How do you say “punitive expedition” in Somali?
Eyl’s location: 7° 58′ 0″ N, 49° 49′ 0″ E. Not that either the United States Navy or the Air Force particularly needs my help in pointing out the coordinates, but it will hopefully clarify matters. Anyway, here’s the comment:
Jamac Habeb, a 30-year-old self-proclaimed pirate, told The Associated Press that the three pirates’ deaths were “a painful experience.” Speaking from the pirate hub, Eyl, he added: “this will be a good lesson for us.”
“From now on, if we capture foreign ships and their respective countries try to attack us, we will kill them,” Habeb said. “Now they became our number one enemy,” he said of U.S. forces.
And here’s my response: Mr. Habeb, have you ever watched Firefly – The Complete Series
…and then I want you to think about whether you want us to take you seriously. Because we’ve had a lot of “number-one” enemies over the years; and they can be neatly divided into two groups. There are the ones that tried to do something meaningful about it, and there are the ones that still exist.
Moe Lane
PS: There’s some dispute over precisely what was or was not the role of the current President in the past crisis; which I will not get into right now, mostly because I don’t feel like it. I will note, however, that sending a battleship or two to shell the most notable Somalian pirate nests will not have particularly negative political consequences for him domestically, although if you’re very lucky he’d send in the Air Force instead. In short, we’ve got an administration from the political party that prefers the rough simplicity of bombing campaigns to thorny military problems.
Think about that, too, before you start acting on your threats.
Crossposted to RedState.
Habeb doesn’t understand just what we can do.