In the comic books, bad guys often team up to fight the forces of good. The
Masters of Evil battle the Avengers superhero team. The Joker and Scarecrow
ally against Batman. Lex Luthor and Brainiac take on Superman.
And the Somali pirates, who have dominated recent headlines with their
hijacking and hostage-taking, join hands with al-Qaeda to form a dynamic evil
duo against the United States and our allies. We're the friendly monsters - a
big, hulking superpower with a heart of gold - and they're the aliens from
Planet Amok.
In the comic-book imagination of some of our leading pundits, the two headline
threats against US power are indeed on the verge of teaming up. The
intelligence world is abuzz with news that radical
Islamists in Somalia are financing the pirates and taking a cut of their booty.
Given this "bigger picture", Fred Ikle urges us simply to "kill the pirates".
Robert Kaplan waxes more hypothetical. "The big danger in our day is that
piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists," he writes. "Using
pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a
crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain
nationalities thrown overboard."
Chaotic conditions in Somalia and other countries, anti-state fervor, the
mediating influence of Islam, the lure of big bucks: these factors are
allegedly pushing the two groups of evildoers into each other's arms. "Both
crimes involve bands of brigands that divorce themselves from their
nation-states and form extraterritorial enclaves; both aim at civilians; both
involve acts of homicide and destruction, as the United Nations Convention on
the High Seas stipulates, 'for private ends'," wrote Douglas Burgess in a New
York Times op-ed urging a prosecutorial coupling of terrorism and piracy.
We've been here before. Since 2001, in an effort to provide a distinguished
pedigree for the "global war on terror" (GWOT) and prove the superiority of war
over diplomacy, conservative pundits and historians have regularly tried to
compare al-Qaeda to the Barbary pirates of the 1800s. They were wrong then. And
with the current conflating of terrorism and piracy, it's deja vu all over
again.
Misreading piracy
Unlike al-Qaeda, the Somali pirates have no grand desire to bring down the
United States and the entire Western world. They have no intention of
establishing some kind of piratical caliphate. Despite Burgess's claims, they
are not bent on homicide and destruction. They simply want money.
Most of the pirates are former fisherman dislodged from their traditional
source of income by much larger pirates, namely transnational fishing
conglomerates. When a crippled Somali government proved incapable of securing
its own coastline, those fishing companies moved in to suck up the rich catch
in local waters. "To make matters worse", Katie Stuhldreher writes in The
Christian Science Monitor, "There were reports that some foreign ships dumped
waste in Somali waters. That prompted local fishermen to attack foreign fishing
vessels and demand compensation. The success of these early raids in the
mid-1990s persuaded many young men to hang up their nets in favor of AK-47s."
Despite their different ideologies, al-Qaeda has one, the pirates don't - it
has become increasingly popular to assert a link between radical Islam and the
Somali freebooters. The militant Somali faction al-Shabab, for instance, is
allegedly in cahoots with the pirates, taking a cut of their money and helping
with arms smuggling in order to prepare them for their raids. The pirates "are
also reportedly helping al-Shabab develop an independent maritime force so that
it can smuggle foreign jihadist fighters and 'special weapons' into Somalia",
former US ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn recently argued.
In fact, the Islamists in Somalia are no fans of piracy. The Islamic Courts
Union (ICU), which had some rough control over Somalia before Ethiopia invaded
the country in 2006, took on piracy, and the number of incidents dropped. The
more militant al-Shabab, which grew out of the ICU and became an insurgent
force after the Ethiopian invasion, has denounced piracy as an offense to
Islam.
The lumping together of Islamists and pirates obscures the only real solution
to Somalia's manifold problems. Piracy is not going to end through the greater
exercise of outside force, no matter what New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman may think. (In a recent column lamenting the death of diplomacy in an
"age of pirates", he recommended a surge in US money and power to achieve
success against all adversaries.) Indeed, the sniper killing of three pirates
by three US Navy Seals has, to date, merely spurred more ship seizures and
hostage-taking.
Simply escalating militarily and "going to war" against the Somali pirates is
likely to have about as much success as our last major venture against Somalia
in the 1990s, which is now remembered only for the infamous Black Hawk Down
incident. Rather, the United States and other countries must find a modus
vivendi with the Islamists in Somali to bring the hope of political
order and economic development to that benighted country.
Diplomacy and development, however lackluster they might seem up against a trio
of dead-eyed sharpshooters, are the only real hope for Somalia and the
commercial shipping that passes near its coastline.
From the shores of Tripoli
It would have been the height of irony if the sharpshooters who took out the
three Somali youths in that lifeboat with their American hostage had been
aboard the USS John Paul Jones, a navy guided-missile destroyer.
Considered the father of the American navy, Jones was quite the pirate in his
day. Or so thought the British, whose ships he seized and looted.
We are left instead with the lesser irony of the sharpshooters taking aim from
the USS Bainbridge. This ship was named for Commodore William
Bainbridge, who fought against the Barbary pirates in the battles of Algiers
and Tunis during the Barbary wars and was himself taken prisoner in 1803.
The parallels between the pirates of yesterday and today are striking. Then, as
now, American observers miscast the pirates as Muslim radicals. In fact, as
Frank Lambert explains in his book The Barbary Wars, those pirates
actually served secular governments that were part of the Ottoman Empire (much
as Sir Francis Drake plundered Spanish ships on behalf of Queen Elizabeth in
the 16th century or Jones served the United States in the 18th). Then, as now,
the pirates resorted to preying on commercial shipping because they'd been
boxed out of legitimate trade.
