El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War with Qaddafi,

This well researched and clearly written study of U.S. combat with Libya in the 1980s has important echoes for today’s policy makers. It begins with a quick look at America’s first war with a Mus- lim state—in the nineteenth century, when the U.S. Navy fought viciously with the Barbary pirates off the coast of North Africa. It then traces the rise of one of the Barbary pirates’ direct descendants—the well known late- twentieth-century practitioner of state terrorism Muammar Qaddafi of Libya