Finally! An Intelligent View Of My Position

Chris Selley's Full Pundit: Who's up for a good old-fashioned naval blockade?
Posted: April 15, 2009, 12:23 PM by Chris Selley Filed under: Full Comment,Full Pundit,Chris Selley
International affairsTerror off the Somali coast, crushing disappointment in Paris, and delicate “mediation” in Kabul.
The Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom believes the piracy situation off the Somali coast could have largely been avoided had the U.S. just let the Islamic Courts Union continue presiding over the country’s “first full period of peace in 15 years,” instead of encouraging Ethiopia to invade in 2006. (For the record, a quick news archive search suggests piracy wasn’t quite as rare during the ICU’s tenure as Walkom suggests.)
To deal with an old-fashioned problem like piracy, author Alan Jamieson proposes an old-fashioned solution in The Globe and Mail—namely, a concerted, multinational naval blockade of the “no more than half a dozen significant ports … to which captured vessels could be brought.” He believes the Yemeni island of Socotra, just off the horn of Africa, would make an ideal staging base. Based on little more than the strength of Jamieson’s argument, we hereby throw our support behind this idea.
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