PIRATES AND THE POWER VACUUM

It is a given that a ‘vacuum of power’ cannot long exist in human society. Anarchy can rule the day for awhile, but not for an unlimited time.

Where human activity occurs, order will eventually be imposed.

The American West in the late 19th Century was a case in point. The same was true in the various gold or silver rushes of the same or earlier or later eras.

If law and order is not provided for a dynamic society from above, a form of it will be imposed from below.

In the current pirate situation in the Gulf of Aden, we are in that in-between time. Chaos is the order of the day: criminals seize law-abiding citizens and their property ever more frequently and authorities have not succeeded in suppressing them those depredations.

And the owners of the vessels preyed upon have not exercised any meaningful remedies - namely, crew-served weapons or private escort gunships.

Order will be restored.

Given the fact that there is really no effective international government, the job must be done by the most capable and involved nations.

The most involved and the most capable nation so involved is, of course, the United States.

It would be nice to form a coalition, to enlist allies. It would be nice to work out diplomatic solutions with the barbarians with Somalia. It would be nice if the great united nations would do something effective for once.

And ice cubes will not melt in hell.

No, we will see if b.o. can handle a real, handleable [I know, awkward] crisis. This one can be solved. It will not be mickey mouse. But it can be solved.

What it will require is some diplomacy; some coalition building; and then, finally, some military power applied very effectively against very primitive and pathetic people, because they are unsophisticated and poor and they understand only a limited kind of ‘influence’.

And they are threatening the welfare of rich and poor peoples, people in their own continent as well as everywhere else.

Pirates are bad people. While the world figures out how to remediate the causes of their barbarism, they MUST BE STOPPED FROM DOING THE HORRID THINGS THEY ARE DOING.

And b.o. has to do the stopping, using the forces at his disposal – the United States military – the agency he is going to cut, cut, cut.

Cannot wait to see how the Chicago pol handles this.