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.

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.

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.

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.