Victor Davis Hansen Is Deranged
Here are a couple of thoughts he expressed at The Corner about the rescue of Captain Phillips today (bolds mine):
1) Piracy may or may not be a matter of American national security, but the American people will not for long stand the notion that a captive brave American ship captain risks his life to escape, while formidable American naval power either cannot or will not punish the miscreants;
2) Pompey’s victories over the Cilician pirates, the Venetian clean-up of the Mediterranean sea-lanes, and the British success in stopping Caribarrean piracy were all predicated on going ashore, destroying the docks, headquarters, and homes of the pirates. To end Somali piracy, disproportionate measures against the shore should be taken—for every one pirate assault, a lethal air assault should immediately follow.
First of all, “the miscreants” were punished — there were four pirates involved in the seizure of this ship: three of them were killed by U.S. military sharpshooters, and the fourth was taken into custody.
I realize that’s beside the point for Hansen. He wants the civilian population on the Somalian shore to be bombed and killed as an object lesson to future pirates.
This reminds me of Saddam Hussein’s actions after the Persian Gulf War when Hussein crushed the Shiite rebellion after the Persian Gulf War by destroying entire villages and towns and slaughtering everyone in them for every violent act by the Shiites. It’s the way most brutal regimes maintain their power — through overwhelming, disproportionate violence and terror.
Steve Hynd points out that this is how empires have historically destroyed their own power — by overreaching and being too heavy-handed in their use of that power:
… It used to be the British Empire that would send a fleet of ironclads if some lesser nation or group dared to hold a citizen hostage. That heavy handed over-reaction led to the widespread sentiment that the sun never set on the Empire because God didn’t trust the British in the dark and to any number of instances of blowback which severely harmed British interests (and are still being felt on the worldwide stage today).
Steve Benen, quixotic tilter at windmills that he is, responds to Hansen as if he were rational:
Hanson went on to argue that “Obamists” are weakening the country with “their serial apologetics” — seriously, he wrote this without a hint of humor — and replacing our cherished “unpredictable” foreign policy, built on “deterrence,” with “a touchy-feely sort of seminar discussion.” It’s led to an environment, Hanson believes, in which “two-bit pirates” boast, “We are not afraid of the Americans.”
We’re supposed to believe that the piracy, in other words, is a result of President Obama’s departure from Bush/Cheney-style “toughness.”
It’s difficult to take such transparent nonsense seriously, but I suppose it couldn’t hurt to point out that piracy off the coast of Somalia began in earnest in 2005 and 2006. By the end of Bush’s second term, offshore banditry had become the single biggest money-maker in Somalia’s economy.
Funny, the pirates didn’t seem especially impressed at the time by Bush’s “unpredictable” foreign policy, built on “deterrence.” It’s almost as if they spent the last four years saying, “We are not afraid of the Americans.”
KTK at Lean Left notices that crazies like Hansen are now “openly advocating deliberate war crimes. Used to be they had the decency to pretend those were accidental.”
Not much decency left on the right (so to speak).
