Piracy: It's America's Fault

That's the message, albeit it comes from two ideologically distinct corners.

In one corner, Matthew Yglesias arguing that America's disastrous interventions in Somalia help lay the groundwork for that country's further collapse into poverty and chaos, which in turned has fueled piracy.

In the other, Jonah Goldberg blaming a "pro piracy" culture for enabling the rise of piracy. This was echoed by his Corner colleague Victor Davis Hanson, who wondered whether fashionable academic theories on piracy (including their status as "sexually ambiguous, cross-dressing, transgendered libertines") had filtered into the State Department, thus paralyzing America's response.

So, piracy: the result of American meddling or American passivity born of post-modernist theorizing and Disney movies? I say none of the above (at least, not exclusively).

UPDATE: Hoover's Ron Radosh thinks blaming America is wholly symptomatic of the left. Clearly that's not the case. The left is certainly more inclined to put more weight into such factors as the distribution of American military support and military interventions inside Somalia as causal factors. The right is more inclined to blame Disney movies, theories promoted by college professors and lawyers.

But at the end of the day, they're both blaming America.