Johann Hari on a new "war on pirates"

The Independent columnist Johann Hari has an interesting piece in the Huffington Post about the misconceptions of the new swathe of 'pirates' in Somalia we've been hearing about over the past few months.

In what could be viewed as a bit of a parallel to the fear-mongering borne out of the "war on terror", Hari points out that western ships have been exploiting Somalia of one of its greatest exports; seafood.

"We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving."

Sounds all too familiar and reminiscent of the plundering of another continent.

"Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals."

Hari's words, inentionally or not, read to me like a series of parrallels with the disaster of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Bush administration projects false fears regarding the perceived threat of Saddam and his regime which provides the caveat to further exploit their resources. Then we expected Iraqis to "stand passively on their beaches (well, deserts)" while we swarmed in under false pretenses, surprised when we weren't greeted as liberators following ten years of severe UN sanctions crippled its people, to punish the ever-changing faces of their criminals.