it off.
Those who imagine we can just shout, “We quit”, and go home in August of 2010 are sadly wrong.