Radical Islamic Militant Somali Pirates!

The Somali pirate situation just gets more and more bizarre. Some western observers have reported that these people are some sort of primitive vigilante coast guard. As though that were not absurd enough, i heard on the radio today an interview of a Somali who is spreading this story, and who claims they were forced to it because the other nations of the world are dumping nuclear waste in the coastal waters of Somalia. Now, i'm never surprised to see outrageous claims like that--look at the incredible horseshit the conservatives around here peddle. But what is pathetic is that anyone who claims to be a responsible journalist would retail that stupid claim, or give the time of day to someone making such a claim, much less interview them.

I dont know how many times I must say this but I'm not prejudiced against anyone. But I reserve the right to be prejudiced against political or religious creeds that advocate violence and intolerance. That imo includes nazism and islam.

I'm not prejudiced against the man for what he is, but I maintain my right to argue with his ideas. I dont have to hold fire just because he claims his religion is beyond criticism.

At best Islam is nonsense, i.e.it makes no sense. At worst it's a dangerous and pernicious cult that spreads fanaticism and intolerance. imho.

Why don't you go sign up to join them ya fat 'tard?

It is rather hard to square the notion that Somali pirates are Muslim jihadis given the latest news with regard to the seizure of a Saudi-owned tanker:



Source

If the pirates were truly Islamist militants, why would they have done what the Islamist militants condemn, and why would those same Islamist militants now attack the pirates?

Logic is a little thin on the ground with regard to the initial thesis of this thread.

The thread is actually about a quite interesting topic - if only it's creator was a tiny bit knowledgeable and be able to ...

Latest news is that the "good Islamists" are probably in lead ...

In foreign affairs, but especially in failed states, it is always hard to tell the players without a score card . . .

Piracy, whether in the Malacca Strait; on the Magreb coast in the Mediterranean; or near the Horn of East Africa is the predictable result of just a few factors - opportunity; multiple rich targets, and a few examples of success to attract others to the trade.

Piracy is much more difficult to eradacate than has been acknowledged here. Even the Romans required multiple expiditions over an extended period of time to suppress (never eradacate) the trade ( a decade before Caesar's expidition to which Setanta referred, Pompey also gained fame for "eradacating" these pirates. Their decentants were still in the trade more than a millenium later when the fledgling United States took on the 'Barbary pirates' operating from precisely the same ports).

Setanta has raised the question of why the Navies of the (Western) world have not earned their keep by suppressing the trade near the Horn of Africa. The answer is very simple - their governments (often for good reasons) have not required them to do so. Why? The reason is that the effort presents numerous contradictions that the peoples of Western countries aren't generally willing to face. Notwithstanding the fact that it fails to exercise controls over crimes in its claimed territory, Somalia continues to claim territorial rights over adjacent seas, and those claims present serious legal problems for most Western governments, particularly European ones, obsessed as they are with the fiiction of world government.

France has long maintained a very substantial naval presence in the area - based in nearby Djibouti. They have never intervened to prevent the piracy that infests the region, very likely because the effort would complicate their interests far more than it would benefit them. The same is true for the United States. This was also true for the former Soviet Union which until its fall maintained a very large naval base and presence at Socotra island at the southern mouth of the Red Sea. That India is beginning to intervene now is very likely an effort on their part to advance their own national interests in the region in the face of a Pakastani rival that is in political turmoil and gripped by conflict between Islamist militants and advocates of a secular state. India has long had a very large navy with large bases just across the Arabian Sea - ample physical ability to suppress the piracy from Somalia: that they have done nothing until now is merely an expression of their changed political calculations on the matter.

