Where is Tunisia?
That’s what I read in many people’s eyes before I came here. I would have the same look about most of Canada, the Baltic, Russia, the Horn of Africa, and many other places. But there is a difference with Tunisia. As Americans, we should know the shores of North Africa. It is here that we forged ourselves as a new nation and then as the world’s greatest military power.
Barrack Hussein Obama pointed out in his June 2009 Cairo address that the kingdom of Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States of America. He also stressed the secular nature of treaty wording: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were keen to represent America as a secular country of religious, personal, and corporate freedom. We wanted to avoid the stigma of the earlier Christian actions with the Islamic western frontier. From the beginning, America saw themselves beyond thousand-year old conflicts, representative of a new world order with promise for all cultures.
Purdue University professor Frank Lambert details the early relationship between America and the southern Mediterranean in The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World. Fresh from the War of Independence, and with the flaccid Articles of Confederation, America was struggling to pay debts, strengthen its economy, and gain respect among nations.
When America threw off the tyranny of the Union Jack her protection came off too. Southern Mediterranean pirates, state-sponsored crews of Europeans and Africans, quickly recognized fresh bait and captured many American ships and cargoes and enslaved their crew. These state-sponsored pirates were the gatekeepers to the Mediterranean’s rich sea trade, and they demanded a toll. The British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch and the Portuguese sent gold, material and gifts south to the kingdoms of Tripoli, Fez, Algiers, and Tunis. They were buying safe passage to the markets of “the Orient” and the lucrative Levant trade with goods from Asia and Africa. But America cringed at this tributary system. The idea of free trade, the economic side to the American revolutionary philosophy, wouldn’t let us. The price was also hefty for a fledgling state.
Enslaved Americans and the blocked markets led to cultural misunderstanding, to the beginning of the replacement of the Articles of Confederation, and America’s first navy. Newspapers and politicians shaped the public idea of the Barbary states as “barbaric” and Islam as a savage dogma of violence. This was not in Obama’s speech, but America’s first image of Islam was bloodthirsty pirates who put free men in shackles. Lambert argues economic and political forces, under the might of Europe and the grip of the Ottomans, created these pirate states. Cultural memory also filled the raider’s sails: the sacking of ships was payback for the cleansing of the Reconquinista.
After giving in to the tribute system for a decade, President Jefferson used a redesigned American navy led by the able Commodore Preble to smash the Barbary states. Success here also led to the first broken promise by America to an Arab insurgency. As American consul in Tunis, William Eaton had studied the regime of Yusuf Karamanli and had found a fraternal crack. If America backed a coup led by the bashaw’s outcast brother Hamet, he would then sign a favorable treaty. The promise was implied, but not recorded, when Eaton and Hamet set out across the Libyan desert to sack Derne. The military maneuver was previously deemed impossible. Victory in Derne was followed by disappointment in Tunis: America signed a treaty with Yusuf without consulting Hamet’s force. Eaton returned to America bitter, angry and highly critical of a presidential act he damned as betrayal.
Europe now saw America in a new light: the fresh country had succeed where many had failed. The ideal of free trade, floated on fifty-gun ships, was victorious. Lambert implies that the end of the tribute system crippled the North African states, leaving them soft for colonization from France, Spain, Britain and Italy.
A century and a half later, the world was at war, but in North Africa, the effects of the American intervention in the Mediterranean were obvious. Colonization had turned the land into a theater for the European conflict. The Italian and Germans were in Libya, the Vichy French were spread from Tunis to Morocco. War material flowed through the Mediterranean to the Soviets and Nazis. This was “the soft underbelly of Europe,” nearly wholly controlled by the Axis. The Allies decided to carve a path to Berlin through it.
Military historian Douglas Porch called this strategy the “Path to Victory.” Operation Torch landed troops in Morocco and drove east, effectively ending Axis command of the Mediterranean. The experience battle-tested and taught American troops, forged a powerful Supreme Command, and positioned the British and Americans for their assault on italy and then Germany. But, I would wager not many Americans have heard this story.
I spent Veterans Day 2009 in the American Battle Monument in Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia. Nearly 3,000 Americans are buried here. Crosses and a few Stars of David cover a green field in a white geometric pattern. Fountains cool the air in the shade of trees. These are the Allied sacrifices in Morocco, Algeria and Libya in Operation Torch, begun in 1942 The military campaign is recorded here in Tunis in a beautiful wall mosaic of the ancient local style.
Nazi commander Erwin Rommel and his Afrikorps are represented with black tiles, their small swastikas converging from Libya on the red word Khasserine.
Under pressure from the Reischtag and eager to reclaim a legacy tinged by the disaster of El Alamein, Rommel came to Khasserine to teach the soft Americans a lesson. In the desert pass, his lean, experienced tank corps routed the Allied troops, injuring, capturing or killing a quarter of the 30,000 Allied troops.
Khasserine was a costly disaster whose responsibility lies on the ignorant, foolhardy American command, argues author Charles Whiting. American tanks couldn’t scathe the Germans because of they were inexperienced, yes, but also because at times they were using practice rounds. Whiting’s book Kasserine is chock full of military-bravado and troops shenanigans, but it tells this important, yet overlooked, part of American history.
Three Marines, two men and a woman, were at the cemetery on Veterans Day, the only other Americans present. It was a sweltering 90 degrees, and after I walked the perimeter, visited the gorgeous, spartan chapel and the black marble tomb of the unknown soldiers, I entered the air-conditioned office. A looped video gave the background to the foreign resting places of American troops in Europe, Africa, Mexico and the Philippines. Hanging in the cemetery’s office is a copy of a speech given by Habib Bourguiba dedicating the land in perpetuity to the memory of these soldiers.
His speech is also a testament in Arabic and English to another American betrayal on these shores. After Operation Torch and World War Two, America agreed to give French back her colonies in North Africa, despite their capitulation to Hitler during the war. When the French reoccupied to Tunis, scores were settled. Bourguiba points out in his dedication speech that American sacrifice did not ensure his country’s independence. Tunisia had to wait for its freedom.
As Obama begins to forge a new relationship with the Muslim world, he must be careful. America is no longer a country without a past. Bourguiba and Hamet Karmanli both felt betrayed by a nation who touted freedom but did not deliver it, and they are not alone. Above all else, Obama as a historian gives me the most hope: he would be wise to remember his predecessors’ promises and actions in North Africa.
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