04/22/09 – Jesse Walker – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest is Jesse Walker.
He's the managing editor of Reason Magazine.
He's the author of a book called Rebels on the Air, if I remember right, although it's been many years since I've interviewed him on the subject.
But welcome to the show, Jesse.
Good to talk to you again, sir.
Good to be back here.
And that is what it's called, right?
Rebels on the Air?
Rebels on the Air and Alternative History of Radio in America.
Yeah, that's you and me right now, making Alternative History of Radio in America, or History of Alternative Radio.
And rebelling.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, so the article is called Against All Flags, Questions and Answers About Pirates and Somalia.
And I really like this article.
You basically just decided to interview yourself, because who better, right?
Yeah, just sort of a mock FAQ about the subject.
Yeah, well, and you do a good job of asking all the right rhetorical questions and setting yourself up to answer them and so forth.
So let's just go through this.
We got a pirate problem.
The world or whoever wants to sail their shipping boats anywhere near the Gulf of Aden there has got a problem with Somali pirates.
We saw Navy SEALs, you know, three shots, three kills, they said, and rescue a hostage the other day.
And so I guess a lot of people are saying, you know, not just at the weekly standard, that we need to just send the Navy and I guess maybe the Marine Corps out there to finish these pirates off and solve our problem.
You disagree?
What problem can't be solved with American military force?
Jesse, come on.
Well, there's a big difference between saving a hostage, you know, one person being captured by four people, which they did a very good job of saving, and stopping the whole practice of hostage taking.
I mean, they quickly started.
It obviously hasn't stopped the seizure that one instant.
I mean, because the Somali coastline is approximately 2,000 miles long and the pirates strike very quickly, generally a window of about 15 minutes, give or take, in small boats.
They're very smart.
You know, they pay attention to what the patrollers are doing and they adjust their activities accordingly.
And we don't have the resources to cover all that water all the time.
And anyone who discusses this will tell you that.
I mean, they generally say, well, yeah, we didn't need to go on and fight them on the land instead.
So first of all, just the idea that we're going to be able to use the Navy to fight all these pirates who are, you know, doing these crimes of opportunity, it's just not possible with the resources that the U.S. and, for that matter, all the other countries that are patrolling there have.
And as far as going to the mainland goes, I mean, the pirate infrastructure is there.
I saw one person comparing it to, you know, breaking up one of the cartels in Colombia.
You can put all these resources into breaking up this one criminal organization and, you know, you'll disrupt things a bit.
But ultimately, that just means more people are going to build that as long as there's the profit to be had and the opportunity to be had.
I mean, it's a decentralized threat that demands a decentralized defense.
And the sort of, you know, the idea that you can fight a war against it is just, people say that metaphorically and then they start taking it seriously and they just start using the wrong tools.
Yeah, well, that happens a lot.
Those ideas getting conflated again.
You talk about war on drugs and send troops through your front door in the middle of the night.
Yeah, I mean, it's very similar to the war on drugs.
I mean, obviously, I'm not calling for legalizing piracy.
I mean, I do support legalizing drugs.
So there is that difference there.
But in terms of just the fact that, you know, it's a hydra, as used the metaphor that people have often used about pirates in the past.
You can break up one drug cartel or drug gang and you can, you know, bray about the largest, you know, bust in history or, you know, whatever hyperbole they used at the time.
But, you know, the drugs keep marching on.
And there are reasons why piracy is attractive to a lot of people in Somalia right now.
And the sort of crackdown people are urging.
It's not as though it's that hard for pirates to pull up stakes and move their operations to someplace else on the coast.
It's happened before.
I mean, it's happened just in the last couple of years.
So it's a lot more complicated than the solutions being put forward by some other people would suggest.
And I should add just one thing.
It would be much more costly than the actual cost of paying the ransom.
I mean, or just in general the dents, not just the ransom, but, you know, the higher insurance costs and everything that have been imposed on shipping companies.
They would be dwarfed by the cost of this so-called solution, which in the end would not solve anything.
Well, you know, Jeff Huber writes for us at Antiwar.com.
