Piracy: How should the civilized world respond?

It could have ended in a disaster, said H.D.S. Greenway in The Boston Globe. But with the dramatic rescue this weekend of merchant ship Capt. Richard Phillips from the clutches of Somali pirates, President Obama “survived the first dramatic crisis of his administration with colors flying.” For four days, U.S. naval forces warily circled the pirates who had hijacked the cargo ship Maersk Alabama off the Horn of Africa. To ensure his crew’s safety, Phillips gave himself up and was taken aboard a lifeboat with three pirates. Then, on Easter Sunday, as negotiations broke down and one of the agitated pirates pointed a gun at Phillips’ back, Navy SEAL sharpshooters aboard the USS Bainbridge ended the siege by shooting his three captors through the head from 100 feet away. It was a terrific feat of marksmanship, and a triumph for “no-drama Obama” as well. He neither caved in to ransom demands nor overreacted with belligerent threats, patiently giving military commanders at the site time to do their jobs.

It’s true—“for those of us who see the resurrection of Jimmy Carter in Barack Obama, this was a nice surprise,” said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. Shooting pirates in the head, or stringing them up by the neck, is the only proper way to respond to barbarism on the high seas. In fact, this is the way civilized nations have dealt with piracy since outlaws began commandeering ships, in the 13th century B.C. So why has dealing with the growing piracy threat from Somalia “become so complicated?”

It’s because civilized nations have gone wobbly, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The owners of captured vessels have consistently paid Somali pirates $1 million or more to free captured vessels, making piracy a thriving business for desperate young Somalis and the warlords who employ them. This year alone Somali pirates have mounted more than 60 attacks. They currently hold more than a dozen ships and 200 crew members hostage. As Cicero said two millenniums ago, pirates are hostis humani generis—an enemy of the human race—and deserve to be treated as such. We might start “by bombing the pirate city of Eyl,” where many of these brigands are based.

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That kind of tough talk may sound good, said The Boston Globe, but bombs and bullets won’t end the piracy problem. With starvation and a brutal, anarchic society awaiting them back in Somalia, the hundreds of pirates have nothing to lose. They haven’t been even slightly deterred by an international naval force patrolling off the coast of Africa, and hunting them in a million square miles of ocean is virtually impossible. “Now that pirates have been killed, the rules of the game may change,’’ and they’re going to be much more likely to kill hostages.

Unfortunately, that leaves only one long-term solution, said The Washington Post, and that is to deal with Somalia’s chaos itself. Ever since the military fiasco in Mogadishu in 1993, the U.S. has been trying to ignore Somalia. As we have learned at great cost in recent years, “stateless territories, particularly in the Muslim world, can pose a significant threat to U.S. interests.” The U.S. may already have a full plate in dealing with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But until Somalia has some semblance of a stable government, thousands of its desperate young men will take to the seas in inflatable boats bristling with weapons, looking for yachts, freighters, and a big payday.