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My hot take: if there's one thing one could wish US would use their military for, is fixing the piracy in this region once and forever, mostly by forcing Somali
by cromka 6mo ago
My hot take: if there's one thing one could wish US would use their military for, is fixing the piracy in this region once and forever, mostly by forcing Somali to do so.
- acdha 6mo agoIf that was a military problem, they’d have done it. Unfortunately, it’s a societal problem and you can’t bomb governments into functioning or people out of poverty.
- cromka 6mo agoTerrorism is also a societal problem, not a military one. This was never a problem for them.
- acdha 6mo agoTerrorism comes in two flavors: you have small groups where a pure assassination strikes can work (e.g. Bin Laden) and larger groups backed by an actual social faction (e.g. the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS), where they don’t. The Somali pirates fall into the latter territory: desperately poor people with a dysfunctional national government see money floating by daily. You can’t bomb that dynamic out of existence unless you’re willing to commit mass murder or occupy the territory and make a Marshall Plan-level investment in the local society.
- nradov 6mo agoWhy should this be a US responsibility? Very little of our trade runs past Somalia and Yemen. The ship in this incident is Togolese and they're not even a treaty ally. Our previous attempt at intervention didn't work. Let someone else fix the problem.
- cromka 6mo agoIt shouldn't be your responsibility, just like several dozens of other interventions shouldn't. Yet here we are. Also, why are you talking about this particular ship when I'm clearly talking about piracy at large in this region?
- nradov 6mo agoOk so then we agree that it's not a US responsibility unless a US flagged ship is involved. Togo can fend for itself.