Pirates, Fishermen, and Mercenaries
April 14th, 2009 by Wil Robinson
I thought the U.S. military was funded by American taxpayers for the purpose of protecting our population (yes, rescuing an American hostage from pirates falls under “protection”).
But there is a difference between rescuing a kidnapped American citizen and providing routine sea patrols outside of U.S. jurisdiction – something that sounds more like corporate security at taxpayer expense. Yet a cacophony of voices is calling for the military to begin enforcing its rule over the one million square miles of open sea near Eastern Africa to ward off piracy.
It’s no surprise that commercial shipping companies want free military aid. The civilians that run the U.S. Department of Defense have made it quite clear that our superior military force is only to be used when corporate profits are threatened. The Iraq invasion sent a message to the world that the U.S. military acts at the behest of giant conglomerates like Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, and Exxon Mobil.
So now everyone wants in on the free security services. Commercial shipping companies – who spend most of their time outside of U.S. jurisdiction – now believe they are entitled to military protection.
If ever there was a job for Blackwater and the private mercenary armies that our perpetual state of war have encouraged, this is it. The cost of protecting commercial shipping should be born by the companies doing the shipping – not by U.S. taxpayers.
Hiring mercenaries like Blackwater would do four things:
- It would create occupational openings for mercenary firms and draw them away from theaters of war like Iraq and Afghanistan. Providing a job alternative for these private armies would fade the image America currently projects abroad with tattooed, gun-happy, testosterone-filled private contractors fighting wars in sovereign nations.
- It would relieve the U.S. military from the “responsibility” of protecting the one-million square miles of open sea that commercial shipping companies fear (and would thus avoid cost to American taxpayers). An already-stretched U.S. military cannot afford to be spread even thinner.
- Consider the rules of open sea: for all practical purposes, there are none. Throughout history, pirates have not enjoyed any rights or privileges. They live without rules and, thus, die without rules. Fight fire with fire – mercenaries are the perfect answer to modern-day piracy.
- It would be nearly impossible for trigger-happy Blackwater contractors to shoot unarmed civilians in one million square miles of open sea.
Problem solved.
Or at least the security problem would be solved. The root of the piracy issue still needs to be addressed, though few people other than Katie Stuhldreher seem interested.
Stuhldreher notes that when Somalia collapsed in the early 1990s, the rich fishing coastline was left with no state control. Foreign commercial fishing operations moved in and pushed out the locals. The first “pirates” were actually local Somali fisherman seeking “compensation” from foreign fishing companies that were profiting at the expense of Somalia.
Stuhldreher goes on:
“The success of these early raids in the mid-1990s persuaded many young men to hang up their nets in favor of AK-47s. Making the coastal areas lucrative for local fishermen again could encourage pirates to return to legitimate livelihoods.”
(Or at least encourage would-be pirates to consider another line of work…)
Stuhldreher’s solution? Fishery protection – either through the African Union, the United Nations, or a coalition of states.
Yet it’s important to separate “fishery protection” from “counter-piracy.” While commercial shipping companies would be responsible for their own private security (via firms like Blackwater), an international body would be responsible for monitoring fishing rights off the Somali coast, allowing locals to return to a profitable business.
There’s no doubt that a rescue operation, like the one that occurred over Easter weekend, requires highly-trained U.S. Navy Seals or Special Forces. But with heavily armed, muscle-bound mercenary guards on commercial vessels, the pirate’s chances of successfully boarding a ship in the first place would be next to impossible. Hostage situations would become far less frequent, local Somali fishermen could return to their livelihoods, and best of all – private mercenaries would have a safe place to operate without ruining America’s reputation abroad.
Any move by the U.S. military to assume the role of corporate security guard in the world’s oceans is a backward step for President Obama and our military.
It’s time for America to move away from the corporate warfare that assures industry profits are placed before human lives. It’s time for the U.S. to start addressing the root of problems instead of playing firefighter. It’s time for new, innovative ideas that create a better world instead of trying to return to an idealized past that has been whitewashed by a fuzzy memory.
How America moves forward on the piracy issue – a centuries-old problem – will determine whether we are moving into a new future, or retaining the failed policies of the past.
quite. haven’t the americans learnt their lessons yet about somalia?? great piece…x j oh ps ITS RAINING NOW here…and there?
Of course; it’s the same old song and dance:
It’s really our own fault that people want to kill us and steal our stuff. If we hadn’t fished in “their” waters (which, as you pointed out, are international and therefore fair game), they wouldn’t be kidnapping our people now. So it’s really the USA’s fault.
