Poopy-head Piracy vs The Chicago Way

I read in the news that Somali pirates threaten revenge after snipers “pink-smoked” three poopy-heads that had been holding hostage the captain of a previously pirated cargo ship. I can’t help but chuckle. The revenge to be had was ours, you poopy-headed idiots. You’re frakkin’ pirates. Fortunately, there is a solution.

Piracy has a long and illustrious/ignominious (po-tay-to/po-tah-to) history. There does happen to be a reason why it only flourishes for brief periods of time, however: the sea-going powers eventually get sufficiently pissed that they stop it. Simple as that. They stop it not with payouts, but with guns, cannon, bombs, and whatever else it takes to make it stop. There is a reason they have the title “Sea-going power”.

And seriously, once you have navy warships (any major navy) pointing guns at your itty-bitty little boat, it’s time to give up the booty and skedaddle, so as to live to loot and pillage another day. You don’t try to face them down.

But this part of the world has been allowed to treat detain-and-ransom as a business model by nations for far too long. Whether via kidnapping or piracy the fact is that as long as it was kept below a certain threshold, the major powers let it slide because they were busier with other things. But when you start hijacking cargo ships and oil tankers…well, that just makes governments and the business who influence them, cranky. When you are a country already “on the list” for your human rights abuses, it’s not generally a smart move to grab the tiger’s tail (any tiger significantly better armed than you).

So, the Somali Poopy-head Pirates Union is threatening revenge. It’s at this point that I suggest the US and other aggrieved parties go old-school:

They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!

— Jim Malone, The Untouchables (1987)

Of course in this hi-tech age we’d be more likely to use missiles and Predators, but the sentiment is the same: the days of poopy-head crime on the seas off Somalia are numbered. (How convenient is it that the man in the Oval Office hails from Chicago?) Soon enough, it will be our turn to go ahrr.

A major stumbling block is that we carry the wrong mindset about hostages in these situations. I think if the government, the public, and the press immediately considered any hostage to already have been killed (or is certain to be killed), it frees up a lot of options. Yes, there will be some collateral damage at first (as well as some rescues), but it doesn’t take long before even the poopy heads of the world realize there is a safer way to earn a dishonest buck. The financial industry, for example.