Fighting Pirates; is Obama being set up for a test stranger than fiction?

The painting is Breughel's Fall of Icarus.

Sometimes, history is much better than science fiction. All of the following facts and most of the arguments are true.

Two hundred years ago, international shipping was menaced by the growth of a piratical federation centred upon Tripoli. Previously, the pirates had been kept in check for the better part of a millennium by an old order of Knights.

The charismatic general, Napoleon, on his way to becoming Emperor, betrayed and broke the Knights in their island stronghold, Malta, in 1798. France and England then turned to their own world-struggle.

The American Vice President, bitterly opposed to his President and who had negotiated a way of living with the pirates, became concerned at their freedom of manoeuvre. One of history's great secularists, he saw the menace of criminals who stole, killed and enslaved Christians on sight for what they were. On becoming president himself, he defied the pirates and sent the USS Enterprise into an attack that would eventually see the deployment of almost all the new US Navy, and the Marines, with the aid of a small Swedish force.

The pirates were suppressed in the Barbary Wars. The Emperor was mollified with the gold Jefferson sent as purchase monies for some worthless territory on the American frontier that now constitutes about a fifth of the republic.

Thereafter, the United States and Britain refused to countenance a structure of law on the high seas, preferring instead that they deploy their power at will. The United States clung to this idea more than England did, which at various times accepted the rights of international bodies to state the law to it. In the twentieth century, long after the fall of the pirates, this strategy seemed to have guaranteed a form of order, sufficient to add the apparent destruction of international slavery to Britain's credit, and the protection of the straits of commerce to that of America when Britain declined.

In fact, trade routes and shipping became critical not just to America's growth, but to that of its republican Empire. The tankers that Aristotle Onassis turned into the source of his fortune were surplus stock after the Korean war, and linked to a scheme supported by some to get Saudi Arabia to link to Onassis' private operations.

Onassis developed his hatred of the Kennedys after Robert Kennedy, then a junior counsel for Joe McCarthy, tried to block him. Mohammed Al-Fayed was trying to make his way in that trade too, before falling foul of the CIA and giving up. He had chosen Haiti and the Duvaliers rather than the Saudis as his attempted conquests. These dramas and adventures are matters of record, and suggest no crimes or bad character in themselves, just to be clear.

But Onassis was a bad man who bore grudges. Revenge would come in marrying Kennedy's sister-in-law, the widow of the dead president, in a way that humiliated America, and perhaps in seeing his wish of Kennedy's death fulfilled. The law of the sea had become a curtain similar to the arras of the king of Spain in Chesterton's Lepanto;

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.

Eventually, an international interest developed in trying to re-order the seas and the sea beds of this ocean planet. That process gave rise to the International Convention on the Law of the Sea and other treaties. America did not join. Though its president signed, its congress held to the idea that their ships could go anywhere on the High Seas at any time.

If pirates were to return to the straits of malacca, or the horn of Africa, or the Mediterranean, or the straits of hormuz, Britain and America and the progeny of Britain's Empire upheld their right to challenge, board or sink them. But they did so in the context of a body of international law which now sought to define acceptable control of coastlines and sea beds, regardless of shifting sands. They also found themselves overstretched, in contention for resources with the re-emerging power of China, and unsure of what to do when states with coasts collapsed completely and the pirates came back.

The arcs of instability met with the waters, and on them sailed pirates. The greatest ship of the American fleet, once the greatest warship in the world, beloved of President Kennedy, was waiting to be mothballed, or turned into a museum piece, sitting in port in Norfolk. A new president was elected.

Was it time to send a ship called Enterprise against the Pirate warlords again?

It's a very tempting story isn't it? Just wait for the media to start sharpening it when the forces of power and blood around in this world want a war and want to try to make people think that war isn't always a shabby, bloody, failure of men.

Here's a video about Nietzsche's hellish idea of eternal recurrence, to which we are doomed if we do not embrace the sort of radical love that could allow all the universes to be nailed to a tree out of love itself. Upon the cross is hung our salvation; because upon that fascist tree, that symbol of the rage and violence of ultimately futile power, is love, from which all good things flow.



UPDATE: As a side note, I have used the term 'arc of instability' extensively on this blog. I must have heard it or read of it years ago. I do not agree with it's use as a code for a Muslim crescent since the Carter administration by the Pentagon and associated PR people, and I will make that clear if I use the term again.