Piracy, Pompey, and Panama

The escalation of piracy and the predicted parallel escalation of NATO
military intervention off the coast of Somalia can be as devastating,
on a global scale, as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by
Gavrilo Princip, which cast the die for WWI.

As we all know, piracy dates all the way back to the age of Julius
Caesar, when Pompey Magnus got exceptional powers to rid the
Mediterranean impudent pirates. Things invited immediate attention
from the Senate and the People of Rome when the pirates mocked Rome by
groveling before captured Romans and begging for mercy before making
them walk the plank. Rome (capital R) was not to be slighted in such a
manner. In the words of Robin Seager:

One man, chosen from among the consulars, was to be given the task of
clearing the sea, with the right to appoint fifteen legates with
praetorian imperium, to fit out a fleet of two hundred ships, to levy
troops as requires, and to draw upon the treasury of Rome and the
resources of the publicans in the provinces. The command was to last
three years. The commander’s imperium was to cover all the sea east of
the Pillars of Hercules, all islands, and the coasts of the mainland,
including Italy, up to a distance of fifty miles inland.

The powers that were temporarily bestowed upon General Pompeius turned
out – thanks to the Baby Face’s exceptional success solving the piracy
problem – to pave the way for his ilk (Caesar, Crassus, et al.) to
rise above the checks and balances of the senate, a bloody civil war
to ensue, and the Senate to be sidelined by a succession of Emperors.

To have US Navy Seals off of the coast of Somalia thanks to a handful
of non-state actors set a course towards the repetition of history:
some ambitious Five-Star General is going to be bestowed with
temporary powers to rid the world of a common threat to create an even
greater threat. To borrow from Karl Marx, it is like the husband and
wife who called the doctor to help them resolve a fight only to end up
with the wife having to break up a fight between the doctor and the
husband, then have the husband break up a fight between the wife and
the doctor.

But that is the benign scenario. A much more sinister one lies in
ambitious enemy states engaging an over-abundant portion of the US
Armed Forces by orchestrating a series of similar pirate hijacking of
ships. Much like Lawrence of Arabia was able to occupy much of
Germany’s military force by bombing strategic train routes in Saudi
Arabia during World War I, so can an agent from, say, North Korea,
hinder NATO global interests by praying on such a weakness.

It is widely agreed upon that had Japan bombed Panama instead of Pearl
Harbour during WWII the devastation caused to the Allies would have
been far more incapacitating. This is because trade routes running
through Panama were the lifelines of the West throughout most of the
war. A few aircraft carriers, without sounding insensitive to that
“day in infamy”, were far less crucial to a world war than a major
artery, such as Panama. So is it the case with the Persian Gulf. As a
result of this elevated importance, the final element of caution the
world must apply to this new threat is to not overly romanticize the
pirates and the story, in order to minimize the number of copycats and
sympathizers in the world.

Pirates off Somalia should never been construed with Johnny Depp-like
pirates of the Caribbean, for fear of causing a global shipping
paralysis – and this is all in peace time!

Mr. Fotohinia is a former Second-Lieutenant in the Canadian Forces and
a student of War Studies at both McGill University and the Royal
Military College of Canada. He has recently returned from Vienna where
he attended the Academy of Arts.