Posted on 05/26/2011 4:57:11 AM PDT by Pan_Yan
(AP) BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese general's call for land attacks on Somali pirate strongholds is being seen by analysts as another sign of the armed forces' growing assertiveness, even if the proposal is unlikely to result in action.
Speaking at a news conference Wednesday in Washington, Gen. Chen Bingde said he believes land bases must be assaulted in order to eradicate piracy.
"I think that for our counter-piracy campaigns to be effective, we should probably move beyond the ocean and crush their bases on the land," Chen said, adding that those funding and organizing piracy must be targeted along with rank-and-file brigands.
Chen's call was interpreted among analysts more as a statement of desire than intent, with the People's Liberation Army ill-equipped to carry out such missions and little appetite among other nations for dispatching troops to the African mainland.
His remarks, however, fit a pattern of greater outspokenness among PLA leaders that sometimes diverges from the official government line, especially in areas outside China's core interests of Taiwan, Tibet and its South China Sea territorial claims.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Travis, your take?
As an aside, one of the things stopping reprisals against the pirate bases are the fact that the Somali pirates hold quite a number of hostages. Of course, it is quite likely the Chinese don’t care about the hostages . . .
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,454124,00.html
The Chinese have the right idea, but thy don’t go far enough.
1. Destroy pirate funding - no ransom for ships or crews. corporations or organizations that pay ransoms are to be sanctioned into bankruptcy.
2. The Navies of the Civilized World should attack pirates at sea. Captured pirates should be tried and executed by military courts at sea. They should not set foot on land again.
3. The Navies of Civilized World should attack the coastal towns than harbor the pirates. Captured ships should recovered, or, failing that, sunk. Everything else that floats should be sunk. The water fronts should be burned with special emphasis on destroying any boat or shipyards.
4. At the same time, troops should rescue any hostages or captured crews or recover their bodies.
5. The principle of massive, indiscriminate retaliation for the death of hostages and crews should be established. Literally hundreds of Somalis within the pirate towns should die for each hostage or crewman killed by them.
6. War should be made against businesses that provide logistics support to the pirates - boats, weapons, fuel, etc. Organizations supplying such should be destroyed and their owners slaughtered.
7. The leaders of the pirates should be hunted wherever the reside and killed without mercy.
8. Individuals providing information to pirates regarding ships to be targeted should be hunted and killed without mercy.
9. The laws of the sea and of nations should be changed to allow ships to carry weapons for self defense. Bounties should be paid for successful defense if involves the death of pirates or the destruction of their vessels.
Since a lot of people don't know, Somalia is divided into three parts. Puntland and Somaliland are autonomous northern states, somewhat recognized as independent, but not given nation status. The Transitional Federal Government (TFG) is on the offense right now backed heavily by foreign troops and U.N. money. They control approximately 1/2 of the capitol Mogadishu. That's actually a significant gain for them. They were down to 12 blocks at one time with 8,000 foreign mercenaries holding it.
A significant number of the pirates sail from Puntland. Al Shabbab, the Al Qaeda group that controls most of the southern third of the country, wants in on the action has been fighting with the pirates lately. Al Shabbab has also been getting into fights with Kenya and Ethiopia, who have both made incursions into Somalia recently to push back Al Shabbab.
Including a few fully loaded supertankers worth a couple hundred million each. No one wants anything to happen to one of those.
Beyond illegal fishing, foreign ships have also long been accused by local fishermen of dumping toxic and nuclear waste off Somalia's shores. A 2005 United Nations Environmental Program report cited uranium radioactive and other hazardous deposits leading to a rash of respiratory ailments and skin diseases breaking out in villages along the Somali coast. According to the U.N., at the time of the report, it cost $2.50 per ton for a European company to dump these types of materials off the Horn of Africa, as opposed to $250 per ton to dispose of them cleanly in Europe.
Re: Dead pirates? Go China!
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Somali pirates is costing the Chinese hugely, two cutting edge boats full time, boats which could’ve been diverted to more productive purposes, i.e., the patrolling and keeping [of State sponsored pirates] in the South China Sea from getting too smart assed which is much more sensible a proposition.
If that dumping of toxins has been done, the offenders should be caught and punished for the violation. That was done without regard for the results. My suggestion is a self-defense strategy for the seafaring world.