And he has an article about, he calls it the scurvy dogs of war or something, where he's kind of mocking all the guys at the Weekly Standard and all their proposals for raining hell down and all that kind of thing.
But he also says, and I guess he's a former Navy guy or something, and he's saying all you need is one EC3 Skyhawk.
I forgot the exact title of it.
But it's like an AWACS plane, basically.
It's got a big radar dish on its back.
And he says that a sophisticated, well-trained technician in the back of one of those planes ought to be able to monitor the area in question quite easily by himself.
Just one plane at a time could basically monitor everything.
And he was stopping far short of calling for any invasion on land.
But he was saying that at least in terms of containing the danger on the seas as they exist now, that it really wouldn't be that difficult.
I'm not convinced of that, but let me get to the other half of my argument, which is that I said earlier that a threat demands a decentralized defense.
There are lots of things that people on the boat themselves can do, including hiring private security, which some people are starting to look at now.
Legal questions, which I think if the world governments want to do something constructive, they can iron that out.
If a security company wants to offer that service and people want to find out if it works as well as promised, then more power to them.
I'm all for that kind of experimentation.
I'm much less enthusiastic about this idea that the United States should be plowing its money into it, especially since I think he's really underestimating the extent of the problem.
Again, the pirates pay attention to where other boats are and then they strike very quickly.
I'm trying to think of the best way to put this that makes my objection clear.
People know generally the parts of the water where there have been pirate attacks recently.
They know generally where the infrastructure currently is on the land.
Just like the Medellin cartel has very strong big houses and so on.
That doesn't mean that they are able to be everywhere at the same time.
One guy sitting there and sending out signals, even given this sort of rosy scenario of what could be done, is not going to be able to get the boats that need to get...
Once they're on the boat, then they capture it and they have their hostage, unless the boat is equipped to fight back, which is another solution people talk about which I think makes more sense.
He has to get the signal out to the naval ship in the area, which the pirates have been paying attention to, or any armed ship in the area, but they've been paying attention to where those are before they strike, and then get them over there in this very narrow window of time, and again on this very large chunk of water.
They're moving out further and further from the coastline, I should add as well.
They're going deep into the Indian Ocean now, from their base of operations in Somalia.
Again, I think that this sort of easy tech fix would not work as well as promised.
Here's the thing.
I don't know anything about being a mariner, but it would seem to me that guys, just average sailors, on say a shipping oil tanker or whatever kind of shipping barge or whatever, if they have rifles and there are men in little speedboats trying to board their ship from what stories below them, it seems to me like a guy with a rifle ought to be able to defend a boat from some pirates pretty easily.
Do you know what I'm missing there?
You're not missing anything.
There are other reasons why owners of ships are wary about having guns on board, which often have to do with having a small crew of often not the friendliest people in the world in close quarters for a long time.
They don't want to deal with what might happen if there's weapons on hand.
There's possibly accidents with certain kinds of boats.
I think that, and I wrote this in the article, the owners and their insurers are best able to assess the relative hazards of having a boat be armed or not be armed and make that decision for themselves.
Another option, of course, is if you don't want to arm your crews, then hire some private security to be with them.
If you don't want to pay to train the crews, there's people who are already trained and you pay for that skill.
I certainly think that option should be open.
Again, as a matter of defense, that seems much more, because it's more decentralized and because the weapons are already there on the boat, you don't have to call someone out for assistance.
It makes more sense.
Well, I want to get into a lot of the background and the history.
You write a pretty informed history of American intervention, Somalia going back, and how it's relevant.
I want to know the circumstances under which these people feel like piracy is probably the best way they can spend their day and make money, due to what options they have and that kind of thing.
While we're still on the subject of containing the threat as it exists, trying to minimize the threat as it exists now, what do you think of Ron Paul's proposal about having the Congress go ahead and pay bounty hunters under letters of marque?
I like it better than the idea of having it completely socialized, having the Navy do it.
I still think that ultimately I would rather have the ship owners making the contracts and having these for private security themselves for the usual free market reasons, which we could get into.
But yes, I think that the letters of marque.
The other thing about what I actually like about Ron Paul's proposal, not so much the content.
