Piracy and Somalia

[StruckingFuggle]

Yes, that's what we need. A union to fix something that isn't broken.

Well if it's so easily and readily profitable to send ships through such dangerous waters as Somalia, might be time for the people who work it to be getting some rather generous hazard pay... unless they've been getting paid more as the waters got more violent.

So ... A capitalistic relationship is only a good thing when the influence comes from the top down, rather than the bottom up, eh?


[qupte]Forget getting rid of pirates. Let's have them slowly extend their reach through all useful trading lanes[/quote]
Yes because the two are just SO mutually exclusive.

Or guns. I support guns in this situation.

As do I, incidentally, either by arming the trading ships, or if that has a problem with sending them into port waters, then by having some sort of private (ugh) or multinational 'mutual defense shipping protection navy' escort the ships through the dangerous waters while staying outside of the ports. This is an arms race that would be won by the people with resources - the shippers - while the pirates would see it cease to be profitable. It doesn't really solve the bigger problems, but it at least buys a bit of peace.

But, if what issues Fuggle pointed out about with issues regarding sailing an armed ship into another nation's waters are true, then waiting for the Marines works too.

I think that was Cid, not I.

I'm all for not pissing off semi-civilized populations of the world if it means not getting air planes flown into our shit, but I'm not exactly sure how Somalia could get any worse, given its current condition.

Unless other terrorist organizations harness the combination of desperation turned violence and potential anti-americanism and recruit from Somalia for new operations, yeah, they're kinda like Grenada. It's not like they can do anything, they're a rather hopeless and helpless and powerless nation we could go curb-stomp and easily assert authority over. Hell, it might even be good for the American Soul after the miserable excursions into Iraq and into the Empire Killer, Afghanistan, to go through our weight around and come down hard for an easy win.

... Then again that's kind of what we expected to happen in Iraq, too.

[The Cid]

Or guns. I support guns in this situation.

Great. Fantastic idea. I'm all for it.

Unfortunately, it's wildly impractical. Allow me to reiterate.

Before you even say it: arming the ships would be next to impossible. That would mean that every time a ship crossed any nation's waters they would be forced to find a port and undergo an inspection. That's not really feasible.

I didn't just pull that out of nowhere: that's how international maritime law works. You can't just arm every ship because armed ships need to be inspected in every country whose waters they touch.

[Deacon]

Why don't we have a fleet of relatively inexpensive and fairly maneuverable gunships that can escort trading vessels through these lanes? Even better, have a few old subs loiter off the coast blasting pirate ships out of the water from the briny deep until they decide it's not worth doing.

[Hirschof]

I'm unsure but I think there have been international talks about that. I will try to hunt down a link.

[collegestudent22]

It's not like they can do anything, they're a rather hopeless and helpless and powerless nation we could go curb-stomp and easily assert authority over. Hell, it might even be good for the American Soul after the miserable excursions into Iraq and into the Empire Killer, Afghanistan, to go through our weight around and come down hard for an easy win.

That would be an excellent idea. However, our current combat ready force not deployed amounts to somewhere around 10,000 Army troops in 2007 (according to Ben Stein's How to Ruin the USA). The Navy is half the size of what it was in the 80s, and Stein estimates that the Marines would need to be increased by about 20,000 troops in order to have sufficient force to perform operations in Somalia or similar situations.

Why don't we have a fleet of relatively inexpensive and fairly maneuverable gunships that can escort trading vessels through these lanes? Even better, have a few old subs loiter off the coast blasting pirate ships out of the water from the briny deep until they decide it's not worth doing.

That would require spending more money on troops and equipment. We can't do that! Since Clinton cut the size of the military from 2.1 million troops to 1.4 million, we have had engagments in Panama, Haiti, Desert Storm, the Balkans, Somalia (! The UN's Operation Restore Hope worked SO well....), Iraq and Afghanistan. Hell, Obama (and Bush before him) won't even increase the size of the Army, despite evidence that the current troop levels are inadequate to come out on top in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and instead troops keep shifting from one theatre to the other. When a third of the active duty Army is deployed without a formal declaration of war, you really need a bigger Army.

[adciv]

Personally, I think introducing them to a conventional version of the Patton Doctrine would be best. We have people in the US complaining about environmental destruction and what not when the Navy moves it's bombing range, lets move it to some place without any environment to protect! We can even invite the Air Force! Target 7°59′N 49°50′E and everything within a 10 mile radius and your problem is solved! Optionally, we could use the original Patton Doctrine and also bring closer to fruition Obama's dream of a nuclear weapon free world!

[Seraphim]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/13-6

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
by Johann Hari

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

So are the Somalians the good guys, or were our founding fathers the bad guys?

[collegestudent22]

The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

So are the Somalians the good guys, or were our founding fathers the bad guys?

Neither. I call Shenanigans. The piracy conducted by our founding fathers was used to capture supplies on British ships headed to British troops we were at war against. The ships weren't merely passing by. Furthermore, if the Somalians really wanted to stop illegal fishing and waste dumping, why would they attack ships that AREN'T doing that?

