Plugging the Gaps

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Email To A Friend

Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.

SPONSORED BY

The Coast Guard has had different missions thrown at it—drug interdiction, terrorism and homeland security—that some say have taken it away from its core mission. Does it have the resources for this new one?
Coast Guard leaders would probably say exactly that—we are the best suited, but we don't have the resources. So then you have two options. You can give them the resources, but it would take time and money for that to work—probably five years. The other option is to rack and stack your priorities, and just walk away. You figure, the problem isn't important enough, so you move to the next issue and accept a certain amount of piracy coming out of Somalia. That's my fundamental argument; the impact on the global economy is minimal and there's no existential threat to the United States. We should be careful about how agitated we get over piracy.

« Prev Page

Member Comments

- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: Horrible Bastard @ 04/20/2009 4:52:40 PM

JohnGaltLakeTahoe: For the love of God, cease your spamming.
- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: Havener1901 @ 04/19/2009 3:29:50 PM

Listening to the story unfold last weekend about the standoff between the USS Bainbridge and the pirates in the lifeboat, I couldn't help thinking that the USS Constitution - yup, the 215 year old wooden frigate permanently tied up in Boston Harbor, which fought the original Barbary pirates in the 1800???s - would have been almost as suitable as the state of the art Bainbridge for this particular mission. If that's overstating things a bit, then it's probably safer to speculate that there are lots of mothballed Vietnam and Korea-era destroyers and frigates out there that could be brought on line for a job like this. Or helicopter carriers: rehab a couple of retired helicopter carriers; equip them with suitably armed anti-pirate helicopters capable of responding quickly within a radius of, say 250 miles.
In British and Dutch colonial times, their big shipping firms (like the Dutch East India Co.) maintained their own armed vessels for escort duty. Could the big shipping lines now organize a proto-navy or coast-guard and send their merchant ships past Somalia in escorted convoys?
Alternately, could NATO simply blockade the Somali harbors where the mother ships are based? It???s not like there???s really an organized Somali government against whom this would be seen as an act of war.
- Reply
- Report Abuse
Posted By: rpearlston @ 04/18/2009 4:20:57 PM

I prefer a solution that recognizes all aspects of the problem, including the causes thereof. The closest that I've seen to that has come from mental1, who has done a very good job of outlining the problems with the other so-called solutions that have been proposed, and at least recognized the source of the piracy.

The real solution here is a ong-term one, and it won't be easy. It is a law-enforcement issue, but it's a law-enforcement because Somalia is a failed state. The biggest part of the solution here is nation-building, and it will take the help of a large number of countries to help to rebuild Somalia and it's governmental structure. Remember, though, that that structure must be one that suits Somalia, and like it or not, it won't be a carbon-copy of the US.

There's one more thing that I need to say hre, and it's this - the solutions posted by most of the respondents here are the "solutions" that cause so many people on this planet to hate the US, and you keep shooting yourselves in the foot every time that you propose them and every time that you back them. Wake up and understand why and how the world sees you, and perhaps you'll finally be able to modify youir approach to the world at large, and therefore modify the responses that you get from the world in return.