Do people really think that peace comes as a result of "popular demand"? Come on! Peace is something fragile that must be constructed and maintained (often through force of arms) not "demanded" by masses of people. Peace isn't even the natural state of things: let people alone and they will fight. Don't believe me? Check out your local school yard when it is without a supervising teacher for about five minutes.The waters off the Somali coast are a vast unsupervised playground, and the bullies are grabbing little Susie's and Johnny's lunches. Only it's worse than that. Pirates, like terrorists, are not just bullies in need of after-school detention and a note home to the parents. Nor are they criminals in need of trial and imprisonment.
No, pirates are enemies of mankind (this is a well-established category--see here, and here--with roots in the Roman civilization) and ought be executed whenever they are caught. They do not bow to noble and civilized notions like the "rule of law". They understand one language and one language only: that of raw power. And so we should mete it out.
While our attorney general is thumbing through his files on how to solve a problem we haven't dealt with for quite a while, maybe we could issue some letters of marque, or at least put some "sea marshals" (we already have "air marshals") onboard US-flagged ships to man 30mm cannons, or something.
None of that is likely, I'm afraid. With the problem being classed as an annoying distraction for the president, I'd say we're in for more piracy. Andy McCarthy thinks so too. His whole article is worth reading, but I especially liked his reflections on what it means to be "civilized":
“Civilized” is a much-misunderstood word, thanks to the “rule of law” crowd that is making our planet an increasingly dangerous place. Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.I think it's fair to say that while Mr. Obama finds piracy distracting, the rough-and-tumble types out there find it very interesting. They will calculate based on what the American President does. If Obama wants to set the stage for easier conflict resolution in the future of his administration, he will demonstrate that there is cold hard steel behind his words. If he does sow in strength now, his administration will reap little more than foreign policy failures garnished with an occasional UN Security Council resolution.
There is nothing less civilized than rewarding evil and thus guaranteeing more of it. High-minded as it is commonly made to sound, it is not civilized to appease evil, to treat it with “dignity and respect,” to rationalize its root causes, to equivocate about whether evil really is evil, and, when all else fails, to ignore it — to purge the very mention of its name — in the vain hope that it will just go away. Evil doesn’t do nuance. It finds you, it tests you, and you either fight it or you’re part of the problem.
As a result, peace will find itself much demanded and seldom delivered.
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