Pirates me hearties, pirates!

[Kevin]

It can be solved, but foremost, the people of Somalia have to want it solved and agree to the solution.

First can you point me to some success stories? I'd like to broaden my knowledge.

And how do you get them to agree? There are people there that want the issue solved and some of them are going about doing it the way they want to. That's part of why there has been civil war there for decades. To me that still points to no solution and as things descend even more into barbarism, they need the help even more and are much less capable of asking for it. How do we keep it from being another proxy theatre of war, we've seen how much that helps a country like Afghanistan.

As you mentioned who pays for that transitional force even if they agree? Isn't what Ethopia tried essentially that but now they can't pay so they pull out and there is a big vacuum again which just breeds more of the same. Where are the safeguards on that?

So you say we don't want to go in there, I agree, but then should we be blowing up the pirates? I want the piracy to stop but what good is treating the symptom going to do. It might buy a few years of peace but it won't stop it. We don't have the money. The UN doesn't have the money or if they do they don't have the power. I agree with you, the UN has for whatever the reasons, been what the US and a few others actually provide. China is still very reluctant to get involved with support for it, and we aren't exactly happy with them getting them more involved either.

I'd like to see the UN restructured too. It's not that it's a bad idea and not all of the organization is flawed, but it needs some work so that it can better accomplish the mission it has. The US might also need to agree to supply power for issues it doesn't always agree on. Walking out on decisions doesn't always help. Sure if you really are diametrically opposed but we've been a big baby on stuff that we only had marginal issues with. If we want to believe in rule of law we can't still only do what we want to.

So I can believe that you can stitch things together, but I'm still specifically looking at the pirates here. I don't see that stopping until you stabilize the country. I don't see anyway for that to happen still. A forced unagreed upon change (Iraq) doesn't work. Since there are civil wars that indicates that someone there has been trying to organize something but who do you back? Do you back your ideals or do you back the group that will actually be able to bring a stable government that you can then work with? We don't agree with many of the countries we work with, but we can work with the stable ones.