Perhaps some readers here will recall the unfortunate shootdown of an Iranian airliner by the U.S. cruiser Vincennes in the airspace over the Straits of Hoemuz in about 1987. At the time Iranian Naval and paramilitary vessels were engaged in sporatic attacks on tankers exiting the Persian Gulf for ports generally in Asia and the west. These attacks had severely damaged several vessels, killed numerous crewmembers and threatened the closure of these vital straits. USS Vincennes was actively involved in the suppression of these attacks, and in the midst of these operations, wrongfully engaged the airborne target, believing it was a retaliatory Iranian air attack (something Iran had repeatedly threatened to do). Numerous errors of action and judgement occurred on Vincennes that led to the deaths of over one hundred passengers on the unfortunate Iranian airliner. These were widely publicized, constituting, among many other things, a serious political problem for this country. However, very little attention was given to the evident fact that the Revolutionary government of Iran claimed the right to contuct illegal attacks and warfare on international trade through the Straits of Hormuz, while at the same time claiming all the rights of peacful passage by airliners in the airspace immediately above.

This unhappy tale illustrates the many contradictions that governments face in dealing with issues such as this. Until those who so loudly advocate decisive action are willing to deal with these contradictions, nothing much is likely to happen.

The only noted piracy during the last four years in the Mediterranean Sea was in Corsica (Corsic separatists) and on the Baleares/Spainish coast (ETA).

Or are you referring to the Barbary Wars? In that case, you certainly could expend your list by some dozen more regions ...


(For the actual data, I've trust in those by the IMC Piracy Report Center.)

My reference was to the Barbary pirates and their local antecedants - who operated there for almost two thousand years - from the fall of Carthage to the Barbary wars (started by America) . I wasn't attempting to provide a complete list of contemporary piracy. Rather my point was that piracy is ubiquitous, persistent and very hard to eliminate.

That a thing is difficult of accomplishment is not a sufficient reason not to make the attempt, if the thing desired is important.



I can agree with all of this, except the fling about a fiction of world government. I acknowledge that i ought to have pointed out that the professional navies of the world have not intervened because of the reluctance of their political masters. It's a bit much, though, to have Baby Bush and the neo-cons wrapping themselves in a patriotic flag to the effect that the invasion of Iraq eliminated a great evil, but willing to ignore so patent and obvious an evil.

In a declaration in 1259, three key Hanseatic cities (Lübeck, Rostock and Wismar) agreed to outlaw piracy and punish those who abet it.
The Baltic Sea area had always been the subject of piracy - the creation of the 'Hanse' stopped that - though they didn't have an own navy.

I think you are missing the significant point here, Stanta. There is little doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime was a great evil - indeed a much greater evil than Somalian piracy. One need consider only the bloody 15 year war he started with Iran; the persistent oppression of his own people; and the unprovioked invasion of Kuwait. The problem is that the political and human costs of our ill-considered attempt to eliminate him and install a modern, secular government in Iraq have far exceeded the benefits of an otherwise largely successful (in terms of achieving these modest objectives) effort.

I don't think you can argue that Somali piracy is an evil comparable to that created by Saddam's regime. Moreover, I have a hard time rationalizing the notion that we must certainly take decisive action to eliminate Somali piracy (with all the attendant side effects in mind), while one, at the same time, judges our intervention in Iraq to have been an absurdity.

Perhaps Walter will enlighten us with a description of the unprecedently wise actions the Hanseatic cities took to so effectively, and with such few side effects, to permanently eliminate the vice of piracy from the Baltic. Perhaps he will also tell us how they might be applied today off the Horn of Africa in the specific conditions that exist there.

I would say that there is considerable doubt that the regime of the Ba'athists in Iraq was a great evil.

You tip your partisan hand. First of all, the war with the Persians lasted not quite eight years, not 15 years. In the second place, Iraq was encouraged and abetted in that war by the Reagan administration, of which the Baby Bush administration is a palid imitation. As for the cruelty of his domestic administration, if that were a valid criterion, we'd need to invade about a third of the world's nations. Iraq had a modern secular government--they simply had one of which we did not approve, with a leader whom we despised. The invasion of Kuwait was handily answered at the time, by Pappy Bush, who carefully elucidated cogent reasons for not "implementing regime change," and which minatory logic has been borne out in the experience.

