As America prepared to fight back against the terrorists who attacked on 9-11, author Joseph Wheelan decided to look back two centuries to when the United States launched its first war on terror.

The result is "Jefferson's War," a new book that finds several remarkable similarities between our enemies then and now.

Wheelan, a former editor and reporter for the Associated Press and the Casper Star-Tribune, now lives in Cary, N.C. About four months after 9-11, intrigued by David McCullough's account in his "John Adams" biography of the U.S. war against the Barbary states that began in 1801, he began pouring over the complete documents of the war housed at the nearby University of North Carolina library.

The terrorists in both cases were Muslims who had declared a holy war against Americans. Barbary pirates had been attacking Christian ships for 200 years, terrorizing their crews and making them slaves. The United States, as European nations had, struck treaties with the Barbary states - known collectively as "The Terror" - in the 1790s and made payments to keep from being attacked. In a recent phone interview, Wheelan noted that the post-Revolutionary War U.S. didn't have much choice, since it was without a navy and lacked the tax money to build one.

But that changed when Thomas Jefferson became president. After pushing for years for a strong navy, he acted quickly and decisively: within days of his inauguration Jefferson sent a naval squadron to the Barbary states to use force if necessary. By the time it arrived, Tripoli had already declared war on the U.S.

Wheelan's book begins with a stirring account of the initial naval battle in the war in which the U.S. Enterprise, led by Lt. Andrew Sterett, captured a Tripoli corsair.

"Sterett was a real pistol," Wheelan recalled. "A lot of those young officers were. They were fighting naval men and they yearned for action."

Wheelan said Sterett received a special citation from Jefferson for his heroic actions, but the lieutenant ultimately left the navy a few years later when a fellow officer was promoted ahead of him.

Wheelan said the Barbary War was a popular one, with literally no critics of Jefferson's decision to send the first American troops to fight in a hostile land. "It was remarkable; everybody was in favor of it," he said, for both moral and commercial reasons. The U.S. needed to trade with Mediterranean nations, but Barbary pirates made that it impossible. Wheelan said Jefferson estimated that in the 1780s the U.S. lost some 900 shiploads in the Mediterranean.

"He felt the United States had not thrown off one tyrant - Britain - to be made to bow down to a lesser one. He just said the only way to deal with (the Barbary states) was to repel force by force.

"He wanted to make an impression on Europe, too," Wheelan added. "He wanted to show them the United States was a different country and it wouldn't bow down to the Barbary rulers as Europe had. We would stand up for our rights."

Wheelan has concluded Jefferson was right. "The way to deal with terror is with military force," he said. "There's no other way; you can't negotiate and expect to have a lasting agreement with people like that who want to either invoke a jihad for moral reasons like al-Qaida for their agenda or for mercenary reasons like the Barbary states did.

"And it seems like that's what we're doing," he added. "That's what George Bush decided to do, to immediately go after the terrorists and not let up until the last one is captured or killed."

Wheelan said Americans closely followed press accounts of the war and were alarmed when the U.S. Philadelphia was captured in 1803 and its 307 crewmen were made slaves. "That was a real shock," he said. "But the reaction was we needed to send more ships and build more ships, and that's what they did."

One of the parallels between the war on terrorism in the 19th and 21st centuries is the use of special operations in both the Mediterranean and Afghanistan, Wheelan said. Americans knew they couldn't allow the Barbary states to have a fully equipped frigate, so the U.S. hatched a plan to destroy it. Using all volunteers, they boarded the ship at night, overpowered the Tripolitan crew and set it on fire. "It was quite an achievement," the author said.

But Wheelan said another special operation using a ship named the Intrepid, loaded with barrels of gunpowder, went awry. The goal was to float it into the Barbary navy and destroy it, but it blew up ahead of schedule and the American crew was killed.

As it did in Afghanistan, the U.S. used foreign bases. It also learned to work with local insurgents. The former U.S. consul to Tunis, William Eaton, led a 520-mile desert expedition with an army of eight U.S. marines, disaffected Triopolitans, Arabs, and European mercenaries, culminating in the successful battle of Derna in 1805 and raising the Stars and Stripes on the shores of Tripoli.

Wheelan's effort has drawn positive reviews from both historians and journalists. Evan Thomas, author of "John Paul Jones," called it "a fascinating and readable story of how America fought and won its first war on terror."

Alan Cochrum of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote: "Wheelan draws lines between 'The Terror' of 200 years ago and that of today, but he wisely refuses to indulge in overkill. 'Jefferson's War' is a bit of sturdy history that informs the reader about the dances of diplomacy and daily life as well as those of wartime death."

Wheelan is now researching another book about the treason trial of Aaron Burr, in which Jefferson also plays a huge role. The author said his opinions about the nation's third president have been greatly altered by his research.

"If you ask an ordinary person about Thomas Jefferson they think that he was sort of like a philosopher king, and the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence," Wheelan said. "This wise man who led us through an early period of our history.

"But there's a lot more to Jefferson than that.

"He could be very vindictive," he added. "He's a very complex character, and I don't think historians have ever really gotten their arms all the way around what he was. He was kind of a mass of contradictions in some ways. When he decided someone was his enemy, for example, he didn't forget anything. He'd go out of his way to make things miserable for them, but he did it in such a way he didn't leave too many fingerprints on things like that. He let other people do the dirty work, like James Madison."

During Burr's trial, Wheelan said, Jefferson "flat out said he was guilty, he was a traitor," in a message to Congress.

"It was pretty outrageous," Wheelan said. "The government had no evidence against Burr, and he was acquitted."