What I like best is not the content itself, as the fact that it's getting people talking about letters of marque and reprisal.
Some people were bringing that up right after 9-11, and people were just kind of like, what?
What?
Marque?
What's that word?
There's a Q in it?
I don't know what you're talking about.
The more we have this awareness that there are other tools at Americans' disposal than just the blunt force of U.S. military, the better.
I don't think it necessarily should be Congress that should be paying for it.
One of the great advantages of having – I mean the disadvantage from the point of view of someone trying to end a piracy is of having the ship owners pay for it themselves, but a lot of them will prefer to just not pay for it.
They'll say, you know, it's a big cost for a relatively small risk.
We'll just pay the insurance, although the insurance has been going up, and so that's a market signal telling them they might want to change their behavior.
I mean by one report it's gone up more than tenfold.
The flip side is that there's more room for experimentation and trying out different approaches.
Obviously you have that as well with paying bounty hunters and that different ones can take different approaches versus just having the Navy and other countries working out what they're going to do.
But when the people paying the bills are the ones whose loot is at stake, that changes the dynamic in an important way.
Yeah, absolutely.
And see, I think you kind of hit on there the way the market really functions to everyone's benefit in a way that I think people oftentimes don't understand.
Well, like when you talk about the price of insurance going up, well, if you're the guy who runs the boat or the shipping company or whatever, that changes your balance sheet and the way that you measure the – say, for example, the negative costs of having guns on board or hired security on board versus not.
Or just taking another route.
I mean a lot of people have been, for obvious reasons, they don't want to go all the way around Africa that's 20 days to the journey, and they'll say, well, what if our competitor then just goes by Somalia and takes the risk and can undercut us?
But then the more the potential competitor has to pay for the insurance to go through there, then the more attractive it is to avoid it.
So I mean there's all sorts of ways that the market is just much more subtle in responding to this than any sort of central planners could be.
And in the military they are central planners too.
I mean this is the market for security.
All right.
Now I guess we could talk about the market for security on all levels, but let's talk about Somalia some more.
I guess probably most Americans don't know too much about Somalia except that's where Blackhawk Down happened.
And for some reason, I don't know whether, for all I know, I guess this society has always been a pirate society or something like that, but something tells me that there are probably circumstances constraining the choices they're left to make that has driven so much of the Somali population to take what ultimately seems like pretty desperate life-risking measures, taking a little bitty bass boat way out to sea to try to steal a ship at gunpoint.
That's pretty risky work.
Yeah.
Well, in terms of the immediate past, the country has been just devastated by the Ethiopian invasion and occupation of Somalia, which wiped out a lot of civil society, closed a lot of doors to other ways of making a living, and drove a lot of people into what is, after all, a pretty risky way of making a living.
I mean high reward but high risk, which is piracy.
But the history of the way that Somalia has been kicked in the teeth goes back a lot further than that.
In my article I was talking specifically about the United States' relationship with Somalia.
So I started the story in the mid-'70s, but before then, they had a nasty dictatorship before the U.S. started aiding it, and before that there's a history of colonialism from both the English and the Italians, which also had some bad effects.
But as far as the United States goes, in the mid-'70s, for reasons related to the Cold War, we started supporting the Marxist dictator of Somalia.
I like that part.
Because Somalia is the great rival with Ethiopia, which was also a Marxist dictatorship, so clearly to fight communism we had to choose between the two Marxist dictatorships.
Sort of like whose side do you take when North Vietnam invades Cambodia?
There was some back and forth in terms of the U.S. policy in the late-'70s.
I skated past this because I didn't have time to get into the details, but essentially Somalia started moving into the U.S. orbit under Ford, and then when Somalia invaded Ethiopia, and they did it with a lot of success, and the Soviets came to the Ethiopians' aid, the Somalis thought the U.S. would aid them, and actually Carter, to his credit, said, no, I'm actually backing off at this point.
I'm not going to give you this aid.
And Somalia, rather, received a pretty big blow.
But then a couple of years later, the Americans started thinking, but actually Somalia wants to be in our orbit, and we've had these steps towards each other, and they have these former Soviet bases there.