I agree that Somali piracy is not an evil comparable to the Ba'athist regime in Iraq--it is much more pernicious, immediately present and deplorable. Given that Saddam was merely offensive to a set of partisan clowns, and was not actively interfering in the commerce of the world, as the Somalis are, i find it ludicrous to claim Iraq represented a greater evil. I consider the Iraq invasion to have been an absurdity, and one tragic for the Iraqis in their tens of thousands. The probable result, too, will be that the former secular regime in Iraq, which i acknowledge was brutal and repressive, will be replaced by a Shi'ite regime, which may well, in the course of time, and a short course of time at that, become in its turn brutal and repressive. The Iraqis want us out, and short of another invasion, there will be nothing we will be able to do to govern what type of regime emerges.

Somali piracy, on the other hand, is something with which professional navies can deal effectively, something which makes good economic sense, and it is the very thing that professional navies have always been good for. In times when an actual state of war has not existed, preventing or extirpating piracy has been the job of professional navies throughout history . . .

. . . until within in the last century, when navies have gotten fat and lazy.

If you truly believe that, there isn't much to say. Perhaps though you should consider the relative death tolls in the wars with Iran & Kuwait, as well as that associated with the oppression of Iraq itself -- all compared to the toll associated with piracy off the Somali coast. It seems to me they aren't in the same league.

I happen to believe the 1991 Gulf war was a great strategic error. While we did restore the property of rich Kuwatis, we did little to promote justice and stability in either Iraq or the region. Indeed we - at great cost - removed the only effective check to the destabilizing efforts of the radical regime in Iran.

I believe you wrongly imply that the United States somehow advanced Saddam's ambitions in starting his war with Iran. The fact is he acted on his own in the mistaken belief that he could quickly and decisively exploit the post revolutionary chaos in Iran to his advantage. Instead he found himself engaged in a bloody war of attrition with a country with more than three times the population of his own. It is true, however, that our policy during that war was to aid whatever side appeared to be loosing at the moment. Though our minor assistance to Iraq has been widely publicised, it was preceeded by assistance to Iran in the earlier stages when it appeared that Saddam might have a walkover. That was a wise policy and we should have continued it in 1991. In that respect the Bush & "baby Bush" administrations were the antithesis - not a pallid imitation - of the wiser policy of the Reagan years.

Susan Rose's Medieval Naval Warfare, 200, is quite a good source. (ISBN 978-0415239776)
In 1259, the town council of Reval (Tallin) wrote to the same in Lübeck: 'We are a unit as are the arms of the Crucified'.


So my answer to your question is: a union in interests. When all nations which are dependent on sea trade (and who isn't?) fight piracy and not only their own little national interests ...



[As an aside: from 1487 onwards there had been - for a few years only - a smaller 'Reichsflotte' [Navy of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation], stationed in Antwerpes, whose only purpose was to fight piracy.)

I think the problem here is that the nations dependent on sea trade - prominently including China, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, and the United States - all believe their "little national interests'" are, in this instance, much more significant. The same was true with respect to the attitudes of the European powers towards the Barbary pirates in the early 19th century. They were all willing to bribe the Barbary states into leaving them alone, because they had other, more important to them, intertests at stake. The then very young United States made a different calculation, based on its own unique interests, and acted differently.

I think the problem here is that the nations dependent on sea trade - prominently including China, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, and the United States - all believe their "little national interests'" are, in this instance, much more significant. The same was true with respect to the attitudes of the European powers towards the Barbary pirates in the early 19th century. They were all willing to bribe the Barbary states into leaving them alone, because they had other, more important to them, intertests at stake. The then very young United States made a different calculation, based on its own unique interests, and acted differently.

That the Hanseatic cities, united as they were principally for trade, should have had very commen central intertests with respect to the piracy that threatened the essential character of their union is hardly a surprise.

Well, I'd thaught that the Americans at first paid quite a lot of Dollars (against Jefferson's advice) over ... 20 years (?). And only when Jefferson became president ...