Posted on 04/12/2009 1:31:45 AM PDT by neverdem
PIRACY is the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. Somalia is a failed state and has the longest coastline in mainland Africa, so piracy flourishes nearby. The 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel called piracy a “secondary form of war,” that, like insurgencies on land, tends to increase in the lulls between conflicts among great states or empires. With the Soviet Union and its client states in Africa no longer in existence, and American influence in the third world at an ebb, irregular warfare both on land and at sea has erupted, and will probably be with us until the rise of new empires or their equivalents.
Somali pirates are usually unemployed young men who have grown up in an atmosphere of anarchic violence, and have been dispatched by a local warlord to bring back loot for his coffers. It is organized crime carried out by roving gangs. The million-square-miles of the Indian Ocean where pirates roam might as well be an alley in Mogadishu. These pirates are fearless because they have grown up in a culture where nobody expects to live long. Pirate cells often consist of 10 men with several ratty, roach-infested skiffs. They bring along drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, grappling hooks, ladders, knives, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and the mild narcotic qat to chew. They live on raw fish.
The skiffs are generally used to launch attacks on slightly larger crafts, often a fishing dhow operated by South Koreans, Indians or Taiwanese, taking the crews prisoner. In turn, they use the new ship to take a larger vessel, and then another, working up the food chain. Eventually, they let the smaller boats and crews go free. In this way, over the years, Somali pirates have graduated to attacking oil tankers and container ships; the...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Sounds like the results of the focus groups are finally complete, and starting to be put into action...
The clock is ticking and it won’t be long before the Gulf of Mexico also has its pirates running rampant.
So are we supposed to have influence in the 3rd or not? I wish the NY Times would make up its mind......
Sorry, I don't buy this premise. Muslims have been pirating ships all through maritime history and just because the pirates have moved from the north coast of Africa to the east coast of Africa doesn't change anything - this is nothing new.
Take out the warlords and stop sniveling.
The United Natins Welfare Program will fix this. . .(subtext: ready or not; prepare to ante up here. . .)
Cool! Let me play! How about:
Failure to deal with piracy means incompetence and incontinence in the oval office.
One would think that Obama would be particularly motivated to get involved with the issue...
Yep, lots of foamy, soft-peddled soap: dozens of nuanced considerations, tangled and complex historical timelines, inveitable inabilities in dealing with these types of problems, and a general implication that really, in the end, there's nothing we can do or even should do.
And of course, no mention of Muslims.
Somali pirates are usually unemployed young men who have grown up in an atmosphere of anarchic violence,wonder how long it will take before things get nasty here?.
Bush’s fault.
This guy must be writing a novel.
When Haitians, who are as poor as Somolies, start engaging in piracy, I may start to believe that there is more to it than just Jihad...but now I wait.
Why doesn’t Geitner just print off an extra $2 million dollars and pay the swabbies, that would only divert about 30 seconds worth of printing press time away from TARP. It’s just scrap paper. But maybe me buck’os want to be paid in gold! Harrrrr.
Indeed. . .
Sooner or later, we are gonna have to give the Muslims the Jiahd they so desperately want.
HAPPY EASTER, CHRISTIANS!
Semper Fi,
Kelly
????
Spoken like an urban denizen.
“Anarchy on Land Means Piracy at Sea”? Can’t buy this formula out of hand. The British Crown commissioned privateers—state sanctioned pirates—to do their marititime dirty work for nearly 300 years (16th-19th centuries) and was hardly a state in throes of anarchy when it did so.
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