Bush is a blithering idiot as always and from the look of the man he is in a more or less state of permanent shock.  The economy is tanking fast, banks are going under, unemployment increases, the war in Afghanistan goes badly, Iraq is still unsettled, and, now, those damn pirates are getting everybody upset.

Use the navy to take control of that area of the world.  Come on, BooMan, you are crediting this lamest of all lame ducks with intelligence.  A dangerous accreditation, indeed.

To survive cruelties, children had to conceal their own feelings from themselves. Alice Miller The Truth Will Set You Free, p.96

Naval piracy has been going on quietly for years off the coasts of Africa, Asia, and South America.  Ships get hit and ransomed off and it's written off as the cost of business.  Big cargo ships these days are largely automated, meaning crews of a couple dozen can run an entire vessel.  Ironically, that only makes them more vulnerable to piracy (cost cutting for the loss.)

Still it wasn't a big deal.  Until last week.

The fact that a group of pirates hit a Saudi Oil Supertanker was their big mistake.  We know what happens to you under the Bush regime if you screw with the flow of energy company petrodollars.  These guys have now graduated into An Actual Naval Threat(tm).

I'm sure the Saudis and the energy companies phoned Darth Cheney personally and said "You will put a stop to this.  Now."  Their masters want results for the country they bought and paid for.

And you'd better believe things are going to get ugly out there off the Horn of Africa.

More at Zandar vs. The Stupid.

...Exactly what does the most powerful Navy in the world have to do right now that's more important than keeping the shipping lanes open? ...

For Bush there wasn't enough of a profit motive to have the Navy there, until now.

Fear will keep the local systems in line. -Grand Moff Tarkin -SLB-

I was one wondering how they were planning to fence $100,000,000 in oil.  Very few pawn shops have sufficient docking facilities.

What would be wrong with mopping up all those pirates with an exploratory force from India or the U.S.? You catch enough of the criminals (or kill them in combat) and it's over, right?

By the way, cartoonist Don Asmussen has some panels about this latest threat, the Arrr Qaeda, here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/19/DDASMUSSENBR.DTL

Just what we need on top of everything else. If those pirates blow that ship up and it leaks its cargo of oil, there will be a massive environmental catastrophe.

So much for the US being the world's policeman.

Change we can't believe in. No we can't!

This Saudi tanker was well out to sea, 200 miles I think, when it was taken. That far out it leaves a lot water to patrol and makes it difficult to protect shipping. That, and the fact that this is such a large ship, combined with a big increase in ships taken (I think eight this week alone), represent to big change in the pirates game.

The US actually has a problem doing anything about it because of Gitmo. Our legal standing to do anything is a bit murky because we muddied the waters. The Navy brass is said to be hesitant to act.

Other nations apparently would have less trouble knowing what to do with these pirates if they were captured. China publicly executed pirates and it pretty quickly stopped piracy in their waters.

Somalia is one of the great but lesser-known disasters of Bush's foreign policy legacy -- the rise in high-stakes piracy is only a symptom of a much wider humanitarian and political catastrophe that the UN is now calling worse than Darfur.

I remembered reading some things about Somalia over the past year or two, and dug up this diary on DKos by gjohnsit that covers some of the history there.

On MSNBC the other night, they were saying that the pirates are former fishermen who can't make a living at fishing anymore...  Bush's support of the Ethiopian invasion in the name of the great "War on Terror" that pretty much destroyed the Islamic Court system that was the closest thing to a stable government the country had seen in years, turning to piracy might be the only option some of those men saw for survival.

The answer to the problem of Somali pirates is not to send in the navy and marines (or worse, Blackwater) -- the war and devastation going on already is horrendous enough. Especially when Bush's policies are a large part of why things are so bad over there right now.  

It's hard to believe that Bush could have fucked up anything worse than he did with Iraq... but in Somalia, he actually did. And what's happening now in the Gulf of Aden is just another consequence of Bush's failed foreign policy legacy.

But all the news reports are about "pirates" -- and damn few in the media seem to be talking about the conditions of utter horror in Somalia that lead to piracy becoming an avenue to survival -- terrorism for profit -- for people who have very little left to lose.

Keith Olbermann speaks for me.

"Which begs the question: with so many US naval vessels in the region, how exactly was this situation allowed to get to this point?"

Honor among pirates?

Bush is "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense." --Former Nixon counsel John Dean

APM's Marketplace had a brief "interview with a pirate" a couple of weeks ago. This guy was working in the Straits of Molucca rather than off the horn of Africa, but I suspect the motive is the same. No work, no prospects, but a boat and some friends and a few guns and you can make a shot at being a pirate. For the fellow Marketplace interviewed, it was a hit-and-miss proposition complicated by the idea that if you scored, you were expected to share the wealth, leaving you about as well off as before.

I think I remember seeing yesterday on Rachel Maddow that India has taken an interest in the waters off Somalia because of the amount of Indian shipping that goes through there, and the Indian navy has taken on some of these pirates. Even so there are a lot of them, and they apparently have little to lose, so the threat is going to remain for a while.

We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty.

Now the real work begins.

I realize this story is old and I'm commenting on it rather late but just wanted to mention that Blackwater is now operating ships on "anti-piracy" missions off the coast of Somalia.

Pax

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