I’m with you on the private security firms thing, but though you support this now, later you’ll be wanting to prosecute them for committing “atrocities” against the skinnies for things like protecting our ships and defending their own lives.
Did you get permission to move to Canada yet? Amazingly, their “liberal pussy” quota isn’t full yet. I’m sure you’ll fit right in, though.
“something that sounds more like corporate security at taxpayer expense. ”
Ah Yup, took me till I was forty to figure that out. And what the military does’t do on orders, the CIA gets in there and mucks about till the military has no choice but to intervene.
*sigh*
We don’t sit around and wait for the Corporate newz to feed us lies any more, things are changing:
Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald on Bill Moyers discuss the Americans’ search for the truth in new media sources.
Some of the lefy bloggers were digging out the truth (not in msm or corporate controlled college campuses) very early Thursday morning.
Meanwhile the 50 million a year hateful corporate mouthpiece rails against the liberals.
janelle–
No - it’s not raining yet. At least another 70 days of heat before the monsoon arrives, and none too soon. Glad to hear it’s hit where you are. I’m leaving fora few weeks in May up to the Himalayas to get out of the heat.
Obama is a fascist–
Thank you for your highly-educated, well-thought out and intelligent response. I’m glad to see you are able to see things from more than a jingoistic, racist and stupid point of view, and are capable from refraining from ad hominem attacks on those people who aren’t just like you. It’s a real sign of intelligence and progress.
Please - keep writing - the Internet doesn’t have enough of people like you working toward a brighter future.
So Janelle is brilliant because she called Obama a fascist?
It was the Italians who dumped the toxic radioactive waste, and it’s European interests who take raw materials out of Africa rather than investing in education of women and clean water supplies and it’s probably European interests who are doing the fishing.
Europe does it’s share of screwing Africa, and I’m sure they have their share of fascists also. So don’t go blaming everything on the Americans.
Here’s a little primer on Somalia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia
Somalians aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed:
Major climatic factors are a year-round hot climate, seasonal monsoon winds, and irregular rainfall with recurring droughts.
and yet:
Total fertility rate: 6.6 children born/woman
http://indexmundi.com/somalia/total_fertility_rate.html
Inshallah
Nunya–
Uh, no, that wasn’t janelle calling Obama a fascist (she actually lives in Tanzania, so probably knows more about this Somalia situation than any of us).
My mistake - I should have separated my responses. I don’t know who that was with the Obama’s a fascist remark…and my claims of brilliance were sarcasm (at least attempted to be). I didn’t want to dignify the comment with a response.
As long as a society relies on manual hands to feed the mouth, birth rates will always be high. The more hands available, the more there are to do work, and small hands do more work than their small mouths can eat. So in the end, it’s a benefit to have more kids.
As long as there is no education and no economic progress, birthrates remain high. Rather than fight the birthrate, fight the poverty/education, and let the birthrate take care of itself.
And yes, I agree. I think Europe has more of a hand in the fishing than the Americans (I didn’t actually say anything about the Americans). And the rules of the sea give a buffer zone for each country - which has been invaded since Somalia collapsed. So in reality, it isn’t commercial fishing in the open sea - international waters- as the right-wing commenter who didn’t leave his name would have us believe.
I know. I just get so sad and angry every time I start looking at Africa. When girls are educated, people have clean water, safe places to live, leadership that actually cares about it’s people, and credit lines that don’t benefit only the multinational corporate interests, then things change. Then women really have the choice about how many children to have.
It just seems like the Islamists are so crazy that all they can do is scream about the evil infidel westerners and there is not anyplace where you can learn about westerners at any university in Arabic.
Latin America is throwing off the yoke of North American companies and Africa is still a train wreck.
Oh, yeah, almost forgot, Amy Goodman from Democracy now had a great show on Somalia yesterday
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/14/analysis_somalia_piracy_began_in_response
“….We speak with consultant and analyst Mohamed Abshir Waldo. In January, he wrote a paper titled “The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other?”…”
Nunya–
Thanks for the great link. Good to see someone else is picking up on the fishing connection…the story I quoted in my post was an op-ed I ran across last November.
It’s a great piece by Democracy Now - the mainstream media needs to pick it up (who am I fooling….)
Wil–
Great piece, thanks! I posted comments in the same vein on several sites. The Somalians were forced into this situation. Desperate people resort to desperate acts.
