"Their response was still wrong, they could have done something different, knowing what they already know about the ME radicals"
Appeasing them just leads to more appeasement. Even the Colonies tried appeasing them centuries ago. our trouble with Islam didn't just begin when Bush was elcted...contrary to what some folks believe.
"In the book "Victory in Tripoli," Joshua London writes about the Muslim Barbary pirates. They attacked American shipping vessels in the 18th century, often boarding ships and enslaving crewmembers. Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. ambassador to France, and John Adams, then ambassador to Britain, visited the resident ambassador from Tripoli (modern-day Libya) in London to negotiate a treaty to protect American ships from Barbary pirates. Why, asked Adams and Jefferson, is your government so hostile to the fledgling United States of America? After all, we have no quarrel with you, nor you with us.
The Tripolitan ambassador told them -- as reported to the Continental Congress -- "that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise."
More:
"Jefferson's plan for an international coalition foundered on the shoals of indifference and a belief that it was cheaper to pay the tribute than fight a war. The United States's relations with the Barbary states continued to revolve around negotiations for ransom of American ships and sailors and the payment of annual tributes or gifts. Even though Secretary of State Jefferson declared to Thomas Barclay, American consul to Morocco, in a May 13, 1791, letter of instructions for a new treaty with Morocco that it is "lastly our determination to prefer war in all cases to tribute under any form, and to any people whatever," the United States continued to negotiate for cash settlements. In 1795 alone the United States was forced to pay nearly a million dollars in cash, naval stores, and a frigate to ransom 115 sailors from the dey of Algiers. Annual gifts were settled by treaty on Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli.
When Jefferson became president in 1801 he refused to accede to Tripoli's demands for an immediate payment of $225,000 and an annual payment of $25,000. The pasha of Tripoli then declared war on the United States. Although as secretary of state and vice president he had opposed developing an American navy capable of anything more than coastal defense, President Jefferson dispatched a squadron of naval vessels to the Mediterranean. As he declared in his first annual message to Congress: "To this state of general peace with which we have been blessed, one only exception exists. Tripoli, the least considerable of the Barbary States, had come forward with demands unfounded either in right or in compact, and had permitted itself to denounce war, on our failure to comply before a given day. The style of the demand admitted but one answer. I sent a small squadron of frigates into the Mediterranean. . . ."
