Congratulations to our Navy SEALs and Captain Phillips

What a great thing to have to the hostage standoff end up so marvelously.

Captain Phillips was a true hero and his crew responded courageously. They are inspirations for all of us.

Here is a brief story from the Washington Post describing how the captain was freed.

"In the last discussion, they said, 'If we don't get what we want, we will kill the captain,' " the official said.

Soon afterward, two pirates moved to one of the hatches of the lifeboat and stuck their heads out. The third pirate advanced toward the captain and pointed his AK-47 straight at Phillips's back, the rifle touching it or inches away, the official said.

U.S. military observers thought that Phillips was about to be shot. SEAL snipers, who were positioned on a deck at the stern of the Bainbridge, an area known as the fantail, had the three pirates in their sights. The on-scene commander gave the snipers authority to fire.

"As soon as the snipers had a clear shot at the guy who had the rifle, they shot him and the other two in the hatches," the senior military official said.

A member of the Special Operations team slid down the tow line into the water and climbed aboard the lifeboat. Phillips was then put in a small craft and taken to the Bainbridge.

Despite some reflexive criticism by some conservatives of President Obama for not coming out and making much of a statement on the hostage situation, he handled this situation as it should have been handled. There was no need to give the pirates the PR bonus of a presidential statement. There was nothing he could say at the time. What was important was what was being done behind the scenes. And the most important action was the giving the go ahead for military action.

And for the criticism that I heard over the word that we were negotiating with the pirates, it appears that we were behaving entirely properly.

A relative of one of the pirates, who said he spoke with the men by satellite phone at about 3 p.m. — four hours before the Navy opened fire — said they "were getting scared" and trying to persuade the Americans to let them go in return for the captain's release.

"They were trying to save their own lives," said the relative, Hassan Mohammed Farah, speaking by phone from Haradheere, a coastal town in central Somalia where pirates are known to operate. "The only thing they could bargain with was the captain, but the Americans would not accept."

The pirates had appealed by satellite phone to other pirate groups to sail captive ships and hostages to the scene of the standoff, to put some pressure on the U.S. forces. But Guled Farah, who belongs to another pirate group that had hijacked a German ship last week, said that the presence of the U.S. vessels scared them off.

"Their little boat was surrounded," Farah said by phone from Haradheere. "We couldn't go to help them, and for that we are sorry."

Now it is time to address the problem of piracy in the area. It is ridiculous that the merchant shipping of all the countries in the world should be enduring this scourge. This is one foreign policy issue where the interests of all countries should converge.

Fred C. Iklé argues in the Washington Post today that we need to start arming these merchantmen.

Start by blaming the timorous lawyers who advise the governments attempting to cope with the pirates such as those who had been engaged in a standoff with U.S. hostage negotiators in recent days. These lawyers misinterpret the Law of the Sea Treaty and the Geneva Conventions and fail to apply the powerful international laws that exist against piracy. The right of self-defense -- a principle of international law -- justifies killing pirates as they try to board a ship.

Nonetheless, entire crews are unarmed on the ships that sail through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Shipowners pretend that they cannot trust their crews with weapons, but the facts don't add up. For one thing, in the United States most adults except felons are allowed to have guns, and the laws of many other nations also permit such ownership. Even if owners don't want everyone aboard their ships to be carrying weapons, don't they trust the senior members of their crews? Why couldn't they at least arm the captain and place two experienced and reliable police officers on board?

When these pitifully unarmed crews watch pirates climb aboard their vessels, they can do little to fight back. And while the United States and many other naval powers keep warships in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean -- deployments that cost millions of dollars -- these ships cannot keep pirates from boarding commercial ships that have unarmed crews.

If necessary, we can pull a tactic from the Battle of the Atlantic in World War Two, and start convoy operations for merchant shipping in this part of the world. It stopped the U-boat menace then and it could work here.

But these are temporary fixes. The fundamental problem is the failed state that is Somalia. We saw in Afghanistan how such a situation can become a haven for terrorists. This is a much more difficult problem to solve and it's time for the President and his foreign policy team to demonstrate their vaunted ability to get other countries to work with the United States to address a problem that threatens us all.