Aren’t rashes and disease common in third world crapholes like Somalia, anyway? < /cruel truth >
And yet, the Chinese have always tried to thwart U.S. attempts to “interfere in other countries’ internal affairs”.
Wars of conquest in places no one really cares about would seem to be one answer.
Is there any evidence to back up this theory? I know a number of people have said it, but it seems to be one of those shibboleths that circulates as if it's holy writ. In fact, China has had surplus males for most of its history, because monogamy is a Western import of recent (20th century) vintage. And yet, relative to European countries, China has had a pretty peaceful history, with few border changes over the last 2000 years. John Derbyshire at the National Review comments:
There is some speculation about what the social and political effects of the male surplus will be. Some writers have argued that it will have national-security implications for the U.S.A. I say fiddlesticks. It’s been the case in societies all over, all through history, that there were not enough brides for the available men. This was certainly so in China because of polygamy. A dear old friend of mine, recently deceased, was born in Guangdong Province in the late 1920s to a father with seven wives. (And this, note, in a nation where female infanticide was still in play, as it had been among the poorer class of peasants since time immemorial.)Even in monogamous cultures there have been adult sex-ratio imbalances due to such factors as male deaths in war and vendetta, and the shunting off of high-status females to convents. If there’s any good data showing that popualtions with surplus males are more prone to warfare or despotism than those without, I’d like to see it. As Mara Hvistendahl notes in her forthcoming book on the subject, “Adolf Hitler came to power at a time when Germany had over 2 million more women than men as a result of the toll taken by World War I.”
Wouldn't fishing trawlers do the trick? The Somalis are little more than armed rabble. It's not as if the US Navy needed anything more than cutlasses, rifles and portable artillery to face off against the Barbary States. The pirates have no army, no air force and no navy - they are little more than rabble hiding behind the reluctance of the major powers to take on the personnel, material and public relations costs of carrying out the kind of Shermanesque policy necessary to pacify the pirate havens. D-Day in Normandy required serious preparation because of millions of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines (and that's not counting the naval mines and U-boats in the way of the invasion fleet), pill boxes, heavy tank divisions, artillery, Stuka dive bombers and 400,000 German troops lying in wait for an Allied invasion force.
Well, we have 1200 years of Muslim history to look at to see what might be the warlike effects of excess males due to polygamy. Admittedly there are other factors at play in that case, but are you completely discounting it? If so, why?
Go for it guys!
It would be fun to watch someone ELSE do this type of thing for a change!
Before attacking the mainland, we need to figure out a strategy for attacking the “mother ships” they use as bases and where they hold hostages. Sounds like a job for Seals and stealth helicopters, also an anesthetic gas that is far less dangerous than the one the Russians used to “rescue” a theater full of hostages.
Actually, polygamy was a response to excess females - as Muhammad's cohorts died off, he had their widows married to those who remained standing. The problem of excess females led to an ever-widening spiral of conquest for loot, as the men joining his army died, the remaining men had to take on the widows of the dead, thereby necessitating the acquisition of yet more loot. Note that the female surplus problem was severely aggravated by the practice of massacring male captives.
But once things stabilize after wars of conquest, as we have now, you have lots of excess low-status males at loose ends if you maintain a polygamous system.
Surely you’re not asserting that the reasons polygamy was adopted 100s of years ago in the Muslim world are still in play there today? They simply don’t have excess females.
And as you will surely admit, China very much has the opposite problem. And while it has occurred, polyandry is not common in history. At all.
If the theory is that excess low-status males without spouses lead to war, then when is stability ever achieved? How did Muslim countries ever achieve stability - why isn't every Muslim country a carbon copy of Somalia? How has China remained so stable relative to Europe, when most of its history has involved a huge surplus of males relative to females available for marriage? Europe had a large surplus of females after WWI, relative to males of military age. Why did WWII occur?
And as you will surely admit, China very much has the opposite problem. And while it has occurred, polyandry is not common in history. At all.
Because of polygamy, China has had a male surplus for most of its history. And fought far fewer wars than Europe.
Perhaps I don’t understand China’s history well enough. Has large-scale polygamy really been that prevalent for a lot of China’s history? I didn’t realize that.
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