On Piracy.

I think it’s ironic that this latest piracy “crisis” in Somalia comes less than two years after America got its last fix of Captain Jack Sparrow, and only six years after our first hit of the smarmy swashbuckler.  We spend the last 6 years falling in love with the romance of piracy, but now we can’t stand it?

WHY DO WE CARE?

Even though modern piracy has been around for decades, we never heard about it until Richard Phillips heroically sacrificed himself to save his crew, and was held hostage for four days until a dramatic, straight-out-of-the-movies SEAL/Sniper rescue operation.  Life suddenly became a video game of good vs. evil.  Again.

WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

I hear that we can’t treat pirates as terrorists because their attacks often come against ships built by a company in one country, sailing under the flag of another, with multi-national crews.  If a pirate attack is an act of war, who is it against?  Who’s responsible for defending the Gulf of Aden, since Somalia doesn’t have any kind of government to help?

So instead of treating pirates as terrorists, we treat them as criminals.  But which country’s laws should they be processed under?  Yesterday, a Canadian naval destroyer sailing for NATO helped thwart an attack and actually caught seven of the pirates responsible, but couldn’t do anything because Canadian law mandated the attack to either be on a Canadian ship (it was Norwegian) or against Canadian citizens (they were not).  So the pirates were released hours after their capture.

HOW DO WE FIX IT?

Right now, the immediate problem is that the area to be covered is simply too large to govern effectively.  Thousands of square miles can’t be covered simultaneously without thousands of ships, which would be ridiculous.  But what if the merchant vessels – the targets – all band together as they enter the gulf and sail as one unit, under the protection of one or more naval vessels, to a checkpoint at the far end of the danger zone, where the ships could split off in relative safety?  The pirates are (for good reason) terrified to go close to the big warships, so if the civilian vessels never get out of visual range, there’s a good chance that the pirates wouldn’t even come close.

WHAT’S THE SILVER LINING?

I see piracy as a perfect excuse to form more multi-national alliances, to get countries working together that never would have before.  I mean, NATO is working together in apparently harmony nowhere NEAR the north Atlantic.  As I write this, Arab countries in the area are considering how they can best protect their interests that pass through the Gulf.  Why not join the countries already there?  Why not have one huge, multi-national fleet working together, with one goal in mind?