Wouldn't they be useful?
And starting in 1979 again, the country started becoming closer allies, and throughout the-'80s, there were all sorts of...
I mean, Abar's dictatorship was one of the most miserable in the world.
I mean, it was a brutal, torturing, totalitarian dictatorship that stole from and killed a lot and lots of people.
And so there were a lot of objections to the U.S. aiding Somalia, but it was considered a security asset to have it.
And another one of the ironies I didn't have room to get to in this piece is that when the first Gulf War came along, and I was opposed to the first Gulf War, but let's just take it from the point of view of U.S. policymakers as, all right, we've got to get our troops in there.
This was the sort of thing that those bases were supposed to be made for.
Like, we have them right there by the Arabian Peninsula.
We can get them over to Kuwait and Iraq very quickly.
But it turns out that all these U.S.
-skeptical countries like Saudi Arabia were very happy to have the U.S. have troops on their soil as the staging ground for that war, so it led to trouble later on.
So when finally the purpose of the U.S.'s relationship with and support for the Somali dictatorship paid off, it turned out they didn't even need it in the first place.
And, you know, they stopped the socialist rhetoric and started the capitalist rhetoric, but the country was still basically a skeptocracy where people stole.
Those with political pull stole from those who did not have political pull.
And the tribal, I mean, Somalia was and still is a tribal society where people have clan and sub-clan loyalties, and that adapted itself to this system.
So that, well, like I said in the piece, one sub-clan could expropriate a chunk of land from another and start a quote-unquote project on it and then present it to the international community as aid-worthy economic development.
And what happened in 1991 when Americans started noticing Somalia because the bar was overthrown and there's all this fighting in the streets, that's just those inter-clan battles spilling out into the open before they had been somewhat subsumed within the system, although there still were cases of people showing up with their armed guards to take the land from the other sub-clan.
And that's when the US-UN intervention that everyone knows and loves so much happened was in reaction to that, to chaos in the streets.
And the actual original justification was that supposedly 80% of the food aid shipments were being stolen.
In fact, that number turned out to be grossly inflated and it only applied to the public food aid shipments.
The private or quasi-private NGOs that get a lot of aid had less than 20%.
I don't have the number in front of me, but I think it was between 10% and 20% stolen.
And the Somali relief efforts themselves were feeding, like the Somali Red Crescent Society, was feeding more people than all the international efforts put together.
The media presented Somalis as helpless children that needed the great white father to come in and fix things.
In fact, there are farmers there who found that the food aid was undercutting their ability to sell their crops, which is when it wound up hurting people more than it helped, especially since by the time the food aid started rolling in, the lack of food was no longer the problem.
The big public health problem was the diseases, which were then being spread further because the interventionists started putting people into refugee camps and folks who had habits that had developed as nomads in small groups going over very empty landscapes suddenly find themselves settled in very large groups packed into small quarters.
Well, suddenly you're going to have public health problems because you need a different set of habits.
The intervention was a human rights disaster on all sorts of levels.
And things didn't start turning around really at all until they withdrew.
The period of Somalia having no central government and no formal outside intervention was one in which there were still lots of problems.
Anyone who tries to present it as an idyllic libertarian utopia is going beyond the facts.
Exaggerating a bit.
That was a time when you had economic growth, a time when you had lower rates of extreme poverty in Somalia than its immediate neighbors.
You had a functioning court system, systems of social insurance, credit.
Because so many of the entrepreneurs were in the telecommunications business, you wound up having more telephones in the country than you did in the neighbors.
And Somalia had one of the best telecommunications infrastructures in the region, which is not saying a lot from an American point of view, but from a point of view of poor people in the sub-Saharan East Africa, it does matter.
I think I've probably gone past answering your question.
I've started launching into this history of U.S. intervention.
Well, no, that's what I'm interested in.
It's kind of the back story of this land and how it got where it's at.
Of course, there's the whole issue of Somaliland and all that, which I don't know how well we can get into that.
But I think it's important to point out that the bad guys from Black Hawk Down, supposedly, these warlords, Adid, I guess, was specifically the one.
