TomDispatch has an interesing look at Somali pirates and the US military budget - Monsters vs. Aliens.

In the comic-book imagination of some of our leading pundits, the two headline threats against U.S. power are indeed on the verge of teaming up. The intelligence world is abuzz with news that radical Islamists in Somalia are financing the pirates and taking a cut of their booty. Given this "bigger picture," Fred Iklé urges us simply to "kill the pirates." Robert Kaplan waxes more hypothetical. "The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists," he writes. "Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard."

Chaotic conditions in Somalia and other countries, anti-state fervor, the mediating influence of Islam, the lure of big bucks: these factors are allegedly pushing the two groups of evildoers into each other's arms. "Both crimes involve bands of brigands that divorce themselves from their nation-states and form extraterritorial enclaves; both aim at civilians; both involve acts of homicide and destruction, as the United Nations Convention on the High Seas stipulates, 'for private ends,'" writes Douglas Burgess in a New York Times op-ed urging a prosecutorial coupling of terrorism and piracy.

We've been here before. Since 2001, in an effort to provide a distinguished pedigree for the Global War on Terror and prove the superiority of war over diplomacy, conservative pundits and historians have regularly tried to compare al-Qaeda to the Barbary pirates of the 1800s. They were wrong then. And with the current conflating of terrorism and piracy, it's déjà vu all over again.

Misreading Piracy

Unlike al-Qaeda, the Somali pirates have no grand desire to bring down the United States and the entire Western world. They have no intention of establishing some kind of piratical caliphate. Despite Burgess's claims, they are not bent on homicide and destruction. They simply want money.

Most of the pirates are former fisherman dislodged from their traditional source of income by much larger pirates, namely transnational fishing conglomerates. When a crippled Somali government proved incapable of securing its own coastline, those fishing companies moved in to suck up the rich catch in local waters. "To make matters worse," Katie Stuhldreher writes in The Christian Science Monitor, "there were reports that some foreign ships even dumped waste in Somali waters. That prompted local fishermen to attack foreign fishing vessels and demand compensation. The success of these early raids in the mid-1990s persuaded many young men to hang up their nets in favor of AK-47s."

Despite their different ideologies -- al-Qaeda has one, the pirates don't -- it has become increasingly popular to assert a link between radical Islam and the Somali freebooters. The militant Somali faction al-Shabab, for instance, is allegedly in cahoots with the pirates, taking a cut of their money and helping with arms smuggling in order to prepare them for their raids. The pirates "are also reportedly helping al-Shabab develop an independent maritime force so that it can smuggle foreign jihadist fighters and 'special weapons' into Somalia," former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn has recently argued.

In fact, the Islamists in Somalia are no fans of piracy. The Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which had some rough control over Somalia before Ethiopia invaded the country in 2006, took on piracy, and the number of incidents dropped. The more militant al-Shabab, which grew out of the ICU and became an insurgent force after the Ethiopian invasion, has denounced piracy as an offense to Islam.

The lumping together of Islamists and pirates obscures the only real solution to Somalia's manifold problems. Piracy is not going to end through the greater exercise of outside force, no matter what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman may think. (In a recent column lamenting the death of diplomacy in an "age of pirates," he recommended a surge in U.S. money and power to achieve success against all adversaries.) Indeed, the sniper killing of three pirates by three U.S. Navy Seals has, to date, merely spurred more ship seizures and hostage-taking.

Simply escalating militarily and "going to war" against the Somali pirates is likely to have about as much success as our last major venture against Somalia in the 1990s, which is now remembered only for the infamous Black Hawk Down incident. Rather, the United States and other countries must find a modus vivendi with the Islamists in Somali to bring the hope of political order and economic development to that benighted country. ...

The failure of the U.S. Navy to stamp out piracy has led to predictable calls for more resources. For instance, to deal with nimble, low-intensity threats like the speedy pirates, the Pentagon is looking at Littoral Combat Ships instead of another several-billion-dollar destroyer. The Navy is planning to purchase 55 of these ships, which, at $450-$600 million each, will come in at around $30 billion, a huge sum for a project plagued with costs overruns and design problems. With the ground (and air) war heating up in Afghanistan and the CIA in charge of operations in Pakistan, the Navy is understandably trying to keep up with the other services. The Navy's goal of a 313-ship force, which boosters champion regardless of cost, can only be reached by appealing to a threat comparable to terrorists on land. Why not the functional equivalent of terrorists at sea?

Pirates are the perfect threat. They've been around forever. They directly interfere with the bottom line, so the business community is on board. Unlike China, they don't hold any U.S. Treasury Bonds. Indeed, since they're non-state actors, we can bring virtually every country onto our side against them.

