Pirates me hearties, pirates!

[Kevin]

Hi,
The disease is their disease. When the *people* of Somalia (ditto Afghanistan, China, most of the Balkans, pretty damned near all the rest of Africa, etc.) want to solve it, then we should be ready and willing to help them. Until they do, all we can do is make it worse. If there's a secret recipe for making it better, then history tells us it remains secret.

The symptom, on the other hand, is our problem. And it is a problem we can do something about, given leadership with guts and commitment. The price may be some hostages, but there's no profit in being a dead pirate. As we did two hundred years ago, so should we now -- speak to them in the only language they understand.

--Pete

So how do we help, even if they want it, even assuming they are wanting our ideals of freedom and democracy? How has any group of people ever really formed a nation. Has it ever happened non violently (I'm honestly ignorant of history, that's a legitimate question).

As Occhi says they are living in the past with modern equipment. But doesn't history show that it's pretty much been this warlord or that leader that united people under a strong will and eventually they realized it was better? Yeah the US history is better, it jumped off from a more developed start and had other ideals to build on. But it was still a stong group of leaders who drug the rest of the people to that point, violently. There were a lot of folks who didn't want the war, who didn't agree with the will of the founding fathers being imposed on them.

I fully agree with you that if we blow them all up, it only works if we blow them all. You can't leave one person left alive with that process or someone just replaces them and you can't know who it is.

The founders of the US had education and the benefits of building from a mostly stable state. How do you get education to the people, when there is no method of delivery?

Can you really blame the people for all of if? My uncles is so much less happy being a member of a co-op farm group than he had been, but the pressures of the mega farms boiled it down to, join a coop or slowly wither away and quit. How does a fisherman compete? Even if that person is a strong leader and organizes those folks into a collective to try and deal with the multinational finishing industry, with no central government how do they enforce their rights to the water they are fishing in? Maybe they did go what they thought was their government, which is a local warlord in this case.

I seriously look at that mess and can't see a way to cure the cause or handle the symptom effectively. Even if the people want the help. The Somali's don't want the religious doctrine thrust on them but they have no means of supporting a rule of law that they may want. How do we help them support that? Things are more stable in Iraq right now. It comes back to kill and destroy.

The whole of Africa is riddled with failure of support. Sending food doesn't work. Trying to build infrastructure doesn't work. How do you keep power in the hands of people when there are so many sources of power to enforce your will on other people available? The status quo can be very appealing compared to death. It takes some pretty strong motivation to die for a cause for most people. That's not in most people, but does that mean they don't have a right to it?


I've seen the pleas to Obama to step-up action on the pirates. But I don't see what it does. The people that have been screwed by living nearly a generation without a government and having the 2 or 3 they have tried to put together torn down by outside influences (Ethopia invading being the latest). How do we aid those people. Obama is screwed politically by any action he chooses here. Killing pirates left and right to watch more fill in their shoes doesn't do him any good because there is no way to fix the land base problems. As you say the magic answer is still just that magic, not real, nonexistent. If he doesn't step things up he suddenly doesn't have any balls or courage or something. Even if he is trying to do something to cure the root causes, that isn't high profile.

It's a mess, and I don't see any damn answer. Fixing Somalia doesn't even solve the issue as there are other countries there that will just cause issues as well.