Pirates and Colonists
This class introduces the question we wish to explore over the next ten weeks: how did the United States come to be entrapped in a seemingly endless war for which there is no apparent definition of victory and for which there seems no exit strategy?
There is a Conventional Narrative that holds this war began on September 11, 2001 when a blameless America was attacked by evil terrorists. Some may find this simplistic belief to be comforting, but it provides no satisfactory answers to the fundamental question of how this happened.
America’s War for the Greater Middle East cannot be understood without looking at aspects of our history and the history of the peoples of the middle east that have led to this point. We will find that our contentious relationship with this region dates from the Declaration of Independence with attacks on our merchant vessels by Mediterranean pirates.
The last part of class one is devoted to looking at the phenomenon of Mediterranean piracy that existed from the classical era until well into the eighteenth century. How did the European powers deal with this problem? How did the different American approach set an adversarial tone for our dealings with this region that persists to the present?
