A comedy is playing out on the coastal seas near Somalia between armed primitives and the world’s most powerful navies.

While zipping around in amusement park sized speed boats, local natives brandish an assortment of light machine guns, rocket propelled grenades, and grappling hooks and nets which they use to board commercial ships and finagle immense cash donations from. They even have a ’spokesman’ to handle the financial exchange through ‘negotiations’, giving the whole reckless pursuit a degree of acceptability.

The latest ship to fall into the pirates’ grasp is a Ukrainian tanker containing tanks and heavy weapons, which has caused a bit of an international stir. Just as hundreds of other ships had been successfully seized and ransomed the last few years, there this war-machine carrying vessel floats awaiting the outcome of intense haggling. To make sure the exchange is fairly accomplished, an international flotilla of warships, any one of which could turn the tanker into smouldering scrap and the pirates into red spray, looks on.

To put this all in perspective, let’s look at one of the warships plying the waterways off the coast of Somalia: The U.S.S. Howard. Here we have a 509 foot long, 9,200 ton guided missile destroyer christened in 2001. She churns along at 30+ knots while carrying 320 officers plus enlisted sailors.

She is outfitted with the latest armament: 1 × 32 cell, 1 × 64 cell Mk 41 vertical launch missile systems, 96 × RIM-66 SM-2, BGM-109 Tomahawk or RUM-139 VL-Asroc missiles; 1 × 127mm, 2 × 25 mm, 4 × 12.7 mm guns; 2 × Phalanx CIWS; and 2 × Mk 46 triple torpedo tubes.

Yet she floats lazily in the sea and not a shot is heard or missile exhaust seen. How can this be? Liberalism. Feel good liberalism that is the latest rage of global politics has the honorable men and women of the U.S. Navy worried that they will hurt someone’s feelings.

The wacky logic of feel good liberalism is that somehow hostage situations are solved by showering the hostage takers with big amounts of cash-money. Incredibly, the political minds behind the cash-for-hostages response have not discerned the common connection between the hundreds of past ship hijackings and the latest hijacking—If you reward bad behavior then more bad behavior will occur.

To regain order, the international community needs only to conduct some overwhelming special operations attacks on a few hijacked ships. Or, for added emphasis in addition to retaking the ship, a complete obliteration of the towns whence the pirates came in one massive and spectacular volley. Either way, that would be the end to their high seas mischief and surely a jump in subsistence farming would be tallied at year’s end.

The cash-for-hostages plan seems non-violent and appeasing, exactly the results that feel good liberals clamor for, but it is unlikely that this newfound wealth will wind up in the collection plate at the neighborhood mosque. Rather, it is practically guaranteed that this ransom cash will be used to fund more of the typical cutthroat lifestyle: murder, rape, theft, drugs, other ship hijackings, and a general ruination of other people’s lives.

To understand what this method of rewarding bad behavior can morph into, spin your globe to the other side of the world to Columbia where half the country follows such a cutthroat lifestyle funded by the other half.

It seems like the bad guys will probably get the last laugh on this one.

*** Thank You Chauncy ($7) for your kind donation. ***