Now what? The struggle to re-define "pirate" through policy responses

President Obama has vowed to "halt the rise of piracy" a day after he authorized the use of deadly force by Navy SEALS against the pirates who were holding Captain Richard Phillips hostage. Obama's rhetoric focused on the attacks themselves and bringing pirates to justice:

"And to achieve that goal, we’re going to have to continue to work with our partners to prevent future attacks. We have to continue to be prepared to confront them when they arise. And we have to ensure that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes.”

Congressman Donald Payne, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa (and whose plane was shot at as he left Mogadishu earlier today), and Senator Russ Feingold, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs, emphasized development-oriented solutions:

“For years, Somalia’s growing instability was neglected by the Bush administration and the international community,” Mr. Feingold said in a statement. “The new administration must not make the same mistake.”

This past week's pirate attack has renewed the debate about whether to arm crews of commercial vessels (the New York Times has a good balanced summary of that debate) and has inspired some, like Fred Ikle of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to call for much harsher responses to piracy. This sense of outrage and desire for a more forceful and violent response is echoed in New York Times readers' proposed anti-piracy solutions, the tone of which can be sensed in post titles such as the following:

Attack Pirate Coves
Send In the Subs
Hang the Ones You Capture
Detonate a Dolphin, and Save Somalia
How About Ray Guns?
Please, No Jimmy Carter Solutions

[A notable exception to this theme is the following proposal which suggests that cultural representations of piracy are never that far away:

Keira, We Need You
Who isn’t enjoying this spectacle of the world’s mightiest military (you know, the one purchased with trillions of borrowed non-existent bankrupt U.S. dollars) having to call up and ask, “Uh, hello? I was sort of hoping that you might consider maybe letting our boy from Vermont swim ashore, and we’ll throw in Keira Knightley and a yo ho ho bottle or rum.”]

Numerous other commentators, including Greg Scoblete, Alexander Benard, and (questionably) Jennifer Rubin have spoken up in favor of a stronger military response. Elizabeth Dickinson at Foreign Policy outlines why military escalation would be an ill-informed, ineffective, and dangerous response to piracy. John Boostra at the UN Dispatch agrees and says that:

treating pirates as "criminals" -- and in fact taking seriously the grievances of at least the original fishermen-cum-vigilante-pirates (namely, the illegal fishing and toxic dumping that engendered the whole viable life-as-pirate thing) -- is in fact the appropriate thing to do.

Boostra also calls for a multilateral response, noting that:

This is something that affects every country that sends a ship through or around the Gulf of Aden. It only makes sense to pool these countries' collective resources and wisdom and address the problem together. Going solo on this one will just endanger the lives of real and potential hostages, undermine the efficacy of the whole project, and unduly antagonize the strange bedfellows of allies (read: NATO, EU, Russia, China, etc.) that piracy has brought together.

Also in the vein of (a completely different branch of) IR liberalism, Peter Leeson's solution is to privatize the Gulf of Aden by selling its waters to private companies, though it's unclear how these corporations would be any better equipped to counter piracy than governments, even if they did have a greater incentive to do so. Certainly this solution, like most of those put forth, would do nothing to address the root causes of piracy, to the extent that the companies who would have the resources to buy these waters are the ones the pirates claim are exploiting the waters.

There has also been a noticeable upswing in the number of headlines and op-eds linking pirates and Islamic terrorists. Al Shabab, a Somali militant group with alleged ties to al Qaeda, praised the pirates for "protecting the Somali coast" and this had led to much speculation about more substantive ties. This can be seen in articles such as "Will pirates join forces with Islamist militias in Somalia?" in the Christian Science Monitor; "Somali pirates are natural allies of radical Islam" by Claude Salhani, editor of the Middle East Times; and in Fred Ikle's assertion in the Washington Post that "Terrorists are far more brutal than pirates and can easily force pirates -- petty thieves in comparison -- to share their ransom money. " This rhetorical tendency is significant, as piracy (as a form of organized crime) and terrorism trigger very different policy responses concerning the use of force.