Matt Yglesias

Bobs Agree We Should Put Blue Helmets on Merchant Ships

Robert Wright, a hippie globalist one-worlder like me, and Bob Kagan, a neocon warmonger, both agree on an idea for dealing with the pirates problem—put a couple of armed United Nations peacekeepers on merchant ships going through the region. The idea here is that arming merchant ships would solve the problem, but that you can’t arm merchant ships because countries don’t let armed ships dock at their ports. Putting the guns in the hands of the UN solves the problem:

I have my doubts about this. My impression is that the biggest problem with arming merchant ships is that ship owners actually don’t want to see firefights happening in the vicinity of their cargo. If you think about the idea of holding a ship for ransom, the premise is that the amount of money being asked for is less than the value of the cargo.

Given that reality, if you own a cargo ship and some guys in a small craft amble up next to you with a shoulder-launched rocket what you really want is for your crew to surrender. If your crew starts shooting, then they’re putting your ship at risk of getting blown up by a rocket. It’s true that over time, a sufficient number of bloody exchanges would serve as a deterrent to piracy both because pirates would get killed and also because pirate counterattacks that end up sinking ships don’t get any ransom. But on an individual level, it still makes more sense to surrender than to fight so it’s not clear that anyone would want blue helmets on their ship.

A different idea would be to go “Anbar Awakening” on the whole situation. Suppose there were a group of armed Somali possessing maritime skills and a spirit of derring-do. The international community could find leaders of these Somalis and provide funds to assist them in their brave effort to battle the pirates who’ve been plaguing their community. It’s true that to some this would look like paying protection money to extortionists. But if you call the protection money “aid” and call the pirates you’re paying off “former pirates” and call the process by which the pirates you’re paying try to kill their rivals “anti-piracy operations” then I think it looks perfectly legitimate to recruit some former pirates to conduct anti-piracy operations that are financed by international aid.

This is a less morally tidy approach, but it’d almost certainly be cheaper. You could call ‘em the Somalia Coast Guard, reach an agreement with them about fishing rights and so forth, and they’d be national heroes.

Leave Somalia Alooooone

New from yours truly at The Daily Beast—the case against invading Somalia to go try to stop pirates. Includes a reminder that past inept American interventions in Somalia have done a lot to contribute to the chaos that allows the piracy to take place.

Mutiny on the Ditto

Jason Zengerle points out Rush Limbaugh’s rather odd argument against arming the crews of cargo ships sailing in pirate infested waters:

Now, a lot of people ask, “Rush, how come these ships aren’t armed?” Everybody says just give some machine guns to the crew when you see the pirates showing up, wipe ‘em out. You maritime captains out there can back me up on this, but the historical reason why you don’t arm the crew on a cargo vessel is to guard against mutiny against the captain and the ship, ’cause you know how CEOs are hated today, and the captain of the ship is a CEO, and employees resent and they’re being told to resent the boss.

So the boss makes you do some things on board, if you’ve got machine guns ostensibly to gun down the Somali pirates, you could conduct a mutiny. So that’s one of the reasons that they aren’t armed.

I’m not sure I understand why this same fear of class warfare doesn’t also apply to gun control on land. At any rate, arming merchant vessels is probably a bad idea, but this would not be the first reason to occur to me.

Pirates Still Hijacking

Looks like a few French and American special forces operations aren’t going to put a stop to Somali piracy:

The latest trophy for the pirates was the M.V. Irene E.M., a Greek-managed bulk carrier sailing from the Middle East to South Asia, said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur. [...] On Monday, Somali pirates also seized two Egyptian fishing boats in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia’s northern coast, according to Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, which said the boats carried 18 to 24 Egyptians total.

My understanding is that the fishing issue needs to be understood separately from the question of hijacking cargo ships. There’s a genuine issue as to whether or not other countries’ fishing boats have been exploiting the anarchy in Somalia to gain access to Somali fisheries. The whole issue of fishing rights off the coast of Africa is way outside my area of knowledge, but as a general matter the fishing issues seem to fall into a “legitimate grievances” box that the international community ought to be seeking to settle in a reasonable way. That’s the counterpart to cracking down on hostage taking and cargo hijacking.

