Let me lay out a few thoughts with regard to the current conflict in the Red Sea.
The Quasi War
The very first test of the new United States was just a decade after the ratification of the Constitution. France was at war with England, as it seems they have been more often than not. When the Republic of France went to war with Great Britain and the European coalition in 1792, the United States declared its neutrality, and the French didn’t like the fact that the new nation was neutral.
This was made worse from the French point of view when the US signed the Jay treaty with Britain, opening trade between the new nation and the British colonies in the Carribbean. As a matter of policy, France began permitting privateering against US shipping. This sparked the formation of a new US Navy to take on French privateers in a conflict called the Quasi War. In the beginning, merchant ships were converted to Naval service while the US built its first six frigates. The conflict ended in 1800. This is an important conflict because it was waged by President George Washington until he retired in 1799 and Congress never declared war.
Jizya
It should be well known to my readers that non-Muslims living in areas controlled by Muslim rule are referred to as dhimmi. The term dhimmi means “one whose responsibility has been taken” and refers to those who must be ruled over by those of the Muslim faith. Muslims believe that dhimmi must convert to Islam, serve Muslims as laborers or in their military, or pay tribute referred to as jizya.
This was the premise behind the Barbary pirates. The Barbary states were a collection of Muslim nations on the north coast of Africa: Morocco was an independent kingdom, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli owed a loose allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. The naval forces of the Barbary states were capturing US ships and holding the crews for ransom, some for more than a decade. They were doing this because they were Muslim and were demanding the US pay jizya in exchange for their ships being protected from the Barbary states themselves.
As we have posted above, and in previous posts, the practice of state-supported piracy and ransoming of captives was not wholly unusual at the time. International law said that pirates could be executed on sight. Granting a letter of marque made a pirate a legitimate member of a nation’s policy and not a pirate. This is where the Constitutional clause allowing letters of Marque came from.
Since the US was busy fighting off the French privateers at the time, they decided that it was cheaper to pay the jizya to the Barbary states than it was to fight them as well as the French. That’s what they did until 1801, when the Pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Qaramanli, citing late payments of tribute, demanded additional tribute and declared war on the United States. The US chose to stop paying the jizya and instead sent their new Navy. The Marines still sing about the resulting military action to this day. The US negotiated a halt to the raids in 1817, but they continued raiding shipping of other nations until the French finally invaded Algiers and leveled the place.
Continued Problems
What we are seeing in the Red Sea is a continuation of the Muslim desire to force everyone to either convert or pay tribute. That is why piracy is a problem in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden. The Muslims in Yemen and Iran have decided that people either pay tribute or serve them in their desires. Those morons wouldn’t be able to do anything if it weren’t for the Iranians supplying them weapons. Note that European nations’ shipping is being left alone. I wonder what that is…
The US has long taken the position that the open ocean is free for navigation. We can either try to fight another forever war of insurgency against Yemen, or we can cut their weapons off at the source- tell Iran to stop supplying missiles to terrorists or else. No need to engage in a long war- tell them to stop selling weapons to them. If the weapons continue to flow, then take out the Iranian navy. If they want to continue after that, we can bomb the missile factories. If we don’t want to do it, all we have to do is tell Israel that we will no longer hold them back from doing it themselves.
