The idea of piracy has made a sensational comeback in popular culture and world politics in the last several years. Hollywood has cashed in millions of dollars popularizing the old mischief. I have attended enough pirate themed children birthday parties to start to consider pirates lovable rascals.

That’s until the Somali pirates enter the picture and ruin the facade for all of us. The news of teenage Somali pirates has infiltrated the airwaves around the world, coming to its climax a few weeks ago with the murderous act of the U.S military. With what is called a ‘failed state’, we have come to expect anything from Somalia. Piracy is not the worst of them. After all, it has been drummed into our psyche that we humans are self destructing beings if not watched over by the more prudent amongst us, such as governments, despite how tyrannical. Lo and behold, Somalis don’t have one.

Such is the picture that is being painted for us of the Somali pirates. A bunch of unruly teenagers causing trouble on high sea. Given our modern education/conditioning that the state is our guardian, the image of Somali pirates quickly conjures thoughts of undisciplined and out of control children.

Western policy in the horn

In the last days of his government, Mengistu Hailemariam sat in front of the Ethiopian parliament and explained why the capture by rebels of a hill four hours drive north of the capital city did not signal defeat for his regime. He reasoned that the reality of military engagement meant that hills are captured and lost all the time with little implication. Never mind that the rebels had one tenth the number of soldiers as the government, and that they were essentially equipped with captured government weapons. He continued to state that even the defeat at Afabet in Eritrea, which astute commentators of the time predicted would be Ethiopia’s Dien Bien Phu, really meant little since Afabet was a small town of 700 inhabitants. Never mind that it contained the largest Ethiopian garrison in Eritrea outside Asmara with the most elite of the Ethiopian fighting force, Nadew ez, within it.

Such egregious miscalculations by policy makers and leaders happen all too often. Typically they lead to the unnecessary extension of violence and suffering without having much altering impact on the final results.