[sperry]

I think the US has a pretty good case that when our citizens are being put at risk, we have the right to defend them without concerning ourselves with the lawyers of the owners of the ships. But it's not the 17 year old kids w/ AKs in motorboats that we should be killing. Those kids are only pirates because it pays better than doing something else in Somalia. The US needs to go after the war lords that are running the show. I think we'd be totally justified in throwing salvos of Tomahawks into the pirate's basecamps.

But there's a problem. The US has a big PR issue with the rest of the world due to the Iraq war. We have a reputation of taking unjust unilateral action, and since Obama's trying to repair the damage Bush did, he simply can't act unilaterally in other nation's borders, even in cases where it's totally justified. We're simply going to have to follow the slow channels of multinational action... go to the UN, get a coalition taskforce together, etc. And in the meantime, there are going to be more ships hijacked, more people killed, and more drama.