[StruckingFuggle]

Because people everywhere, even in Somalia, suck - and so for every one who is could be just trying to look after his life and his home and his people you get more who're either getting carried away or are just using it as cover or an excuse.

You seem to be trying to group all the people of Somalia who engage in piracy into a single, unified group where statements about one apply to statements of them all. Which isn't ever going to be correct, just easy, lazy, and wrong.

[Seraphim]

The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

So are the Somalians the good guys, or were our founding fathers the bad guys?

Neither. I call Shenanigans. The piracy conducted by our founding fathers was used to capture supplies on British ships headed to British troops we were at war against. The ships weren't merely passing by. Furthermore, if the Somalians really wanted to stop illegal fishing and waste dumping, why would they attack ships that AREN'T doing that?

That's covered in the non-bolded parts and Fuggle.

Every nation uses irregulars, and mercenaries in times of desperation. America has been using Mercenaries recently. Black Water in Iraq. And like all merc's, they tend to be more aggressive and less disciplined than regular divisions. As it turns out most of the crimes committed by Americans in Iraq has been from our merc's and not our troops. The danger of pirates has always been that, while they provide additional support, they tend to form factions, some of which get carried away and cause crime.
It just seems so hypocritical to condemn Somalian pirates when we're across the sea with our own merc's.

[The Cid]

So are the Somalians the good guys, or were our founding fathers the bad guys?

Uh, I don't think you read the article you posted very thoroughly.

The "good intentions" part of all this pertains to how it got started, but it's not a provisional coast guard any longer. What started as an effort to stop poisonous dumping and overfishing has devolved into lawless seizure of anything they can get their hands on. There's no justification for that.

The article does bring up an excellent point though: Somalia has been a dying country since the early nineties and little has been done to help that's been at all effective. You're welcome to argue that it's not anybody's job to save Somalia, but just know that with a country that's fallen into such anarchy you're going to get something really bad.

It's a good thing to bring up the context that these people are taking to such drastic measures for a reason, and that reason is that their country is in ruins. That's not justification, that's not a good excuse. But I doubt it'll be easy to find the solution if we don't pay attention to the cause.

[Deacon]

Ugh. That article and the thinking behind it is bent all out of shape. Rationalization as justification powered by near propaganda isn't really very helpful. The right does enough of it that I hear all too often, but this particular brand of mental shell game is played most deftly by backwards leftists such as these "Common Dreams" people. Yeah, as though communism would be so lenient with these guys.

First of all, all this bleating about nuclear waste is stuff we're just now hearing about even though they came up 5 years ago. Why? Because it's a red herring. It's entirely irrelevant to the situation. The allegations that didn't surface until about 15 years after the fact were revealed to be contracts entered into between two European companies and the Somali government to safely (as much as such things can be) bury toxic waste in territorial waters. It took the massive tsunami of 2004 to be strong enough for there to be problems, and the problems are still just assumed to be related. And those isolated incidents occurred nearly 20 years ago.

Now that we've gotten some of the facts straight, toss it all aside, because it's utter bullshit to relate any of it to Somali pirates violently attacking merchant vessels passing through the area and holding the ship, its cargo, and its crew hostage in order to make the pirate leader rich. It's one of the most transparent and childish attempts at retrofitting rationalization to past acts and an outright lie that these warlords are simply considering themselves to be their country's Coast Guard. They don't inspect these ships that are lawfully and peacefully passing by. They don't arrest smugglers. They don't rescue seamen in distress. They hijack ships, kidnap their crew, and hold it all for ransom, sometimes killing some off.

That entirely useless aside about piracy in the 16 and 17 hundreds doesn't even count as a red herring, I don't think, since it's pure non sequitur, its sole purpose to set your mental stage with the anti-American and pirates-as-communist-heroes foundation to work some backwards pretzel logic into defending these absolutely unjustifiable warlords of the sea.

You seem to be trying to group all the people of Somalia who engage in piracy into a single, unified group where statements about one apply to statements of them all. Which isn't ever going to be correct, just easy, lazy, and wrong.

Wait, what? Which one of those posters were you responding to? And how, really, is it always going to be incorrect? At least, significantly incorrect.

Every nation uses irregulars, and mercenaries in times of desperation. America has been using Mercenaries recently. Black Water in Iraq. And like all merc's, they tend to be more aggressive and less disciplined than regular divisions. As it turns out most of the crimes committed by Americans in Iraq has been from our merc's and not our troops. The danger of pirates has always been that, while they provide additional support, they tend to form factions, some of which get carried away and cause crime.
It just seems so hypocritical to condemn Somalian pirates when we're across the sea with our own merc's.

I don't even know how to respond to thinking so broken as that. Where do you even start? Is it even possible to get past your rabid prejudices and warped world view and into some realm of reason? Or are you so far down the rabbit hole that there's no turning back? Only if we'd emptied the prisons to find vicious criminals, hire them to fly our flag, and then let them run loose for years wreaking havoc with innocent people could you even come CLOSE to beginning to be able to start down this ridiculous road.