The Barbary pirates took to looting European vessels because European
governments had barred the states of Algiers, Tripoli, and Morocco from trading
in their markets. Back then, the fledgling United States accused the Barbary
pirates of being slavers without acknowledging that the US was then the center
of the global slave trade. Today, the US government decries piracy, but doesn't
do anything to prevent the maritime poaching of fishing reserves that helped
push pirates from their jobs into risky but lucrative careers in freebooting.
The most improbable link, however, involves the conflation of terrorism and
piracy. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001 pundits and historians
identified the US military response to the Barbary pirates as a useful
precedent for striking out against al-Qaeda. Shortly after the attacks, law
professor Jonathan Turley invoked the war against the Barbary pirates in
congressional testimony to justify US retaliation against the terrorists.
Historian Thomas Jewett, conservative journalist Joshua London, and executive
director of the Christian Coalition of Washington State Rick Forcier all
pointed to those pirates as Islamic radicals avant la letter to
underscore the impossibility of negotiations and the necessity of war, both
then and now.
The battle against the Barbary pirates led to the creation of the US Marine
Corps ("... to the shores of Tripoli") and the first major US government
expenditure of funds on a military that could fight distant wars. For
historians like Robert Kagan (as argued in his book Dangerous Nation),
that war kicked off what would be a distinguished history of empire, which he
contrasts with the conventional wisdom of a United States that only reluctantly
assumed its hegemonic mantle.
Will the current conflict with the Somali pirates, if successfully linked in
the public mind to global terrorism, serve as one significant part of a new
justification for the continuation of empire and a whole new set of military
expenditures needed to sustain such a venture?
The new GWOT?
The United States has the most powerful navy in the world. But what it can do
against the Somali pirates is limited. Big guns and destroyers are incapable of
covering the necessary vast ocean expanses in which the relatively low-tech
pirates operate, can't respond quickly enough to pin-prick attacks, and
ultimately aren't likely to intimidate what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
has quite correctly termed "a bunch of teenage pirates" with little to lose.
"The area we patrol is more than one million square miles and the simple fact
of the matter is we just can't be everywhere at once to prevent every attack of
piracy," said Lieutenant Nathan Christensen, of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
Last year, approximately 23,000 ships passed through the Gulf of Aden. Pirates
snagged 93 of them (some large, some tiny). Yet, in part because these trade
routes are so crucial to global economic wellbeing, this minuscule percentage
struck fear into the hearts of the most powerful countries on the planet.
The failure of the US Navy to stamp out piracy has led to predictable calls for
more resources. For instance, to deal with nimble, low-intensity threats like
the speedy pirates, the Pentagon is looking at Littoral Combat Ships instead of
another several-billion-dollar destroyer. The navy is planning to purchase 55
of these ships, which, at $450-$600 million each, will come in at around $30
billion, a huge sum for a project plagued with costs overruns and design
problems. With the ground (and air) war heating up in Afghanistan and the
Central Intelligence Agency in charge of operations in Pakistan, the navy is
understandably trying to keep up with the other services. The navy's goal of a
313-ship force, which boosters champion regardless of cost, can only be reached
by appealing to a threat comparable to terrorists on land. Why not the
functional equivalent of terrorists at sea?
Pirates are the perfect threat. They've been around forever. They directly
interfere with the bottom line, so the business community is on board. Unlike
China, they don't hold any US Treasury Bonds. Indeed, since they're non-state
actors, we can bring virtually every country onto our side against them.
And, finally, the Pentagon is already restructuring itself to meet just such a
threat. Through its "revolution in military affairs", the adoption of a
doctrine of "strategic flexibility", and the cultivation of rapid-response
forces, the Pentagon has been gearing up to handle the asymmetrical threats
that have largely replaced the more fixed and predictable threats of the Cold
War era, and even of the "rogue state" era that briefly followed. The most
recent military budget from Gates, with its move away from outdated Cold War
weapons systems toward more limber forces, fits right in with this evolution.
Canceling the F-22 stealth fighter aircraft and cutting money from the Missile
Defense Agency in favor of more practical systems is certainly to be applauded.
But the Pentagon isn't about to hold a going-out-of-business sale. The new
Obama defense budget will actually rise about 4%.
George W Bush's "global war on terror" turned out to be a useful way for the
Pentagon to get everything it wanted: an extraordinary increase in spending and
capabilities after 2001. With GWOT officially retired and an unprecedented
federal deficit looming, the Pentagon and the defense industries will need to
trumpet new threats or else face the possibility of a massive belt-tightening
that goes beyond the mere shell-gaming of resources.
The "war on terror" lives on, of course, in the Obama administration's surge in
Afghanistan, the CIA's campaign of drone attacks in the Pakistani borderlands,
and the operations of the new Africa Command. However, the replacement phrase
for GWOT, "overseas contingency operations," doesn't quite fire the
imagination. It's obviously not meant to. But that's a genuine problem for the
military in budgetary terms.
Enter the pirates, who from Errol Flynn to Johnny Depp have always been a big
box-office draw. As the recent media hysteria over the crew of the Maersk
Alabama indicates, that formula can carry over to real life. Take
Johnny Depp out of the equation and pirates can simply be repositioned as
bizarre, narcotics-chewing aliens.
Then it's simply a matter of the United States calling together the coalition
of the willing monsters to crush those aliens before they take over our planet.
And you thought "us versus them" went out with the George W Bush
administration.
John Feffer is the co-director ofForeign
Policy In Focusat the Institute for Policy Studies. His writings can be
found athis website, and you
can subscribe to his weekly e-newsletter World Beat
here.
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