Pirates and Presidents

Do we judge our presidents on their ability to rescue hostages

Transcript:

DEFCON Pirates and Presidents. Hostages and Heroes. Since the early years of the Republic, we’ve judged our presidents on their ability to defeat pirates and rescue hostages.

Remember Jimmy Carter? When Iranian radicals stormed the American embassy in Tehran in 1978 and took hundreds of our diplomats hostage, Carter failed to negotiate their release. His secret rescue mission two years later was a fiasco. The Iranian hostage crisis wasn’t finished but Jimmy Carter’s presidency was.

Obama, the antiwar candidate, needed a decisive and successful hostage rescue- both for domestic political reasons and to demonstrate to the world that he isn’t the Jimmy Carter of the Pirates. The strongest navy in the world couldn’t be held at bay by a bunch of skinny teenage thugs in dingys, hopped up on narcotics and waving AK-47s at Americans. Thanks to the Seals, the United States Navy and Captain Philips this ended well.

The question is what’s next. Somali piracy will continue– it’s easy money, pirates are replaceable, and seizing an unarmed vessel on the high seas is easy pickings. Yet, the world community tends to view pirates with amusement– the same way we used to laugh off airplane hijackers as annoying but relatively harmless – that is until September 11 when the hijackers turned deadly.

As the world watched the pirate drama unfold, there was no doubt another group watching it as well – observing, learning, measuring how they might use piracy to advance their own goals. Could the next phase of the pirate wars be terrorists seizing tankers full of oil and using them on suicide missions into ports or fuel depots or narrow waterways?

That’s why President Obama needs to build on the momentum he’s achieved and pull together a consortium of nations – perhaps using NATO forces – to end the pirate menace now– before it morphs into a much more deadly form.