Fighting a War on Terror or, "Our Country, Right or Wrong!"

Yet as events seemed to speed out of control, U.S. leaders and intelligence agencies identified Osama bin Laden, the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as the predominant sponsors of terror and of the violence engulfing the world. Fortunately, Robert Allison's biography of Stephen Decatur does not contribute to this base of misinformation.1 Building on his earlier study of America's encounter with the Barbary States of North Africa from 1776 to 1815, Allison reveals the private and public life of the naval hero Stephen Decatur, who emerged as a nineteenth-century American icon because of his exploits against the Barbary pirates and against the British during the War of 1812.2 Leading men to victory in Tripoli, the War of 1812, and the Algerian War of 1815, Decatur created an enduring legend of bravery, celebrated in poetry, song, paintings, as well as in the naming of some twenty-six towns-from Georgia to Illinois to Texas.