And, finally, the Pentagon is already restructuring itself to meet just such a threat. Through its "revolution in military affairs," the adoption of a doctrine of "strategic flexibility," and the cultivation of rapid-response forces, the Pentagon has been gearing up to handle the asymmetrical threats that have largely replaced the more fixed and predictable threats of the Cold War era, and even of the "rogue state" era that briefly followed. The most recent Gates military budget, with its move away from outdated Cold War weapons systems toward more limber forces, fits right in with this evolution. Canceling the F-22 stealth fighter aircraft and cutting money from the Missile Defense Agency in favor of more practical systems is certainly to be applauded. But the Pentagon isn't about to hold a going-out-of-business sale. The new Obama defense budget will actually rise about 4%.

George W. Bush's Global War on Terror, or GWOT, turned out to be a useful way for the Pentagon to get everything it wanted: an extraordinary increase in spending and capabilities after 2001. With GWOT officially retired and an unprecedented federal deficit looming, the Pentagon and the defense industries will need to trumpet new threats or else face the possibility of a massive belt-tightening that goes beyond the mere shell-gaming of resources.

The War on Terror lives on, of course, in the Obama administration's surge in Afghanistan, the CIA's campaign of drone attacks in the Pakistani borderlands, and the operations of the new Africa Command. However, the replacement phrase for GWOT, "overseas contingency operations," doesn't quite fire the imagination. It's obviously not meant to. But that's a genuine problem for the military in budgetary terms.

Enter the pirates, who from Errol Flynn to Johnny Depp have always been a big box-office draw. As the recent media hysteria over the crew of the Maersk Alabama indicates, that formula can carry over to real life. Take Johnny Depp out of the equation and pirates can simply be repositioned as bizarre, narcotics-chewing aliens.

Then it's simply a matter of the United States calling together the coalition of the willing monsters to crush those aliens before they take over our planet. And you thought "us versus them" went out with the Bush administration...

The Independent has an interesting opinion piece about Soamli pirates, declaring "Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling" - Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates.

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence.

If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century".

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy." This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas." William Scott would understand.

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?

The Boston Globe has an interesting take on the Somali piracy industry - What the pirates say.

THE WORD "pirate" has come into the news for the first time in memory, as raiders armed with grenade launchers and grappling hooks take over vessels headed through waters off Somalia for the Suez Canal. Last week, four ships were captured, including a massive Saudi oil tanker, the Sirius Star. More than 3 million barrels of oil pass through those waters every day en route to markets in Europe and the United States. On Thursday, the pirates announced that they wanted $25 million for ransom for the Saudi tanker. For more than a month, pirates have held a Ukrainian freighter, the cargo of which is a vast store of weapons, including tanks and artillery. The arms were headed for Kenya or Sudan.

Oil and weapons. The pirates have enriched themselves and now build villas on the Somali coast, but the high-seas drama moves away from mundane thievery to take on the character of a morality tale. A legion of impoverished people were castaways of the world economy, condemned to stand on their forlorn shore and watch passing ships loaded with fuel that creates wealth and arms that protect it. They decided to stop being mere spectators of their own desperation, and became desperados instead. The invisible poor are being seen, and their complaint is heard. Consider:

# The anarchy that permits piracy dates to the collapse of the Somali government in 1991. In 1992, the United States led the infamous "humanitarian intervention" that ended in the American humiliation at Mogadishu. Somalia has been a failed state ever since. According to UN figures, of the $2 billion spent in that intervention, 90 percent went to a military effort, with the paltry rest going to economic reconstruction. Imported weapons empower the warlords to this day.

America's continuing overreliance on weapons is one of the pillars of the problem. Last month, the US Africa Command became fully operational, headquartered in Germany, in part because no African nation wants to be host. The United States no longer pretends that its main way of relating to the continent is through the State Department or the Agency of International Development, and not through the Pentagon - through force of arms instead of foreign aid. It figures. As the captured Ukrainian freighter makes clear, Africa is the world's weapons dump. The pirates, in effect, protest.

Somali piracy began when the nation's failed government lost the ability to protect the rights of fishermen. Tuna abound in Somali waters, and in the 1990s vessels from other countries illegally moved in, prompting Somali fishermen to arm themselves and confront the poachers. Soon they confronted everyone.

Piracy is not justifiable, but it did not begin as such, and that matters.

There is more than one kind of piracy. Drug companies, marketing cures from the flora of the tropical world, including Africa, engage in what the Nobel economist Joseph E. Stiglitz calls "bio-piracy." While the developed world exploits African resources, including oil; while government subsidies for US farmers destroy the ability of African farmers to compete; while high-tech and green revolutions pass by; while their continent is looted, the extreme poverty of Africans only grows.

