15-04-2009, 10:28 AM
Pace Charles' post (#2) to this thread, this article by William Pfaff provides further food for thought:
Quote: <Snip>
Somalian piracy is a nasty little affair in which hundreds of foreign seafarers have been made prisoner, but the only ones who have died did so during efforts to rescue them.
But things are getting out of hand. The pirates now threaten revenge. They haven’t killed anybody. At this writing, they hold some 200 hostages. As Obama indicated, half the NATO navies seem on the way to chase fishing boats in Somalian waters and the Gulf of Aden.
Quoting the encyclopedias on Barbary pirates and U.S. Marine Corps lore about the Tripolitan War makes good newspaper stories. But the Marines, and the Tripoli war’s settlement in 1805, did not put an end to piracy on the Mediterranean Barbary Coast; American commerce was being raided as late as 1815. Maybe somebody should tell the president about that.
<Endsnip>
Peter Presland
".....there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims"
Guido Preparata. Preface to 'Conjuring Hitler'[size=12][size=12]
"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied"
Claud Cockburn
[/SIZE][/SIZE]
".....there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims"
Guido Preparata. Preface to 'Conjuring Hitler'[size=12][size=12]
"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied"
Claud Cockburn
[/SIZE][/SIZE]