It's a good thing to bring up the context that these people are taking to such drastic measures for a reason, and that reason is that their country is in ruins. That's not justification, that's not a good excuse. But I doubt it'll be easy to find the solution if we don't pay attention to the cause.

I really hate it when people assume that vicious criminals and warlords would otherwise be docile, peaceful, lawful people if they lived a life of luxury. It's as though every single organized crime member, every mafia boss, every wealthy and murderous dictator, every gang-banging drug dealer rollin' on twenny-fo's isn't following an innate drive for power and greed and notoriety but are rather simply trying to put food on the table for their family. It's easy to feel sorry for the starving orphan stealing an apple from a street cart, but let's not confuse wealthy and murderous warlords for some sort of "drastic times call for drastic measures" innocent.

[Seraphim]

So are the Somalians the good guys, or were our founding fathers the bad guys?

Uh, I don't think you read the article you posted very thoroughly.

The "good intentions" part of all this pertains to how it got started, but it's not a provisional coast guard any longer. What started as an effort to stop poisonous dumping and overfishing has devolved into lawless seizure of anything they can get their hands on. There's no justification for that.

The article does bring up an excellent point though: Somalia has been a dying country since the early nineties and little has been done to help that's been at all effective. You're welcome to argue that it's not anybody's job to save Somalia, but just know that with a country that's fallen into such anarchy you're going to get something really bad.

It's a good thing to bring up the context that these people are taking to such drastic measures for a reason, and that reason is that their country is in ruins. That's not justification, that's not a good excuse. But I doubt it'll be easy to find the solution if we don't pay attention to the cause.

I agree with you to a point. But I see the timeline as:
America declared Somalia's government invalid, and did not lay down terms for forming a new government that would be valid. America dumped and still is dumping shit. Europe, Russia, and China was and still are illegally fishing. Somalia, tried diplomacy but was rejected because America only negotiates with Governments and Somalia didn't officially have one. Somalia fielded pirates. We invaded and killed their power structure. They fielded more pirates. Those pirates are getting out of hand maybe.

I just really don't think war is the next step. I think perhaps we should apologize for all of that shit, offer to clean the place up, and everyone goes on with their lives. No war. No Piracy.

[Seraphim]

First of all, all this bleating about nuclear waste is stuff we're just now hearing about even though they came up 5 years ago. Why?

You heard it guys. Overfishing and dumping in territorial waters is irrelevant to people that fish those waters fur sustenance. I guess we just start killing them ay?

But seriously, knock it off with the communist shit. It isn't about that. It's about not destroying a country's main source of food, refusing to stop, and then bitching when they field pirates to stop you.

[Deacon]

America dumped and still is dumping shit. Europe, Russia, and China was and still are illegally fishing.

Citation needed. For all of it. I need to know that a reputable source has discovered the American government dumping nuclear waste on Somalia. I need to know that a reputable source has discovered the Europe, Russian, and Chinese governments routinely practicing illegal fishing in Somali waters (and specifically what makes it illegal). Of course, no such thing is or ever has happened.

Somalia, tried diplomacy but was rejected because America only negotiates with Governments and Somalia didn't officially have one. Somalia fielded pirates. We invaded and killed their power structure. They fielded more pirates. Those pirates are getting out of hand maybe.

I swear to god if you were new I'd swear you were just a troll. Unfortunately, you're only enforcing the distasteful memories of your past exploits here. A government hiring pirates to violently attack and raid civilian vessels even suspected of performing some illegal act is off-the-charts fucked up enough on its own. But they haven't been doing that for a long time, if indeed they ever were. Instead, they've been attacking and raiding innocent merchant vessels passing by and holding them ransom against their private and uninvolved trading companies. That, also, is nothing new, though apparently the news media around the world is finally figuring out that it brings in ratings. Trying to paint Somalia's long-running problems with violent pirates as "well, you know, boys will be boys, and a few might get out of hand maybe" is as abhorrent as it is mind-boggling.

I just really don't think war is the next step.

Is someone suggesting it is? I suggest the next step is to start blowing pirate ships out of the water.

I think perhaps we should apologize for all of that shit, offer to clean the place up, and everyone goes on with their lives. No war. No Piracy.

OH MY GOD. If only someone had thought of this sooner! If America would have just apologized to Jimmy Hoffa or Whitey Bulger for...whatever, then they'd break up their organized crime! If America would just apologize to Somalia for...nothing wrong, then the pirates will suddenly cease to be pirates!

FOR FUCK'S SAKE I'm pretty sure I've heard more coherent babble from an 18 month old.

You heard it guys. Overfishing and dumping in territorial waters is irrelevant to people that fish those waters fur sustenance. I guess we just start killing them ay?

Troooooooll...

But seriously, knock it off with the communist shit. It isn't about that. It's about not destroying a country's main source of food, refusing to stop, and then bitching when they field pirates to stop you.

Yeah, this self-labeled "progressive" activist group called "Common" Dreams going on about how pirates have created a communist Utopia and then doing the mental gymnastics required to justify vicious piracy today has nothing to do with an off-your-rocker leftist world view.