Due east of Somalia, in the far Indian Ocean, are the Maldives, an island nation of more than 300,000 people. As I learned reading Stiglitz, the Maldives will be underwater in 50 years because of rising sea levels due to global warming. Who speaks for those people? Or the billions of others in vulnerable coastal regions - the soon-to-be victims of all those oil tankers, which might as well be warships. Pirates may not consciously be mounting protests to the coming catastrophe, but their actions are not unconnected to it.

Blooomberg is reporting that Somali pirates are thinking of reducing their %25 million ransom demand for a captured Saudi oil tanker. Meanwhile, the SMH reports that Range Resources are making one of the more interesting exploratory efforts offshore - trying their luck in Somalia, and, much to their dismay, getting accused of supporting piracy while they are at it - Range awaits Puntland govt election.

Oil and gas explorer Range Resources Ltd may have to renegotiate a production sharing arrangement with an African state if upcoming elections produce a change in political power.

Director Peter Landau told shareholders Range's production sharing arrangement (PSA) with the Puntland government, an autonomous state within Somalia, could be at risk if president H.E. Mohamud Hersi lost power.

But Mr Hersi had "more than a good chance" of getting re-elected in January, Mr Landau told the company's annual general meeting in Perth on Monday.

Mr Landau said Range was considering legal action over a recent news report alleging links between Range's mining activities and pirates.

The Independent has a report on the standoff offshore Somalia between a group of irates (who blame over-fishing for their having to resort to harvesting other forms of wealth from the sea) and the US and Russian navies - Cold War stand-off over pirates' weapons ship. Chatham House is speculating piracy may drive shipping away from the red Sea, increasing the price of oil and other goods in Europe and North America.

Russia has dispatched a frigate to the scene of an increasingly tense stand-off between the US Navy and pirates who have seized a tanker laden with tanks and weapons in the Indian Ocean off Somalia.

The tussle over the fate of the Soviet-designed tanks captured off a failed African state has developed into an international incident worthy of a James Bond novel. Pirates are demanding a $20m (£11m) ransom and governments in the region are denying any knowledge of the arms shipment, amid fears of a new civil war in Sudan.

Russia has seized upon the crisis to send the missile frigate The Intrepid, prompting speculation that it might attempt to free hostages in another public projection of its military power.

American helicopters and warships from the 5th Fleet have surrounded the Ukraine-flagged Faina after Somali pirates boarded her six days ago and seized a cargo which includes 33 T-72 battle tanks, ammunition and heavy weapons such as rocket launchers.

The US squadron has sent helicopters low over the deck of the seized tanker and has made it clear they will not allow the pirates to land their haul, which it is feared would be handed over to Islamic insurgents that Washington believes are linked to al-Qa'ida. The pirates have said they will fight to the death if the ship is boarded. ...

The pirates blame overfishing by foreign trawlers for destroying their livelihoods, forcing them into hijacking ships and demanding ransoms.

The most dramatic seizure yet, with its lethal cargo, has underlined a surge in piracy in the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's busiest shipping routes. The problem has spread south to the Indian Ocean coastal waters off Somalia with 62 ships attacked this year. The International Maritime Board's piracy monitors say there are at least 10 vessels and 221 crew members held hostage in ports such as Eyl, east Somalia.

Pirates, many operating out of former fishing ports such as Eyl and Bosaso, are deploying increasingly sophisticated methods, including high speed launches, GPS trackers, and satellite communications, to target shipping. They have captured some of the biggest vessels on the seas and extracted multimillion-pound ransoms from multinational companies and even the government of Spain. France sent in special forces to track pirates who took a luxury yacht in April and captured six of them. They will face trial in France.

The London-based think-tank Chatham House says piracy could see shipping forced away from the Gulf and into the longer route to Europe and North America, producing a drastic effect on oil and commodities prices.

Greenpeace has organised a nude global warning awareness stunt in Switzerland one one of their rapidly shrinking glaciers.

Nearly 600 volunteers have stripped for the camera on a melting Swiss glacier high in the Alps for a publicity campaign to expose the impact of climate change. The environmental group Greenpeace, which commissioned the photo shoot by world-renowned photographer Spencer Tunick, says the volunteers turned up under blue skies near the foot of the Aletsch glacier, a protected UNESCO World Heritage site.

Nicolas de Roten of Greenpeace Switzerland says there are almost 600 people there. "It's relatively chilly but that doesn't seem to be disturbing them," he said. The campaign is aimed at drawing attention to melting Alpine glaciers, one clear sign of global warming and of man-made climate change, Greenpeace says.