Nunya–
I mean no disrespect, for your comments are usually spot on, but……
“It just seems like the Islamists are so crazy that all they can do is scream about the evil infidel westerners…” is a typical Neocon/Zionist talking point. I could switch two words and be just as valid:
It just seems like the Westerners are so crazy that all they can do is scream about the evil infidel Islamists…
Although I am a Christian, I know several Muslims and have studied and preached with a few of them. A few loud-mouthed radicals is not a basis for condemning an entire religion. Should we condemn Christianity because of all the hate-filled speech that comes from the likes of Falwell, Dobson, Parsley, Bush, et al?
People are quick to deride the Muslims as radical hate-mongers, yet conveniently overlook the fact that Westerners (Christians) have killed more innocents than all Islamic radicals combined have killed. Is dropping bombs from 30,000 feet, or raining cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away, killing innocent men, women, and children, somehow more justifiable than a suicide bomber or a roadside bomb? Is killing, not really killing when done by us?
When did God die and leave His authority to the politicians in Washington,D.C.? I must have missed that news cycle. Before we start making wild accusations about the Muslims, we would do well to heed Jesus’ advice, and ‘remove the beam from our own eye’.
An excellent idea, Wil. We need your smarts back here at home, you know?
Brother Tim, you totally missed my point. I’m not a neocon Zionist, but you can’t tell me that Islamists who encourage suicide bombings are sane. Even I know that that is against the teachings of Islam.
Quite frankly, I’m damn sick of everybody blaming all their problems on America and Israel.
Is it Israel’s fault that there are no jobs in the Middle East? NOPE. Iran is the only country that provides free birth control, and don’t give me some ridiculous sermon. Human population growth is wreaking havoc on the planet. Do a little homework on the loss of glacier water and how it is already causing riots in India.
Colonialism has left an ugly legacy all over the planet, and the religious teaching of “go forth and populate, and conquer the planet” endemic to all religions IS a problem.
There were 2.3 billion humans on the planet when my mother was born. There were 3.2 billion when I was born. There are now close to 7 billion.
Number don’t lie and technology cannot overcome and is in fact causing pollution problems that will continue to wreak havoc even after large numbers of people die of thirst, or diarrhea.
Wake up, you fool, the answers to a lot of human misery lie in the education of women and their ability to choose how many children they have.
Oh, and Wil, you might like an interview I left a link for in another comment. Bill Moyers interviewed Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) and Glen Greenwald, and they talked about how Americans are simply going around the mainstream media. More and more people are looking for reliable sources of information and the msm is proving to be an ‘epic fail’
Nunya–
I did not ‘totally miss your point’, in fact, I agree with most all of what you had to say. I was addressing that one sentence only. I did not, nor would not, call you a Neocon/Zionist. I read your comments here all the time and know that is not the case. What I said was, that sentence is a typical Neocon/Zionist talking point.
Nowhere did I say that Islamists who encourage suicide bombings are sane. In fact, I stated just the opposite.
I tried to qualify my comment to you in the first sentence, but you got your panties bunched in a wad over the second sentence and it blinded you to the rest of the comment.
It’s a long stretch to say EVERYBODY is blaming ALL their problems on America and Israel. What they ARE blaming is America’s hegemonic behavior, imperialism, and raping and pillaging the earth of it’s resources. Another Neocon talking point is: We’re in the Middle-East to ‘protect our oil supplies’. NEWSFLASH — It’s not ‘our oil’ until we buy it or steal it, and stealing seems to be the preferred method.
I never have, nor never will, preach a sermon on birth control, pro or con. And had you ever been to my site, you would see that I have done my homework on global warming, and have posted extensively on it. I have also never preached, “go forth and populate, and conquer the planet”.
As for your final ad hominem attack: I may be a fool, but I am a wide-awake fool. The education of women as the answers to a lot of human misery is theoretical, at best. As for their ability to choose how many children they have, I believe Wil addressed that quite adequately in his comment above, and I concur with him.
Peace and Grace
Brother Tim,
So the Taliban not allowing the UN to bring in polio vaccines to the Swat Valley because they believe that Westerners are trying to kill or sterilize Muslims is not an example of “It just seems like the Islamists are so crazy that all they can do is scream about the evil infidel westerners” ?
The negative views that I personally have of Islam are not based on Neocon talking points. They are based on conversations I have had with women who came from countries with Shariah law. They told me things because I am a woman that they won’t tell you guys because you are men. You want me to list the countries that these women came from?