President Obama congratulates Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on successful pirate raid

LEHMAN: I think the biggest concern when I talk to my former counterparts and current military leaders in — among our allies in Europe and the Pacific is, the theme that they — I keep hearing from them is, Why is the United States under Obama abdicating leadership or keeping stability in the world? … And they see our abdication of leadership in for instance dealing with the pirates. We were not in a leadership position and that’s opened up a very attractive opportunity for the Russians and even the Chinese have two ships out there.

Listen to the clip:

Absent in Lehman’s argument of course is the fact that, according to data released just this week, sea piracy worldwide has declined 28 percent in the first quarter of the year and, as the AP reported, “attacks fell sharply in Somalia’s waters thanks to international naval patrols.” And which country has a “large” naval presence there? The United States.

“When the Obama administration came to office the problem of piracy off the coast of Somalia was snowballing out of control,” Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro said recently at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress, “through the collective effort of the United States, the international community, and the private sector, we are now seeing signs of clear progress.” Shapiro continued:

The numbers clearly demonstrate this. In 2011, the number of successful pirate attacks fell by nearly half. As a result, there has been a significant drop in the numbers of ships and crew held hostage. In January 2011, pirates held 31 ships and 710 hostages. In early March of 2012 pirates held eight ships and 213 hostages – a roughly 70 percent decline. This is still way too many, but it is clear advances are being made.

“The Obama administration has pursued a strategy that seeks to leverage all elements of U.S. power” to combat piracy, Shapiro added, which comprises an integrated multi-dimensional approach that includes diplomatic engagement, expanding security at sea, preventing attacks and debilitating piracy networks.

Also absent from Lehman’s argument? Obama’s order in 2009 for a successful Navy SEALS operation to take out pirates holding an American ship captain hostage, nor his most recent order for U.S. special ops forces to rescue an American and a Danish hostages from pirate-affiliate kidnappers.

Obama was overheard congratulating Panetta on the success of the operation as the president entered the U.S. House of Representatives chamber on Tuesday for his annual State of the Union speech.

Panetta had been at the White House, where he had monitored the progress of the operation, before the speech. The raid was still being wrapped up when the president spoke to him.

“Leon. Good job tonight. Good job tonight,” said Obama.

Watch it:

The American commandos who rescued the two aid workers this morning were, as the New York Times reports, “drawn from the same Navy commando unit that killed Osama bin Laden” — a point that highlights the president’s success in the face of threats to the security of the U.S. and its allies. Here are some examples since January 2009:

– TAKING OUT TERRORISTS: In addition to ordering the raids that killed bin Laden and al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Alwaki, dozens of high level terrorists have been taken out under President Obama’s watch.

– ISRAEL’S CAIRO EMBASSY: Last September, demonstrators in Cairo, Egypt ransacked the Israeli embassy calling for the Jewish state’s ambassador to be expelled after Israeli security forces killed Egyptian soldiers. President Obama intervened with U.S. assets to assist in evacuating the Israeli embassy staff. “I would like to express my gratitude to the President of the United States, Barack Obama,” Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu said in a subsequent statement. “I asked for his help. This was a decisive and fateful moment. He said, ‘I will do everything I can.’ And so he did.”

– HOSTAGE RESCUE: The president’s first encounter with Somali pirates occurred just months after he took office. Then, Obama ordered Navy SEAL snipers to kill three pirates in order to free an American sea captain who had offered himself as a hostage to save his crew. “I want to be very clear that we are resolved to halt the rise of piracy in that region and to achieve that goal, we’re going to have to continue to work with our partners to prevent future attacks,” Obama said after the sea captain had been freed.

Throughout the presidential campaign this year, Republicans regularly charge that Obama appeases America’s adversaries. “President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy,” Mitt Romney said last month. The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan recently ran through a number of false claims the GOP presidential candidates constantly recycle, including the appeasement charge, and concluded, “None of this is even faintly connected to reality.”

Indeed, as the president himself said last month: “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 other out of 30 top al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement.”

I’ve been interested for quite some time in communities that do public service and volunteer work based on the principals of their fandom. There’s the Harry Potter Alliance, of course, which grounds its campaigns in Potter-driven values. The Browncoats volunteer groups are inspired by Firefly. AnimeAid got together fans of the genre to raise money and coordinate efforts around Japanese earthquake and tsunami recovery activities. And I suspect that as fandom becomes an increasingly important basis for identity or community, we’ll see more work and organizations along these lines where the values that motivate service are drawn less explicitly from political parties or religious faith and more from powerful fictional texts.

Of course, it’ll be fascinating to see if, and how, these groups scale, and if they develop into ongoing organizations or function more like loose networks that can be activated when issues are on the front-burner, but don’t require as much maintenance in fallow periods. If nothing else, the SOPA debate seems to suggest a generation gap on Internet policy between legislators and consumers that could be usefully filled with education campaigns and citizen lobby visits. On both sides, this is a battle, not the war. And fans have a lot to offer.

There’s some interesting data out from the American Academy about file-sharing practices that might provide a useful jumping-off point for further digging in to this kind of argument, and separating out intentional and accidental piracy. Apparently, about 15 percent of people who use file-sharing software hide their IP addresses while they’re doing it (25 percent of sharers between 18 and 24, and 5 percent of sharers older than 44), which suggests they’re aware they’re doing something that is not legal. TorrentFreak reports that an IP address scrambler has seen its business go up recently, and attributes that growth to the introduction of and debate over SOPA. Those people are probably not ending up the wrong place by mistake, and SOPA may harden their stance and practices — and it’s bad news for anti-piracy advocates that younger folks are hiding their IP addresses more than their older counterparts. That generational trend is in the wrong direction.

So it’s probably worth figuring out in granular detail what’s happening with that other 85 percent of filesharers and what makes them change their behavior. Do they stop going to filesharing sites when they learn about services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime? Do they stop going to sites that offer pirated material when they’re taught to recognize them? The creative industry is going to need two strategies, one for people who are accessing their product outside of legal channels on purpose, and one for people who are doing it by accident or out of ignorance.

“It feels great to be home,” Murphy said. “With the exception of Rush Limbaugh who is trying to make this into a race issue. It’s disgusting.”

“The president did the right thing. It’s a war. It’s about good versus evil. And what you (Limbaugh) said is evil, that is hate speech. I won’t tolerate it,” Murphy said.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.