Greenpeace says the human body is as vulnerable as glaciers like the Aletsch in southern Switzerland - which is shrinking by more than 100 metres a year - and the world's environment. The group hopes its billboard and poster campaign showing people exposed to the cold will send a shiver down the spines of the public and politicians, and convince them to do more to tackle pollution and climate change.

While I've been following the progress of the proposed Iraqi oil law (still haven't handed over the oil) on a fairly regular basis, another interesting piece of peak oil legislation is a hydrocarbon law being considered for Somalia (though given Somalia's propensity for reverting to anarchy when given half a chance attaching any significance to this law may be wishful thinking on behalf of those pushing for it to be passed). It is probably worth keeping in mind that US headquarters during the "Blackhawk Down" period intervention in the 1990's was the Conoco Phillips office, if my memory serves me correctly. It sounds like the Chinese are being given the heave-ho, which may not go down well in Beijing. Business Day reports:

Big oil groups that declared force majeure and quit Somalia 16 years ago will be given the chance to resume their activities under the anarchic country’s proposed hydrocarbon law.

According to a parliamentary bill, companies that held concessions before December 30 1990, would be given the right to return to those areas under new production-sharing agreements. The new production deals will set out different financial terms, exploration periods and obligations as well as new block sizes.

“A prior grant in the form of a concession entitling the prior contractor to conduct exclusive petroleum operations shall be convertible into a production-sharing agreement,” the draft law says.

Several western oil majors — Royal Dutch Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, ENI — held Somalian exploration concessions in the 1980s before leaving in 1991 when warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and the country descended into lawlessness.

The draft law, awaiting parliamentary debate, gives previous concession holders a year from the time the law comes into effect to sign up for a production-sharing agreement. It was not immediately clear whether any of the western oil majors would consider returning to a country that has become a byword for violence.

The bill also nullifies any exploration deals struck after 1990 — a clause that is likely to meet opposition from Somalia’s northern regions of Somaliland and Puntland, which have both signed separate agreements in the past five years.

It may also affect a production-sharing agreement signed by President Abdullahi Yusuf and China’s largest offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC , which was reported by the Financial Times last month.

“Any right to conduct petroleum operations in Somalia granted after December 30 1990 shall terminate and cease to be a binding obligation on the government,” according to the draft law .

The interim government, formed in late 2004, is keen to attract foreign partners to develop its nascent petroleum sector, seen as one of the final frontiers for untapped energy.

Although the US energy administration says Somalia has no proven oil reserves, geologists hope to find an extension of the crude-bearing deposits that hold nearly 4-billion barrels across the Gulf of Aden under Yemen in the Middle East.

Analysts say the bill’s recognition of previous concession holders is a deliberate move to encourage the return of well-established players and to dispel any doubts over the legal status of prior deals in the Horn of Africa country.

A production-sharing agreement template says the government would receive 8% of revenues in cash on the first 25000 barrels of oil a day if the price was $55 or more a barrel. On production in excess of 100000 barrels of oil a day, it would receive 14% of revenues.

The SMH reports that Iraq Veterans Against the War are encouraging people to protest against the war during Bush's presence at the APEC summit.

A FORMER US marine who did two tours of Iraq is urging Australians to ignore warnings by police of violence during next month's APEC leaders' summit and join the protests.

Matt Howard, 26, is touring the country telling public meetings of the alleged horrors being carried out by US forces in Iraq. Mr Howard was a truck driver for a marine tank corps during the invasion in 2003. He served in the war zone again in 2004. He said he had to drive over the dead bodies of Iraqis after marines had fired on anything that moved in free-fire zones.

After he left the service he joined Iraq Veterans Against the War and campaigns to bring the troops home. "Australians need to get out on the streets and have a mass mobilisation against the war when President [George] Bush comes for APEC. Let your voices be heard," he said.

Meanwhile, police are seeking out protesters with a violent history to warn them not to demonstrate atAPEC. Police Minister David Campbell confirmed police were compiling a list of people who were "not welcome at APEC". They won't need to be informed - they know who they are, he said.

Links:

* The Oil Drum - The Economics of Oil, Part I: Supply and Demand Curves
* The Oil Drum - The Status of Canadian Oil Production
* Wall Street Journal - Nanpu: Downgrading a Chinese Oil Find
* WSJ Energy Roundup - Thin Margins for Ethanol Producers
* Alex Steffen - Lunar Ark
* Inside Greentech - University of New Hampshire gets gas. "UNH is the first university in the U.S. to use landfill gas as its primary energy source".
* Inside Greentech - U.S. Army going hybrid. Hybrid howitzers ?
* IVAW - The journey of a VIP bodyguard, sniper against the war
* Cryptogon - China Bans Buddhist Monks in Tibet from Reincarnating without Government Permission