Quote Originally Posted by csadn View Post
I'm not so sure -- most people are, tragically, ignorant of the fact the US's first overseas war involved Fighting Islamic Terrorist Hijackers....
I'm going to regret this no doubt, but I hardly think the Barbary Wars are in any way relevent to the current world situation. They were pirates who plundered ships and sold people into slavery for wealth. This is essentially what the western world had been doing for centuries at the time anyway, that is, plundering each other's ships, enslaving populations up and down the West African coast and slaughtering Christians of the "wrong" denomination (specficially but not exclusively, England and Spain in their wars). The modern concept of terrorist hijackers of any religion is completely misplaced in this context.