America 1, Pirates 0. Also: Terrorism?

Yay for America. Boo pirates. And I'm tired of hearing about it already. The captain seems a stand-up fellow, so hopefully he'll resist the siren song of the cable "news" circuit and endless inane interviews recounting minute-by-minute how he was feeling throughout the crisis.

All this talk of pirates, (with the requisite jokes about peglegs, eyepatches, and parrots) has of course awakened a desire among some to give them a more 21st-century name. They're terrorists! after all. Maritime terrorists!

Count me with Yglesias in saying: puh-leeeeze. These guys board ships to either steal the booty outright or ransom the ships and crews. They've not expressed a moment's interest in advancing any particular ideology, and how their activities could possibly do so is beyond me. They're not attacking civilian populations with the intent to further their political goals. They don't meet any coherent definition of "terrorists" other than that we don't like them and they happen to be Muslim. Then again, that's uncomfortably close to what passes for a definition these days.

"Terrorist" is one of many words in danger of being overused into meaninglessness. There are plenty of terrorists in the world. And there are also Muslim extremists fighting us who are not terrorists by any reasonable definition. Most of the Shia militias in Iraq that fall under the Jaysh al-Mahdi/Sadrist umbrella, for example, are guerilla fighters who targeted uniformed soldiers of the enemy (us) and took reasonable care to avoid civilian casualties. By definition they are not terrorists, and it confuses the issue to conflate them.

Somali Pirates?

We've been hearing all about the Somali pirates. I've written a bit about them myself. But something struck when I looked at the Somali coast on this map of attacks:

All the news stories speak of these attacks occurring off "the Somali coast". Thing is, most of them are happening practically in sight of Yemen. I don't really know what to make of that. I suppose the ships are probably just crossing to the other side of the street, as it were, and the pirates are just going where the ships are, but at least some of the pirates are Yemeni, and many more seem to be funded or supplied from Yemen. It still seems a touch strange that this situation isn't being made clear. Is it just easier to blame the chaos of Somalia, or is there a particular reason Yemen isn't in the spotlight on this?

Someone's Still Standing Up For Civilization

Someone's still standing up against the barbarians, but sadly (and sadly predictably) it's not a traditional Western power. Rear Admiral Raja Menon of the Indian Navy has chastised NATO members for treating Somali pirates "with kid gloves", Danger Room reports. "There is an 1838 convention that permits any warship to interfere anywhere on the ‘High Seas’ to intercept pirates and try them — without handing them over to the country of origin." Dern skippy, there is. Customary law of the sea has always treated pirates as stateless actors and given captains of legitimate flagged vessels the authority to try them, at sea, under the laws of the capturing country. But the West these days is more concerned with the pirates' civil rights. An old definition of conservatism is the firm belief that civilization is but a thin and fragile veneer in need of vigilant defense: India gets it, Europe clearly doesn't, and America can't seem to make up her mind. This isn't the first time I've wondered whether, having inherited more evidently the traditional responsibilities of Western civilization, India doesn't more legitimately deserve the global eminence that the Western powers historically enjoyed.