Tuesday, November 18, 2008

pirates less fun when i can't fill my tank

i'm beginning to wonder if the somali pirates may have finally overreached when they seized the saudi oil tanker.

sure, they've attacked cruise ships in the past. but who takes a cruise off the coast of somalia?

and yeah, they snatched that a ship filled with heavy weaponry. but the weapons were probably just going to feed the sudanese civil war. the pirates may have done us a favor by preventing that shipment from going through.

sure, their actions have disrupted shipments of videogames. but is that a bad thing? maybe the those kids will pick up a book instead.

but you don't fuck with the world's oil supply. this attack in particular has a lot of scare potential as the tanker was seized 450 nautical miles southeast of mombasa, that's a long way from the somali coast (mombasa itself is quite a bit south from the somali border). if pirates are going that far afield in every direction, that would place a lot of the gulf oil shipments in jeopardy. if they keep this up and particularly if there's a noticeable effect on world oil prices, the world powers will probably come down pretty hard on them.