Piracy and Empire

By John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted April 27, 2009.

In this revived neoliberal environment, al-Qaeda will remain the same important "other" that the Barbary states were in the 18th century: a useful excuse for new military spending and projecting force. But they are now also joined by a more direct inheritor of the Barbary mantle: the pirates of Somalia. These pirates are attacking globalization's very lifeblood — the ships that carry energy and goods through the Suez Canal — just as the Barbary pirates blocked early America from becoming a global economic actor. As part of its own post-Cold War transformation, the Navy is shifting its strategy away from policing the high seas to controlling the coastlines. It has already had one major confrontation with China (around the USNS Impeccable). But given China's investments in the U.S. economy, the pirates are a safer justification for this shift in direction

Terrorists on land and at sea are useful in another way. Precisely because they are not states but dispersed entities, pirates and terrorists can serve better to justify both a global war and a new military doctrine. The Pentagon has insisted on expensive but rather old-fashioned weapons systems to handle the rising China threat: advanced aircraft carriers, huge naval destroyers, and new nuclear submarines. A dispersed threat, meanwhile, requires a dispersed defense: U.S. military bases (reconfigured as "lily pads" the better for jumping off from), rapid response units, new C4 (command, control, communication, and computers) capabilities. It also justifies a new military doctrine that emphasizes speed over position. Obama has endorsed these changes. They will enable the Pentagon to respond rapidly to threats to U.S. economic interests, whether paramilitary attacks against pipelines in the Gulf of Guinea and Colombia, territorial disputes affecting shipping lanes in Southeast Asia, or pirates in the Straits of Malacca.

The end of the Cold War created a crisis of mission for NATO. What was its need when the Soviet Union no longer existed? But this crisis of mission could be applied to the Pentagon more generally. The celebrated second front at the Korean demilitarized zone lost its purpose when South Korea no longer considered North Korea an enemy. The China threat diminished considerably when Beijing became the leading trade partner of all countries in the region. Cuba no longer possessed any threat potential beyond sending boatloads of refugees to the Florida shore. Saddam Hussein is dead and gone. Colin Powell famously said in the wake of the first Gulf War, "I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Kim Il Sung and Castro." Osama bin Laden came along just in time for the Bush administration. The Somali pirates are the Pentagon's latest lifeline.

Maintenance of high military spending, whether to further the neoconservatives' "hard" imperial aims or the neoliberals' "soft" hegemonic economic goals, requires villains of comparably great stature. Castro's brother and Kim Il Sung's son just won't do. If al-Qaeda didn't exist, Washington would have had to create it (which it helped do by providing Osama bin Laden with weapons in the 1980s). And if the Barbary pirates hadn't existed 200 years ago, conservative historians would have had to create them as well. Indeed, in their construction of Islamic terrorists out of rather ordinary pirates, they have in fact done precisely that.

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John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

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