In fact, a little aside here, I remember seeing a front line years ago where the father of one of the dead rangers talked about an encounter with Bill Clinton where he said, so I understand you're trying to negotiate with this Adid guy.
And Bill Clinton said, yeah, that's right.
We were doing everything we could to pursue diplomatic channels and this and that.
And he said, well, then why did you send my son out to arrest him at the same time that you were trying to deal with him?
And he said that Clinton looked at him with just this blank stare and then turned and said, well, you know, I asked Tony Lake the same question.
So that goes to kind of the incoherence of American policy, at least in that time.
But then here's where the supreme irony kicks in, is where the Ethiopian invasion that began Christmas 2006 that you mentioned there was backed by the United States, and it was an attempt basically to install this guy, Adid's son, and his buddies, the warlords from Black Hawk Down, into power to replace the Islamic Courts Union, which as you described was basically kind of a grassroots, bottom-up, very limited sort of thing that had basically come out of the lack of a central state that they had dealt with since, what, I guess the early 90s or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to prettify the Islamic Courts Union.
I mean, they were enforcing Sharia law, and they were trying to form something akin to an Islamic state, to the extent that you could form a state there.
But let me back up just a little bit.
But I mean, they had very limited authority, didn't they?
We skipped, actually, an important part of the story, which is that before the Islamic Courts Union was controlling half the country and the U.S. started backing Ethiopia, the U.S., in the wake of 9-11, started sending aid to warlords, many of whom were the same warlords that the U.S. had been fighting a decade earlier, who are now presenting themselves as able to go hunt down jihadists hiding in Somalia.
They call themselves the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, which many people believe was a PR-savvy move on their part.
And of course, once they get the aid, they use it to pursue their own agendas.
That's when the fighting starts ramping back up.
I mean, there was a higher level of violence in Somalia than in the typical society during that period of growth we were talking about earlier.
But it was not that kind of constant warfare that they'd seen before and that they're seeing now.
It started ramping back up with this outside intervention again.
That pushed many more Somalis into the arms of the Islamic Courts Union.
So it was an example of the U.S. intervention having the opposite effect of what it intended to do.
And then Washington says, all right, we're going to back this Ethiopian invasion.
That's going to get rid of the Islamic Courts Union.
We don't want an Islamist foothold or another one in the region.
And of course, as we talked about earlier, it was just a gore fest that was a disaster for the country and really ramped up the level of piracy as well as people fell into that to make a living.
And now the transitional government that is coming into play with the Ethiopians that have been withdrawn is run by the former commander-in-chief of the Islamic Courts Union.
At every stage in the game, going back to fighting the Cold War by propping up a Marxist-Leninist dictator, the U.S. has managed to get the exact opposite of what it was trying to do accomplished.
And as I said in the piece, if they do a war on pirates, I would expect it to end with Obama dedicating a 60-foot statue of Blackbeard in the middle of Mogadishu.
That's the way U.S. intervention in Somalia has been working for the last three decades.
Well, it scares me.
If he takes your advice and decides not to invade, that's going to lead to a full-scale invasion and occupation forever.
Good point.
Anyway, you mentioned the humanitarian crisis there, and this is where the rubber really meets the road.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees, a million and a half people on the brink of starvation, a worse humanitarian crisis than Congo or Darfur.
Real people whose lives have been destroyed by the hundreds of thousands since the Dick Cheney-slash-Ethiopian invasion of 2006.
And now you have people...
I'm moving away from talking about policymakers now, but when I just listen to the conversations or read the kind of conversations that chess thumpers like to have on the Internet, they say, why don't we just nuke the place?
I mean, there are people there who are living as though they...
Not as if they've been nuked, but they have taken a lot of blows there.
And aside from just the horrible level of feeling for your fellow man and woman, you hear statements like that.
In a way, they tried that, blowing the place up.
And look where it's gotten us.
It's what's brought you this problem of piracy in the first place.
All right, everybody, that's Jesse Walker.
He's managing editor of Reason Magazine.
It's, of course, Reason.com on the web, and the article is called Against All Flags, Questions and Answers About Pirates and Somalia.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
I'm glad to be here.