Dean's World

Mary's pointed to this article a few times before, but never (that I recall) featured it as a stand-alone article worth pondering. So here it is for discussion: How Thinking of Terrorists As Pirates Can Help Win The War On Terror.

Note that this is not a joke. We aren't talking movie pirates, "yo ho ho" here. It's a serious article. Read it. It's quite thought-provoking.

Aziz over at Nation Building (who really need to get a new URL if they're to be serious about bringing in new people, especially people who may not be particular fans of Howard Dean) has a tentative endorsement of the idea of treating terrorists by the same laws as pirates.

And, all jokes aside, this is a very serious argument. Please no jokes.

(And no, this does not mean that Dean's World will discontinue its tradition of honoring International Talk Like A Pirate Day in two weeks. We will continue that fine, fun tradition. But that is a joke, entirely for fun, meant to honor great fantasy movies like Treasure Island or Captain Blood or The Princess Bride. Having fun with humorous mythological fluff is no different from enjoying a film like Aladdin, which may take place in Baghdad but contains absolutely no serious suggestions for how to behave in Baghdad that I'm aware of. Fun is fun, this is serious.)

What I'd ask the fine folks at Nation Building is this: you're tentatively endorsing this, and I can see why. It's a powerful idea, and worth taking seriously. Piracy at one time, in the early 1700s, had the tacit support of many nations, including the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, and some of the northern coastal states of Africa as a form of illicit (and thus plausibly deniable) warfare. After a decade or three of this, all the states involved began to recognize that this was a bad idea, and not strategically viable. They all began cracking down on it hard, some a little later than others.

But there is a danger to this view of terrorism. My own gut says this is a proposal with much merit, but it amounts to declaring that pirates and terrorists enjoy no civil rights protections to speak of. Anyone declared a pirate or terrorist may be killed on sight or, if captured, hung by the neck until dead, dead, dead by a fairly quick military tribunal--what some might call a "kangaroo court."

Under such a view of terrorism, for example, many of the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay would simply be dead now, summarily executed after a quick military tribunal. Appeal? Perhaps an impassioned appeal to the head of whatever state captured you (Bush in America's case, Blair in the UK's case, and so on) might save your neck. But probably not.

I know many people who are quite ready for this and would not shed a tear over the fact that some cases might wind up being unjust. C'est la guerre will be the not-particularly sympathetic response from many. I might join them. In fact I'll just be honest: I probably would.

But are you guys up for it? It would certainly add clarity to the muddied waters.

Among my all-time favorite movies is The Princess Bride. It is, I think, one of the most perfect movies ever made. I honestly think it ranks right up there with Casablanca. It is simply flawless from start to finish. I would change not one moment, not one second of it. Besides, it contains what is probably one of the best lines ever said in a movie:

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

If you haven't seen it, you don't know what I'm talking about. If you have, I defy you to disagree with me.

But I'll give you an interesting bit of trivia I'll bet you didn't know: the Dread Pirate Roberts was a real guy, and while he is not well-remembered in the popular imagination he is considered by historians to have been the most dangerous pirate to have ever sailed the Caribbean. If this were 1716 and not 2006 everyone would know who he was.

No fooling. Check it out.

Since it was raised earlier by my brother Ali: This "Talk Like A Pirate" nonsense is just fluff. Same like dressing up on Holloween like ghouls or zombies or torturers. If you want to know how I feel about it (and how I imagine most Dean's World contributors feel about it) if we're talking seriously, please see this essay.

We're not above having fun with Hollywood fantasies here. But we aren't stupid ye know. Ye scurvy dog.