How Islamists Affected United States Form of Government

I also find the episode of the Barbary Pirates and the our Founding fathers fascinating. It seemed even exotic in High School despite the fact the whole Islamic aspect of this was hardly mentioned. I am catching up on my blog reading and From Burke to Kirk and Beyond... has a post up called America's first encounters with jihadists... 1784

Here is a part from his link from it conclusion of giving a great history of the event:

Though a period of paying tribute and douceurs (or “softeners” — expensive trickets and toys) to Islamic pirates would continue, the words of ‘Abd al-Rahman Adams were chilling enough to leave Adams and Jefferson in no doubt as to the sanguinary and messianic nature of their adversary. “An angel sent on this business,” lamented Jefferson, “could have done nothing” to placate such men. He called them “sea dogs” and a “pettifogging nest of robbers.” The episode preceded further acts of piracy against American vessels and the imprisonment and sale of its crews and passengers, and was enough to get Jefferson to overlook his wariness of federalism and agree to a Constitution with a strong central government capable of building and keeping a powerful navy. Adams, as it turned out, was more worried that American opinion wouldn’t rally for war, or accept its dire consequences. But the Philadelphia convention that drafted our national covenant in 1787 was hastened, and its welter of opinions unified, by the Barbary question. As the historian Thomas Bailey wrote, “In an indirect sense, the brutal Dey of Algiers was a Founding Father of the Constitution.”

America still sued for peace. The Betsy’s release had been negotiated, albeit abjectly, and to the accompaniment of America’s first diplomatic accord, the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Ship-Signals, signed with Morocco in 1786. But no sooner was the ship let go and its captives freed than it was recaptured by Tunis and renamed the Mashuda. Also, Washington at one point found itself spending 20% of its annual revenue in paying blackmail to a loose confederation of terrorists on the high seas. Under Jefferson’s presidency, the first era of American military predominance was inaugurated, with men like William Bainbridge, William Eaton and the Byronic swashbuckler Stephen Decatur, becoming folk heroes. Their legacies would be fondly remembered by Patton as he alighted, a century and a half later, on the shores of Morocco and Algeria, this time to defeat another barbaric and imperial menace — the Nazis.

If there is a lesson to be had in all this, it is that talk is not cheap in matters of geopolitics, and can be instructive in ways one hadn’t even considered.

But no commander-in-chief need be blind to the arrogance and intransigence of his foe, particularly when it is an Islamist one. (And Jefferson and Adams did not have to contend with a foe seeking the ultimate means of apocalypse.) Santayana got it backwards, in fact: even those who remember history are still doomed to repeat it.
That goes double for America’s involvement in the Middle East.

In the end were these not just the Radical Islamic Terrorist or at least the distant cousins to the Bin Laden's of the day?