[This paper was prepared for a seminar on the Maghreb at the Center for Algerian Studies in the School of Country and Regional Studies at Northwest University, in China, Shaanxi, Xi’an, in July 2025.]

Part of my intellectual history is inseparable from the fact that I was educated in an Anglo-Irish immigrant family in the US and that both my father and grandfather had served in that country’s navy. My grandfather had been an occasional companion to the American “march king”, John Philip Sousa, the Marine Corps’ most famous band director. I grew up with the US Naval Academy fight song and the Marine Corps Hymn. As a young lad one of my earliest memories was a visit to the USS Constitution, the US equivalent to the HMS Victory but unlike Admiral Lord Nelson’s flagship, the Constitution remains under sail when not berthed in Boston Navy Yard. Thus my first contact with the Maghreb was lyrical. 

In the souvenir guidebook from my visit, I recall that this US warship was deployed against the Barbary Pirates. At the time I did not know who they were. My idea of piracy was shaped by 1940s Hollywood fare. It was years later that I learned why Marines “defend our country’s honour” to “the shores of Tripoli”. I mention these anecdotal aspects because I believe they are indicative of the way in which ordinary people in the US acquire any perspective of the world beyond their country’s borders. Moreover this barely incidental exposure to the almost mythological projection of US power expresses a contradiction between the ostensibly popular democratic republic and its actual sources of power. The public pronouncements of US foreign policy reinforce the ignorance and self-centeredness which astound not only the governments but the peoples of other nations.

In 1777, the Kingdom of Morocco was the first state to recognise the independence of the 13 British colonies that would form themselves first as a confederacy and then after constitution as the United States with a treaty of friendship. The new, old elite of separated British North America comprised clerics, merchant mariners, and latifundistas extracting work from bonded labour, acquired mainly through the trade in enslaved Africans. It was this combination of theocracy, piracy and slavery that shaped the polity known as the United States of America. Today the much-vaunted “special relationship” makes it hard to believe that until the Great War (1914-1918) the British Empire was considered the principal enemy of the republic south of the River St. Lawrence. However the competition between the newly independent nation and its previous colonial ruler was fierce as the War of 1812 demonstrated. It was the only time the US was ever invaded by a foreign power since its founding. British forces under one Admiral Cockburn actually put the nation’s capital to the torch. The US only narrowly escaped defeat by the world’s premier military and naval force.

Recognition of the new republic by monarchies, like France and Morocco, at a time when dynastic autocracy was still the norm may be explained by opportunism, e.g. sharing in the efforts to reduce British power or the expansion of business with a new commercial enterprise. It is less likely that popular republicanism was present or sufficient until much later—when it was also violently repressed. Another contradiction propelled the naval and marine forces of the United States into the Maghreb. On one hand, a substantial segment of the US economy depended upon undisturbed transport of goods and souls. On the other hand, the US government felt obliged (i.e., was forced) to protect its own citizens at sea from impressment or enslavement. Namely there was also traffic in “white slaves”, historically acquired in Central Eurasia and sold within the Ottoman Empire. Even two centuries ago the US government was no stranger to hypocrisy, applying naval force to protect its “white” citizens from the predations of non-Christians while at the same time assuring that the African slave trade was profitably unhindered.

Thus the association of the Maghreb with lawlessness did not begin when Colonel Qaddafi was elevated to “public enemy no. 1”. A brief survey of the literature suggests that US-Maghreb relations can be divided US interest into three broad periods:

the mercantile-piratical of the 19^th century;

the North Atlantic integration until 1945, and

the imperial from 1945 until today.

The imperial can now be distinguished between the anti-communist until 1989 and the counter-terrorist since then. Prior to 1989, the Maghreb was viewed as a region that not only held valuable primary commodities, if unevenly distributed, but as a front where the mission was to obstruct national development programs in cooperation with or modelled on the USSR. After 1989 and the defeat of the Soviet Union, the previous pretext for interventions, subversion and plain old seduction became obsolete. As the notorious Samuel Huntington formulated it, there was due to be a resurgence of Islam, also to fill the void left by the collapse of the USSR—both practically and in terms of idealism. Given that  already in the wake of the Great War, European settler-colonialism would be given (or seize for itself) carte blanche to redesign the legacy of the fallen Ottoman Empire, the image of savage, meanwhile also “genocidal” tribes was recreated—as if from the Hollywood Western genre—to excuse the “scalping” of indigenous Palestinians. It should be remembered that even today in the US, the practice of scalping is a form of terrorism attributed falsely to the indigenous population. Scalping actually originated as bounty hunting of “Indians”. The practice survives today in the euphemism “body count” that became one of the key performance indicators for US Forces invading Vietnam.

