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...terrorist attacks against the U.S. have generated widespread comparisons to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and to the casualties suffered by the country during the Civil War, but as the country gears up for its response, one can also find some similarities to a far more obscure episode in American history - the war against the Barbary pirates in the early 1800s.

Plunder On The High Seas
In the years prior to the Barbary war, the U.S. and other countries had been paying pirates on the North Africa coast to let their shipping pass through the area unmolested -- although by the turn of the nineteenth century the country found itself subjected to increasing demands for tribute and finally a declaration of war on its shipping. Faced with a choice between the exorbitant costs of tribute and having U.S. interests in the Mediterranean attacked by pirates, President Thomas Jefferson dispatched U.S. naval vessels to the region.

One of the most famous incidents from that conflict involved then-Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, who sailed into Tripoli Harbor in 1804 in a bold mission to burn the captured USS Philadelphia. In other notable details from the conflict, the oldest commissioned ship in the Navy, the USS Constitution (still on display in Boston Harbor), also saw action off the Barbary Coast before going on to greater fame in the 1812 war. And of course, the famous line "to the shores of Tripoli" was also coined during the hostilities as U.S. Marines engaged in one of their first overseas missions.

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