Clearly there was a great deal of personal courage involved in this incident. Captain Richard Phillips behaved with inspiring courage and selflessness. His crew was clearly courageous. The U.S. Military personnel was not only courageous, but chillingly competent.&
amp; nbsp; All that said can anyone explain to me how this Captain did not behave stupidly before he was forced into this situation? He was sailing directly through the area where all these pirates have been attacking ships, would it not have been more intelligent to sail AROUND that area. I have heard some sort of explanation that he (or the company he worked for, obviously if he was acting on his employer's orders than it is as much their fault as his) thought that walls of the freighter ship were too high for the pirates scale. Clearly this assessment was incorrect, and frankly this smells like the kind of piss poor excuse that television news editors slip into news stories so obvious questions that might fuck with the narrative they think will most please their viewers (the narrative being: this Captain is an amazing hero that survived an amazing ordeal! the question being: what the fuck was he doing there in the first place?)
2) Why is this "mothership" allowed to exist?
Evidently, there is a "mothership" these pirates need to operate (obviously they can't travel over 300 miles off shore in a dingy). We know this thing exists from media reports. We have the most sophisticated Navy in the world so I'm guessing we can also find it. Frankly, I would guess there is probably an American submarine under it, right now, and has been for some time. Can't we just blow this thing up. What the hell do we spend bazillions a year on our Navy for if we can't take care of some freaking pirates. Who's going to complain, the Somali government? Of course not. There is no government there. What are we afraid of, an "International Incident?" The only likely international incident I can think of is an incidence of every country with their flag on one of these ships at risk in that area being very, very grateful we took a leadership role here (this includes the Russians, the French, the Saudis, the Greeks and many others), and used our military to act decisively to solve an international problem no one else seems to want to deal with. Not only would it be the right thing to do, it would have the added benefit of of proving to the world that our new president is capable of using the largest military power the world has ever seen to take assertive action to solve practical problems, just about everybody wants solved. So blow up the mothership. If there are hostages on it that make this impractical, then send our highly competent SEALs to capture it.
If we are waiting to take action because there is some sort of intelligence somebody thinks they can get from this situation, somebody else should be asking the question: is it really likely that this potential intelligence will be more valuable to us than the international political capitol we would earn by taking care of this situation, and the intelligence we could gather later by leveraging this capitol.
Seriously, get rid of the mothership. This is embarrassing.
3) Cool point slipped into that NYT "Week in Review" article.
This was 1796. I don't know who wrote this but I'm guessing whoever did was pretty familiar with the mindset of the founding fathers. In other words all these people who claim that the Judea-Christian philosophy was integral to our country's founding are WRONG. By extension, that means that constitutional constructionists should be in favor of separating church and state whenever possible.
It also means that just about everything Bill O'reilly ever said or wrote on the subject of God and our government is dead wrong, but everybody already knew this, so all this run on sentence is accomplishing is bringing me one step closer to arthritis in my fingers ...
Gregory K. Nelson