Thus the focus of US policy was no longer “anti-communism” but counter-terrorism. The Maghreb became the set for an endless, if modernized, version of John Ford’s cinematic genre. Such has been the success of remoulding the anti-communism script into anti-terrorism, that even today there is no serious analysis of the phenomenon—deemed for convenience and Latin Christian tradition to be a unified field. The appeal of anti-communism and hence of anti-terrorism rhetoric is obvious. Both are products of the same political contradiction: namely that many regimes, including the US have their origins in some kind of coup d’état or revolt against an extant order. In monarchical systems, regime change does not rely upon popular legitimation. However, the governance rhetoric of the democratic republic—as even Thomas Jefferson asserted—includes the very violent means of overthrow that gives such a republic its inception. 

Anti-communism and anti-terrorism were both invented to resolve this contradiction by claiming that anything which supposed or was tantamount to replacement of the entire governance structure was clearly immoral, treasonous and criminal. Such a formulation in fact appealed to the sense of order of any Establishment. So while on one hand the US, as the patron of the Israeli state, was obliged to see Islam as the religion of terrorism, it had to appeal to governments in the region whose leaders were Muslim with the argument that as long as they suppressed any enemies designated by the US regime (and its NATO allies), their Islam would be exempted from the Crusade. Just as there was no fixed definition of communist in US practice, there was no empirically objective definition of terrorist. In other words, like in the days of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, accusation sufficed prima facie, while there was no catalogue of virtues, whether religious or civic, that could acquit anyone seized under these pretexts. 

Thus to consider the focus of US attention on the Maghreb, counter-terrorism policy, the term terrorism has to be properly understood. Terrorism is usually presented as a law and order or national security problem. In fact it is neither. In the West the term terrorism derives from a misinterpretation of the so-called “reign of terror” during the initial phases of the French Revolution and from the ideas of “revolutionary terrorism” found especially in the writings of Russian anarchists in the late 19^th century. Perhaps the most famous narrative articulation of the latter is in Dostoyevsky’s The Demons. Aside from the fact that far more deaths were incurred by the subsequent “white terror” in France, the claims by some of the revolutionary Left (when that term had some meaning) to promote terror was not an arbitrary lust for violence but the result of an analysis of the terror used by the Establishment to maintain its power. The argument for “terror” was essentially that the Establishment, e.g., the Bourbon monarchy, relied on terror to remain in power and would not surrender power to reason but only to superior terror. In contrast, counter-terrorism is based on the displacement and reconstitution of Establishment terror—arbitrary violence as a means to control human behaviour—so as to attribute Establishment violence to those who are targeted as real, potential, or imagined threats. 

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Dynastic group portrait of Louis XIV (seated) with his son the Louis the Grand Dauphin (to the left), his grandson Louis, Duke of Burgundy (to the right), his great-grandson the duc d’Anjou, later Louis XV, and Madame de Ventadour, his governess, who commissioned this painting some years later; busts of Henry IV and Louis XIII in the background. (Public Domain)

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The role Algeria assumed as a safe haven and supporter of independence and anti-colonial movements from around the world was certainly as legitimate as the pretence by the US regime to harbour and even nurture revolutionaries and exiles. The function attributed to the sodomised and murdered Libyan leader, Muamar Qaddafi, could hardly have been less honourable than that ostensibly performed by the government in Washington. If the term terrorism, or its superlative form in American jargon “state-sponsored terrorism” is to have any analytical value then it would do well to keep the cultural-historic framework of US policy, strategy and tactics in mind. In theoretical terms counter-terrorism can be traced to Modern Warfare, Roger Trinquier’s appreciation of his counter-insurgency experience in French Indochina and Algeria. Trinquier’s lessons would form an important element in US doctrine, especially the CIA’s Phoenix Program, the template for counter-terrorism today.

