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by sthnblllII 1857 days ago
Then why did piracy spike after the US intervention?
2 comments

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose" - Captain Picard
Thats not what happened. There was no piracy problem. Then the US toppled the government. Then there was a piracy problem. The US didnt intervene to stop a problem that didnt exist. I was responding to the claim that destabilizing the Somali government in 1993 was profitable to wealth Americans because shipping lanes are near Somalia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Soma...

>After the collapse of the Somali government and the dispersal of the Somali Navy, ... groups, using small boats, would sometimes hold vessels and crew for ransom. This grew into a lucrative trade, with large ransom payments. The pirates then began hijacking commercial vessels

Thanks for the insight, I really wasn't aware of the extent of their actions.

The quote I posted is a bit cryptic by itself. What I meant by it was that perhaps the US had plans that would lead to greater benefits for them in the region, but these plans backfired by inadvertently creating the Somali piracy problem.

They did everything right with regards to whatever they were hoping to achieve, but they still failed and then pirates happened.

I didn't say it was a success.

The US is no stranger to strategic military intervention that costs lives and money and achieves nothing very substantial - from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan.

Speaking of which - what was the profit motive in Vietnam? There was definitely geopolitical motive, but I can't imagine there was a "rich American" person or corporation calling the shots for themselves in indochina
What are you talking about, the military industrial complex made an insane amounts of money from that war.
> The US intervenes in plenty of places where there is no profit motive outside of the standard military industrial complex.

It was the cold war. I'm pretty sure the MIC could have justified so much spending in other ways besides vietnam, but we are venturing into counterfactual territory.