The New York Post has a good wrap-up of the events off the coast of Somalia during the past few days. The article points out that the pirates had threatened to kill the captain of the Maersk Alabama and had AK-47's pointed at his back. At that point, we had no choice but to take their threats seriously.
I am reminded of all the Peanuts cartoons where Charlie Brown is up at bat at the end of a baseball game. His thought is that he can be the hero or the goat. President Obama was in a similar (although much more serious) situation. Had one of the pirates reflexively pulled the trigger on the gun he was holding, we might be in a very different situation. I believe President Obama did the right thing by giving the USS Bainbridge the freedom to act quickly in the situation. I am thrilled that the hijacking and kidnapping ended the way it did.
According to the New York Post article:
"Buccaneers operating out of lawless areas of Somalia increasingly have been chasing and seizing commercial ships operating under the flags of several nations, holding the crews and vessels hostage for millions of dollars. There currently are more than a dozen ships and 230 sailors -- none of them Americans -- being held hostage in the region."
The pirates' response to yesterday's events is to say that they will increase their level of aggression against French and American ships (the French recaptured a private yacht recently, killing two pirates and one hostage). The pirates are not justified in practicing piracy, and they are not justified in threatening to kill people, or killing people. The only answer to the problem of piracy is the one Thomas Jefferson employed during the early 1800's. Send in the armed forces (in his case the US Marines) to wipe out their bases and eliminate any pirates that get in the way of that effort. The world needs to unite and repeat that action. If the world is not willing to do it, America needs to do it and require other countries impacted by the pirates to help finance our actions.
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