He asserts that terrorism is a result of bad foreign policy; if he's said that every single attack is a direct result of US foreign policy then he's wrong, but if he's said that, I've missed it. And my angle is that the mistreatment of the Middle East has come from the West, beginning with World War I.
There are a few problems with citing the Barbary Wars. First, these conflicts took place a long time ago. The wars didn't cause any large impact (other than the creation of the navy, which you can bet would have happened anyway as we kept getting into scraps with Britain). I've heard enough people dismiss the Crusades as having happened a long time ago that the Barbary Wars ought to be given this same classification.
Second, many Muslims have condemned piracy as being one of the few cases in which capital punishment is a preferential punishment.
http://www.geocities.com/uk_imaan/imaan/QuranFAQ.pdf
Interpretive religion anyone? Some can take the Qur'an to mean, "Go kill everyone who isn't a Muslim," and that's that. Some take it to mean something completely different.
That said, under some interpretations of Islamic law, the Barbary Pirates would have been tried, convicted, and executed for their actions. Under the interpretations prevailing at the time, they were not. There were any number of factors for this: good old human greed, racism, fear of other cultures (especially Western cultures).
I'm not aware of any statesmen today who think that terrorism is something we should just "learn to live with." We all recognize it as a problem and our differences come in how we believe the problem ought to be dealt with (which is where the "where the problem came from" arguments all started).
We were in a very different position then than we are now. Then, a strong show of military force could get them to back down, as they were the aggressors, and treaties could keep the peace. Today, this is not true; a strong show of military force only creates more extremists who hate us, and treaties are ineffective so long as they are attained through coercion. In short, so long as they know we're manipulating them, there won't be peace - especially not by the end of a gun.
The "by any means necessary" philosophy isn't appealing anymore. If we simply wanted to eradicate the problem, sure, we could turn the Middle East into a pile of ash tomorrow and be done with it. If you're really an advocate of doing "whatever it takes" to defeat the enemy, why aren't you saying we should be launching missiles at them right now? That'd be the simplest, and probably most effective way to end the problem.
Of course, there'd still be the United States' own Muslim population that probably wouldn't be too happy with our eradicating their ancestral homeland. But after watching a century of systematic internal genocides in other countries I'm sure we'd figure out some way of dealing with them.
