Pirates Must be Killed First, Understood in Retrospect

My father grew up reading the Horatio Hornblower novels. They dealt with a young man who joined the Royal Navy in the nineteenth century, back about the time when Napoleon Bonaparte was making such a nuisance of himself from Spain to Russia and all points in between. Films have been made of some of those old novels. One thing that was never murky or unclear was the morality of a character's behavior in such novels. If the person did his duty and lived or died for the Union Jack, he was a good man. There was no equivocating about whether his diet contained too much meat or whether he served on a ship that polluted the sea too much.

Pirate life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was pretty much what it had always been. Hard. Dangerous. Sometimes profitable. Almost always short.

Pirates have been around as long as there has been travel and trade on the high seas and the major rivers. We even had pirates plying the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers in the 19th century. Jean Lafitte, leader of the large community of pirates who were headquartered at Barataria Bay in the Gulf of Mexico, was so successful that neither the US nor the British navies were successful for a long time in eradicating his fleet or his little town full of pirates and their families. Yes, a town of pirates. Just as some towns employ most of the men with logging, farming, or manufacturing, Barataria Bay employed all the husbands and fathers as pirates.

When the British invaded the mouth of the Mississippi in December of 1814, Andrew Jackson called on all local citizens to join the militia he'd brought from Tennessee to prevent this major western highway for our trade in crops from being brought under British control. Slaves were promised their freedom if they would join up. And Jean Lafitte, the pirate, was promised amnesty for himself and all his men, if he'd show up at the Battle of New Orleans in January of 1815, bringing with him his men, some cannon, and the flints and powder on which Jackson's forces were running dangerously low.

Having them there made all the difference. Their skill with cannon, developed by destroying and stealing the cargoes of so many ships over the years, made a real difference in the artillery duel which preceded the disastrously unsuccessful British infantry charge that morning when the British lost more than 2,000 young British and Highland men and we lost only about 23. But, amnesty or no, he and most of his fellows went back to piracy as a way of life.

There are people today who claim that the Somali pirates who are seizing so many ships off the coast of Africa are to be excused because of their desperate poverty. Some have stretched their imaginations so far as to blame us (spelled US) for the disastrous political and economic conditions in so many African nation-states. While I think that attitude is absurd, I am not going to argue that here and now. First things first. We must kill, sink, or capture as many of the pirates as possible.

In ever other age of human history, whether during the time of Phoenician dominance on the Mediterranean or later Roman control of it, whether a captain called himself a "privateer" and got to keep whatever he'd stolen from one nation's shipping by receiving permission for it from the queen of his own land, or whether a man (or a few women) put together pirate crews out of pure greed, there has never been historical precedent for negotiating with them, bribing them, or in any way appeasing them. The standard practice in every ocean and sea and by every government with a navy, was always to kill as many of them as possible. Sink their ships and arrest whatever bobs to the surface. If, after a trial, it was proven that they were guilty, the best they could hope for was a long time in a dungeon. Many were publicly hanged as a hopeful discouragement to others who might decide to rise above financial hard times by falling in with thieves and killers. (The Romans crucified them. So did the Carthaginians, I believe, but then they were just transplanted Phoenicians anyway.)

For you see, that's what pirates are. Thieves and killers. Some folks are making a big deal out of the extreme youth of some of the Somali pirates who are taking ship after ship in the waters within 300 miles of Somalia. I have no doubt that pirates anciently and in early modern times were also apprenticed to it at very tender ages. It's pitiful. It's sad. But it makes no difference when our sailors and the cargoes they carry are being constantly attacked, held hostage, stolen, and threatened. Pirates must be fought, actively and assertively. They must be killed in as large numbers as we can manage. We should not hesitate to use surface ships, submarines, and even ground troops to attack them wherever they live or are headquartered. We should take advantage of our air power. They are making war on us. A nation as large and powerful as ours must maintain a position of credibility. We cannot allow the rest of the world to lose its confidence in us to be what we have become in the past century - - a protector of the weak and a destroyer of threats.

In 1803 the Barbary Coast Pirates, headquartered in Tripoli, raised the annual tribute they charged all the merchant ships of all the nations who plied the waters of the Mediterranean. Fail to pay this tribute, and your ships would be seized, their cargoes stolen, and your men held for hostage or killed outright. All the great navies of the world, even the Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, French and even the British, humbly allowed this bullying to go on for many years. But when the annual tribute was raised in 1803, a Democrat President decided to take matters into his own hands. He sent a combined force of Marines and Sailors to attack the pirates at their headquarters in Tripoli. The Marines were marched overland and arrived just in time to attack the city as the navy charged into the harbor, firing into every vessel in sight. The fight was vicious. Ships lashed to each other were pulling each other down as they continued to fire broadsides into each other even as their crews pulled them closer together with grappling hooks and lept aboard their enemies' vessels with cutlasses and pistols.

Soon the decks were awash with sea foam and blood; cannons which had broken loose, rolled wildly about the decks, crushing some men, crippling others. One of the weakest powers on earth had stood up to the Tripolitan (or "Barbary Coast") Pirates and given as good as we got. We had to pay a one-time ransom for some of our people they already had in prisons before the fight started, but that was the beginning of the end of piracy in that area.

When the SEAL team marksmen took out the three punks who were holding one of our merchant captains yesterday, they had to await Mr. Obama's specific permission! If they'd been a SWAT team dealing with a hostage situation a mile away from the White House in downtown DC, all commands and all authority would have been local. That's how it should be in any encounter at sea. The ships and their crews have a right of self-defense. Maritime officers and men should be armed and given at least rudimentary instruction in repelling boarders. They certainly were in days of yore. The U S. Navy and the navies of our trading partners should be actively hunting down and sinking every pirate vessel they can. There should be willing and active international cooperation in eradicating these terrorists and murderers.

No matter how charming Johnny Depp is as the delightful character Captain Jack Sparrow, the reality is that pirates are among the world's worst people. They are as bad as any street gang, biker gang, drug cartel, or organized crime family you can imagine. They come from countries where their governments have been cruel and ineffective for decades. They see piracy as a way to make big bucks in a short time. That is no excuse. Just because a kid you know at school is beaten and given a bad example by his parents, does not excuse him from beating you up and stealing your lunch money. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. Let's wake up! PIRATES ARE BAD PEOPLE! Let's fight them constantly until they cease to be one of our many problems.