No Ordinary Pirate Movie

It is very hard for us serious folks here at USDemocrazy not to think of talking parrots, gold dabloons and Johnny Depp when we hear the word “PIRATES!”. 

So we landlubbers were alarmed to discover that real pirates do exist today and are wreaking havoc as we speak (…or is it type?).

The location of these havoc-ateers is not the Caribbean but the Arabian Sea off the coast of Somalia. The mission of these Somali bandits is not to discover sunken treasures and drink copious bottles of rum but to rob and steal at gunpoint from the numerous cargo ships that traverse the sea nearby.

Somalia is a pirate’s paradise.  Starvation, civil war and anarchy have defined this failed state for nearly two decades. Early on the US tried to intervene and help the struggling nation with little luck. The famous movie “Black Hawk Down” embodied that unhappy episode. It catalogues a failed American military mission in 1993 that cost the lives of 18 US soldiers.

In the chaos and remoteness of Somalia, pirates operate unchecked. They are heavily armed, board ships with guns blaring and hijack cargoes. This is no Hollywood family movie.

The pirate issue caught the news this week when a small band of pirates attacked an American flagged vessel and took its captain as hostage. The US Navy was sent in to save the day, but as the New York Times says:

The Indian Ocean standoff between an $800 million United States Navy destroyer and four pirates bobbing in a lifeboat showed the limits of the world’s most powerful military…

Kinda makes you want to rethink the way we spend our military budget… (WAIT! That’s what we are doing!)

This all comes at a pretty busy time for President Obama. Trying to fit pirates into his daily routine of saving the planet from financial ruin is not easy at the moment.

So it will be interesting to see how the US and the world tackles the thorny problems of these bad acting pirates of the high seas (Johnny Depp excluded).