"Vic Smith" wrote in message
...

I was watching Glenn Beck a while ago and for once he said something
that might have made sense.
"Where are the Marines?"
Keeping a fast reaction force in that area and just plain kicking ass
when an American flagged ship is touched would stop it cold.
Take no prisoners.
I got a feeling it won't be done because of crew safety and
"environmental" considerations.
Sticky problem. The Mayaguez and Iran hostage situations are probably
studied to make these kinds of decisions.
Remember the Q-ships? Merchant ships with hidden guns.
Maybe it was all a John Wayne movie.
Tripoli was assaulted to stop the pirates before.
Might take a land assault to stop it this time.
It's weird to think that 204 years after the Barbary pirates, we're
back to the same problem.
Actually, Somalia is less "civilized" than was Tripoli.
There was a leader of Tripoli to make peace with.

--Vic


Interestingly, the first military action taken by the United States after
we became an independent nation was against the Barbary pirates who were
doing exactly the same thing then as the Somali pirates are doing today.
They were capturing European ships and demanding ransom payments. They
then began attacking US ships. At first Congress appropriated money to be
paid as ransom but Thomas Jefferson had some balls and led the effort to
confront them. We didn't really have a global Navy at the time, but what
we had were sent to the Med and they took care of business.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/collecti.../mtjprece.html

Eisboch