It is worth noting that this term has been applied almost exclusively to “brown” countries. In 1985 I witnessed an embarrassing exception. The UN organisation was celebrating its 45^th anniversary and I was attending sessions as an accredited journalist. Following the demolition of the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour by French espionage agents, then New Zealand premier David Lange actually accused France before the UN General Assembly of “state terrorism”. France’s foreign minister in New York for the commemoration, Roland Dumas, remained silent (claiming not to have heard the speech) but the reaction in Paris was speedy. The French induced the EU to impose sanctions on New Zealand’s imports—mainly lamb—until Mr Lange’s government surrendered the French terrorists to their state sponsor. 

While many states of the European isthmus share the Mediterranean with the Maghreb states, the US has no natural reason for engagement in the region. Yet it has historical motivations. These lie in the fundamentally commercial nature of the American state. This commercial character was reshaped by the theocratic refugees from the Thirty Years War and English Civil War who founded the colony of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Plantations. Whereas the continental powers in France, Spain and Portugal, exploited in the name of the Latin Church, the North Americans pursued commerce—in goods and souls—with religious fervour purely on their own behalf. As a race of pirates, slavers and drug dealers, they could hardly claim moral superiority to the Barbary sailors. However their commercial doctrine of freedom, e.g. freedom of contract, could be defended as freedom of the seas or free trade. Yet like the inequalities embedded in the fiction of the labour contract, free trade and free seas are the prerogative of those who can deprive others of their freedom. In essence the innovation of the US was to change Christendom, i.e. the church as state, into capitalism, that is to say the church without a state. 

In the civil law and the law of nations the principles of equality are moderated by the degree to which the equal can defend themselves against those who are more or less equal. Unequal treaties are the equivalent of the inequality in the labour contract. This inequality is not rational. It is based on the economy of sin and grace. The vociferous determination with which commercial war was and still is waged arises from this underestimated religious fervour. The aggression of the Crusades survives in the compulsion to define Islam—or even worse so-called “political Islam”—as an enemy to be vanquished. Yet contrary to mass media and popular portrayals, “political Islam” is not manifest in the terrorism conglomerate invented by Western intelligence organisations as agents and cut-outs for the violent transformations of 2001. True political Islam, as archenemy of the forces expressed through the US, is the memory of liberation from oppressive Christian oligarchs of which Augustine of Hippo became the most notorious mouthpiece. Political Islam was the fuel of anti-colonialism in territories that had been demarcated for the convenience of foreign powers. Just as the Roman pontiff waged incessant wars against the heretics who espoused the duty of clerical poverty and charity and their later manifestation in “liberation theology”, the chimera of Islamic terrorism was created to consolidate oligarchic power and suppress popular faith.

In Latin America the same strategy was pursued using evangelical Christian sects, funded both overtly and covertly, to undermine political Catholicism such as the basic Christian communities (CEBs) as well as to train cadre to support the US-sponsored dictatorships. The role of evangelicals in Latin American counter-insurgency operations receives almost no attention whatsoever where terrorism is concerned.

The US view of the world, its Weltanschauung, is derived from the universal conversion mission of the Latin Church, the incubator for the modern international business corporation. The jargon of security cooperation and strategic interests serves to conceal this universalizing force. Cooperation here is really another term for conversion. In the context of military mission, the complement to so-called trade, the primary force of national cohesion is to be integrated through exploitation of the command, reward and punishment system that modernized militaries share. The last thing the US wants is state power exercised through a different or antagonistic conviction, whether that be nationalism, Pan-Arabism, political Islam, socialism or any indigenous ideology. The illusion of rationality in commercial trade, or realism in policy, is particularly seductive to those who aim to govern states without popular legitimation. However that rationality remains an illusion as any honest examination of the current world trade regime demonstrates. The anti-colonial leaders who have paid with their lives since 1945 all faced this contradiction between the apparent rationalism of modernization and the integrity of the societies which they governed. The late Colonel Qaddafi was constantly mocked for his particular ideas about Libyan society. So was President Nkrumah before him. Yet no one dares to mock the very peculiar ideas of the settler-colonial republic with its capital on the Potomac. More importantly no one mocks the extremely peculiar ideas of the financial oligarchy in New York or London. Perhaps that is because numbers don’t lie, but people do.

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Dr. T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

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Featured image: Maghreb (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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