What “Sid Meier’s ‘Pirates!’” Can Teach Us About Piracy

I don’t know how many of you have played the game “Sid Meier’s ‘Pirates!’”—either the old computer game or the newer XBox version—but for a while I was a devotée of the XBox game and I think it illustrates some key points about pirate policy that endure for the modern day. The main one is that anti-pirate military patrols are pretty much a lost cause. The ocean is just too big. A pirate only gets taken down this way because of hubris—you might deliberately try to attack and seize a military ship and wind up biting off more than you can chew. But the risks of actually getting caught are tiny relative to the rewards of successful piracy.

The only countermeasure that really works well is to escort a dedicated merchant vessel with small anti-pirate military craft. This, however, is rarely done for the exact same reason that we’re hesitant to do it today—it’s expensive. Arming the merchant vessels themselves is a geopolitically and legally dicey move in today’s environment. But “Pirates!” illustrates that this is inherently problematic as there are serious tradeoffs between cargo capacity, speed, turning performance, and cargo capacity that give dedicated pirate ships an intrinsic advantage against any kind of economically reasonable hybrid vessel.

So how can the pirates be stopped? Well, fundamentally the viability of your enterprise is “Pirates!” rests on the geopolitical chaos on land. The Caribbean islands are politically fragmented between Spanish, Dutch, French, and English colonies with possessions of different nationalities mixed together and everyone always at war with someone else. Consequently, out by the main range of islands you’re never far from a friendly port where you can duck in to resupply, to sell your wares, to recruit more crew, to fix your ship, whatever. When things can get problematic is if you start spending time in the parts of the mainland that are uniformly under Spanish control. Here, if the Spanish get hostile enough that they won’t let you dock in their cities you can get in real trouble. Not because the Spanish ships are so militarily formidable, but simply because the sheer distance to safe harbor reduces your options. If your pirate crew is actually strong enough to defeat the Spanish garrison on land, you’re fine. But if not, you might be done for.

To make a long story short, to curb the Somali pirate problem you need to fight them on land. This was recognized by everyone back in December but it hasn’t materialized since nobody really wants to try to mount a serious operation to bring Somali territory under control. And far be it from me to question that decision. I don’t want to either. But given that reality, while we can try to mitigate the pirate problem at sea, we’re never going to resolve it and suggestions that the Obama administration should snap its fingers and make this problem go away are absurd. What we need to do is wait until such time as someone or other establishes some kind of coherent control over Somali territory and then deal with piracy issues as part of our relationship with that person / group / organization or whatever it may be.

Unfortunately, the last time it appeared that a coherent de facto government was emerging in Somalia—the Islamic Courts Movement—we helped sponsor an Ethiopian invasion that plunged the country back into chaos. We need to stop doing that! You can read about Somalia in greater detail on the ENOUGH Project’s website, but the baseline point I would make is that we could start helping in Somalia by resolving to not do things that make the situation worse anymore.

Marque and Reprisal

Tim Fernholtz observes that the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which I’m mostly familiar with from its work in the booming field of climate change denialism, has put out an innovative approach to the pirate situation—more pirates:

Washington, D.C., April 9, 2009— News that Somali pirates had seized an American ship and, after being repelled, held her captain hostage drew a response from analysts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: the United States should consider authorizing private parties to attack pirate ships under little used instruments called “letters of marque and reprisal.” [...]

“The world has changed a lot since nations last made significant use of letters of marquee and reprisal. If Congress were to decide to issue them, it would certainly have to revisit the concept,” said CEI Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer. “It’s the type of free-market solution to a real problem that Congress should consider but hasn’t in any serious way.” Lehrer added.

This seems to me to be a complete misunderstanding of how such letters work. You could imagine a situation in which, say, Venezuela decided it was pissed off at Saudi Arabia. Venezuela might start issuing “letters of marque and reprisal”—basically licenses to pirate—to private citizens interests in seizing Saudi oil tankers. If people took Venezuela up on the offer, this would probably reduce the volume of Saudi oil exports, thus simultaneously hurting Saudi Arabia and helping Venezuela by boosting the price of their own exports. Of course the Venezuelans would be opening themselves up to a global military response—war for oil and so forth. The point here, though, is that Saudi ships are full of valuable stuff, namely oil. Nobody in their right mind would want authorization to try to seize control of Somali pirate boats. They’re tiny and worthless. All of Somalia is desperately poor. Nobody wants to rob them.