Wipe them out! Why are the Pirates of Somalia Still Alive!?

The Pirates of Somalia - Clifford D. May - National Review Online

3/3/11

We have the weapons to defeat them. All we lack is the will.

Not long after achieving independence, the United States faced its first foreign threat: pirates off the coast of Africa seizing American merchant ships. As Michael Oren recounts in Power, Faith and Fantasy, his sweeping history of America’s involvement in the Middle East, American vessels were abducted beginning in 1784, their crews enslaved and held for ransom. One local despot, Hassan Dey, paraded his American captives “past jeering crowds” and “spat at them, ‘Now I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones.’”

This crisis, Oren writes, “raised fundamental questions about the nature, identity, and viability of the United States. . . . Would Americans imitate Europe and bribe the pirates, or would they create a revolutionary precedent and fight them?” George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both believed it was right and necessary to use military force. But not until 1794 would Congress vote to create a navy. And not until 1805 would U.S. Marines fight on the “shores of Tripoli.”

Today, American ships are again under siege by pirates off the African coast. This time, however, the buccaneers are setting sail from Somalia rather than from the territories that are now Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Today, the U.S. has the greatest navy the world has ever seen. But the debate is exactly what it was more than 200 years ago: Do we have the will to fight? Or would we prefer to submit to blackmail — to pay tribute to sea dogs?

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