More Piracy Near Somalia

[motorfirebox]

Originally Posted by carl

Allowing a boatload of pirates to get away with 12 innocent kidnapped mariners, yeah, I agree, what were they thinking?

Care to comment on the action by the Danes?

What's there to say about it? They did it, it worked, hurray. I will point out that the Danes' action was carried out by guys who do this sort of thing for a living, which--from what I've gathered about this class of frigate--the Halyburton doesn't have a complement of. The Halyburton is, as I understand it, basically there to blow up boats. Blowing up a boat full of hostages would seem to me to be counterproductive to the whole 'maritime defense' thing--that whole 'cure worse than the disease' bit that was discussed earlier.

I find the opinions of some on this topic to be pretty confusing, when taken in comparison to their opinion on Libya and the Ivory Coast. In the latter two (and I recognize that there are many who say we shouldn't be involved in any of the three), there are those who are all for sending in our forces to blow up the bad guys and 'fix what we broke'. When it comes to Somalia, though, many of those same voices say we should just attrit the pirates until they go back to shooting at each other instead of (not, for the most part) shooting at hostages. This, despite that the US has had a far more direct role in Somalia's current condition than Libya's or, for that matter, the Ivory Coast's.