Presidents and Pirates

I don't recall a whole lot of debate about piracy in last year's presidential campaign -- yet another illustration that no one really knows in advance what challenges a president will face.

Indeed, the Somali thugs who captured Capt. Richard Phillips were initially treated as a bunch of yo-ho-ho bumblers, with some folks seeming amused that a problem that plagued Thomas Jefferson could still be going on in the nuclear age.

But as the hostage situation dragged on, it became more clear that these were armed terrorists -- small time, to be sure, but terrorists nonetheless.

I knew it was inevitable that President Obama would be judged on the outcome. Indeed, the WashPost yesterday declared the successful rescue of Phillips "an early victory that could help build confidence in his ability to direct military actions abroad."

My own view is that the Navy deserves the lion's share of the credit, not the president. Of course, if the operation had gone awry and Phillips had been killed, Obama would have been unfairly blamed. So I guess the laws of political physics allow the pundits to praise him.

Some on the right are still criticizing Obama. I don't think they'd credit him if he put a knife between his teeth and rescued the captain himself. Even Bill O'Reilly called the carping absurd.

And we know that such incidents have consequences for a president's reputation, particularly one who is new on the job. The failed helicopter rescue of the Iranian hostages seemed a metaphor for Jimmy Carter's struggling tenure, and the debacle in Somalia was an inauspicious debut in military matters for Bill Clinton. Conservatives often forget, though, that Ronald Reagan dispatched the Marines to Lebanon, and withdrew them after 241 of them were killed by a truck bomb.

But Obama deserves special credit in one respect. He said very little about the hostage incident, resisting the temptation to shake his fist and vow that the pirates would be brought to justice. That would have been good theater but done little to solve the problem.

The media, too, seemed relatively restrained in their coverage, certainly in comparison to 1979 and 1980, when the hostages in Tehran dominated the news for an extraordinarily long stretch of time (giving birth to the ABC series "America Held Hostage," which became "Nightline"). That kind of saturation can reach the point where politicians can't talk about anything else. But I suspect that had less to do with maturation than with the absence of video. Without pictures of the boat or tape of the captured captain, television lacked the images it needs to truly obsess on a running story.

"The operation on the waters off the Horn of Africa may presage a more complicated challenge for a president already trying to end a war in Iraq and win another in Afghanistan," says the New York Times. "Somali pirates have vowed to take revenge on Americans, and they have demonstrated in recent months their ability to seize ships from all sorts of countries with impunity. Even now, pirates in Somalia are holding more than 200 hostages from countries other than the United States."

The New York Post reports: "The Somali pirates picked off by Navy sharpshooters after holding Capt. Richard Phillips hostage for five days were a ragged band of boys with little experience -- but plenty of weapons, officials said yesterday.

"Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the four brigands who took Phillips captive after a botched hijacking of the Maersk Alabama were only 17 to 19 years old."