A Modern Blackbeard

Face it. The most natural American gut reaction to the news about Somali pirates holding an American ship captain hostage is, blow them the f*ck up! And that’s pretty much what the always-level-headed editors at the New York Post advocated on Saturday.

We would urge Washington to bring the melodrama to an immediate end — irrespective of the consequences to the hostage. Failing to do so would paint the Navy — and America — as impotent, making US-flagged vessels even more tempting targets for Somali cutthroats.

In other words, Nuke ‘em!!!!! Oddly, cooler heads prevailed at Rupert Murdoch’s other calm-cool-collected editorial page, the Wall Street Journal.

Amid the crisis Wednesday for the Maersk Alabama cargo ship, Capt. Phillips calculated without hesitation that he would put his life at risk to save the lives of his crew members. He traded one life to save many. In some corners of the nation, that honorable act is also well understood as a show of American strength. General David Petraeus, now head of the U.S. Central Command, will surely seek a way in turn to save Capt. Phillips’ life. That may require patience.

Wow! The WSJ editors urging patience? What’s next? An editorial promoting national health care? Actually the remarkable divergence of opinion between America’s two generally lock-step conservative papers is telling. The Obama Administration finds itself in a murky mess where even the Pentagon is apparently split about how to handle the Somali pirates.

The White House has said the world needs to come together to deal with the larger issue of a lawless country almost ideally situated geographically to wreak havoc on critical shipping lanes. Agreed, but coming back to the subject at hand, hasn’t the world already joined to try and stop the pirates? India, Russia, France, Germany, Portugal, Canada, and others have naval ships patrolling off the 1,880 miles of Somali coastline yet the number of attacks has skyrocketed since last summer — there have been at least 80 attacks since July.

As the administration correctly points out, the problem is Somali pirates aren’t some unified entity that’s easily or even profitably attacked in their beach towns. Indeed the greater threat apparently comes from an Islamist group that is fighting Somali’s Ethiopian-backed government. The Washington Post has a lengthy look at Al-Shabab and why two U.S. Presidents have been reluctant to act with force. It helps to explain why these gangster pirates (which Al-Shabab seems to condemn) have flourished despite the international naval armada — they’ve been a nuisance but not a national security threat.

Now, however, by attacking the rare American-flagged cargo ship (see more on why there are so few, here) the Somali Sopranos of the Sea have attracted the kind of attention they really didn’t want. They hold nearly 250 hostages but until they took one American their business was pretty safe. No more.

The Obama team is well aware that (relatively) minor events like this can balloon into public opinion crises fast. It’s been 3 days (as of Saturday afternoon) since Captain Richard Phillips gave himself over to the pirates to save his crew and ship. At some point patience may prove impractical for both tactical and political reasons and the navy may have to act more assertively.

For now though, Obama has political cover to wait since only the most bloodthirsty armchair warriors are shouting for a military response — even if Captain Phillips dies as a result. Nice, huh?