Ghost of a flea

As always, Mr. Hitchens does a great job, and this is a story America needs to know and remember - but there's a few points that should be addressed.

First, Jefferson - while not the anti-military and isolationist politician that many would have us believe - was never in favor of a large fleet and Marine regiment (and it stayed a regiment for another forty years or so) and firmly believed that America's destiny lay westward in the vast tracts of the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson happily allowed his SecTreas, Albert Gallatin, to come within an ace of essentially closing down the USN and the Marines with it - and this while the Barbary Wars were reaching their height. At one point, the USN was down to just nine purpose-built warships (the United States class frigates), and some of those were to have been 'in ordinary', that is, laid up with skeleton caretaker crews.

Next, what the USN was doing in the Med was far from the 'instructions to enforce existing treaties and punish infractions of them' that Mr. Hitchens states. They were there in the desperate hope that the Barbary pirates (who tended to quail away from large heavily armed warships with trained sailors and Marines aboard) would therefore stay away from US shipping. It didn't work for a number of reasons. First, the aggressiveness of the US skippers was in some cases less than what was called for (in one case, USS Constellation watched as a Pirate towed a captured US merchantman past because Constellation's skipper feared ending up aground) and secondly the ROE were utterly unbelievable - if a Pirate ship was caught, it could be fired upon and even captured, but then HAD TO BE RETURNED. There was one notable exception to that - the case of Mastico/USS Intrepid - and that was very much a case where the leadership on the scene just said 'the hell with it'. But overwhelmingly, the Mediterranean Squadron was not allowed to do a great deal and when it did it was badly hamstrung.