First Principles

So it seems that one of President Obama’s first international military crises will be a repeat of one of our nation’s first menaces – piracy on the high seas.  How he deals with it will tell us much about the alleged steel in the spine of our mysterious new President-Elect.  There is, after all, a very simple solution to dealing with pirates.

Hunt them.  Sink their captured ships out from underneath them if necessary.  Kill them.  All of them.

Exterminate them like the vermin they are.

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This story linked on Drudge today was maddening.  World leaders, including our own, are wringing their hands and then throwing them up in the air, complaining about being powerless.

Admiral Michael Mullen, the US military chief, pronounced himself stunned by the pirates’ reach after their capture of the supertanker Sirius Star and its $100 million (£70 million) cargo. Commanders from the US Fifth Fleet and from Nato warships in the area said that they would not intervene to retake the vessel.

I remember getting reports of piracy in that area when I was sailing through it the better part of a decade ago.  Admiral Mullen was around – he even stopped by the ships I was on to tell us how great we were.  What’s to be stunned about?  It’s not like we couldn’t have seen this coming.  (And even if he didn’t, did he have admit it like that?  Sheesh!)  His statement – and the world’s inaction – is just embarrassing.

At least the Australian Navy is taking the problem seriously, as long as the pirates kindly refrain from their thievery within a month either side of Christmas.  No, no – don’t get up, fellas.  Maybe the East Timor Navy can help us out in the meantime.

There is no greater magnet for aggression than weakness, real or perceived.  Schoolyard bullies don’t pick on kids who punch back.  This is a lesson obvious to any 3rd Grader – stick up for yourself, or you’d better bring some extra lunch money.

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The world is taking some action, of course.  Diplomats are being dispatched.  Conferences are being held.  Arab diplomats are “discussing” the problem.  No doubt we are mere months away from a strongly worded letter to the pirates from Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon himself!  The pirates are quaking in their boots now, by golly.

But not military force.  No, no.  We have experts telling us that such a thing would be futile!

Analysts said, however, that the seizure of the Sirius Star exposed the use of foreign warships as “a sticking plaster” that would not solve the problem. “Maritime security operations in that area are addressing the symptoms not the causes,” said Jason Alderwick, a maritime defence analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Roger Middleton, a Horn of Africa specialist at the Chatham House think-tank, said that the capture was a crucial escalation. “Now that they have shown they are able to seize an enormous ship like this, it is beyond a military solution. You won’t fix this without a political solution.”

A political solution?!?  Like what, exactly?  They aren’t hijacking those ships because their children don’t have universal single-payer health care, or because they just want a homeland of their very own to retire peacefully to.  They’re doing it the same reasons thieves always steal – because they want stuff that isn’t theirs, and taking it is currently easier than earning it or paying for it.

That’s a cost-benefit equation within our power to adjust.

Here’s the solution.  You re-board the ship.  You sift out the pirates from the crew by their seaman’s papers or passports which are supposed to be kept in the Master’s safe, if possible.  You kill every pirate that doesn’t surrender.  The rest you bring back to the US, try, and then string up from the highest yardarm in the harbor.

But wait!  What if they go out of bounds?

Even there, pirates hijacked a Hong Kong-registered freighter, the Delight, as it carried 36,000 tonnes of wheat to Bandar Abbas. The hijack, the seventh in 12 days, took place near the Yemeni coast, underscoring the new tactic of evading foreign warships by simply sailing beyond their area of operation.

This isn’t hard, people.  The boundaries for chasing pirates should be “within the confines of planet Earth and its greater celestial vicinity.”

But that’s not all!  Alas, there are “legal difficulties!”

Operations undertaken by the coalition fleet are fraught with legal difficulties, ranging from restrictive rules of engagement to rights of habeas corpus, as the British Navy discovered when it detained eight pirates after a shootout last week. Yesterday the detainees were passed on to Kenya, where efforts to prosecute them will be closely watched for precedent.

First, rules of engagement are easy to change (I’m talking to you, Mr. President-Elect.)  As for legal rights, that one is actually easy, too.  It’s not like the war on terror, where there are legitimate problems of defining combatants.  These are actual criminals.  But why do we trust failed Kenya to try them?  Why do we care about their precedent?  What stops Britain from prosecuting them?  What happened to so thoroughly castrate the once-great Royal Navy?  Admiral Nelson is positively spinning in his grave.

Our nation has already claimed jurisdiction over pirates over two centuries ago, and put them on notice in our very Constitution.  We have the legal tools and framework in place.  What’s stopping us?

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The proper role of government can be understood as an umbrella.  In order to maximize individual freedom, the government must protect us from other individuals who might wish to curtail that freedom.  This is how being tough on crime and having a strong national defense are conservative in the tradition of protecting individual liberties.  (While the proper balance is admittedly never easy to strike, liberals and many libertarians tend to ignore completely the freedom-enhancing value of being able to live your life free from fear of crime or death-by-terrorist, as if government were the only entity capable of restricting your freedom.)

No where does this principle apply more than with protecting commerce from direct, physical attack.

Imagine I make a product, and want to sell it across town to my friend who wants to buy it.  He needs my product in his business, I need his money to grow my own business (and get a sweet car).  But if I am attacked and lose my product every time I try to transport it to my friend, my production becomes pointless, and my profit is lost.  In those circumstances, can I truly be said to be free to pursue my rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness?  Not in the least.  I starve, or am reduced to subsistence.  Same with him.

In a global economy, international piracy works to strangle freedom and liberty in exactly the same way.  It is a scourge to our most fundamental rights.

Undermining these economic liberties is far more dangerous than limiting the growth of some CEO’s retirement fund.  It is a direct threat to our civilization.

Don’t believe it?  I bet the Romans didn’t, either.

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But we don’t have to go all the way back to the fall of Rome to recall a lesson we should already have learned.  From Ted Sampley:

In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams, then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the “Dey of Algiers” ambassador to Britain.

The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress’ vote to appease.

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For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800.

Not long after Jefferson’s inauguration as president in 1801, he dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the Mediterranean, and informed Congress.

Declaring that America was going to spend “millions for defense but not one cent for tribute,” Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American Marines and many of America’s best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast.

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During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, crumbling as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on shore raids by Marines, finally officially agreed to abandon slavery and piracy.

You don’t negotiate with them.  You don’t work out “political solutions.”  You find them, hunt them, and exterminate them.  And you save money in the long run, while allowing your economy to grow unmolested back home and around the world by keeping markets for our products open and accessible.

President Jefferson figured that out.  And he only had eight ships.

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This is an easy one for Obama, especially with the world’s finest Navy to make it happen.  Will he show that steel Joe Biden says he has, or will he choose the path of “political solutions” and appeasement?

Trading Admiral Mullen for a sturdier model would be a good start.