Zakaria on Somalia, piracy, and failed states
Kurt Bassuener November 24th, 2008
In the closing of this week’s edition of his excellent international current affairs program, Fareed Zakaria’s GPS (Global Public Square) on CNN International, Zakaria noted the pirate seizure on the massive supertanker Sirius Star, carrying $100 million in oil from Saudi Arabia. The vessel was taken far off the shores of Mombasa, Kenya by Somali pirates - the furthest raid so far. Zakaria noted that this makes 1.1 million square miles off the coastal waters off the Horn of Africa vulnerable to piracy - an area far too vast to be effectively policed by the international naval task force attempting to combat the piracy.
Zakaria closed his program by saying that if anyone ever doubted the need to prevent failed states, or deal with them, this should wake them up.
A far longer post has yet to be written on the long litany of international policy failures that has allowed Somalia to remain without an effective government for almost two decades. But the most recent one is the Bush adminstration’s support of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, in support of the provisional government, to topple the government of the Islamic Courts Union, which had finally restored some order to the capital, Mogadishu, to the relief of its citizens. In a beautiful irony, a group of Somali Islamists are now declaring that the hijacking of a ship belonging to a Muslim nation goes too far, and that they will punish those responsible.
