Three months after taking office in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson rebuffed Tripoli's demand that the fledgling United States pay $225,000 in ransom to end pirate attacks against American merchant vessels off the North African coast. Instead, Jefferson dispatched Navy frigates to the Mediterranean, setting the stage for the Barbary wars that ultimately eradicated the pirate menace.

This bit of history seems to have been lost on shipping firms that have fallen prey in growing numbers to pirates operating off the coast of Somalia. To gain the release of their hijacked merchant vessels and valuable cargo, shipping companies and even some governments, notably France, have paid the pirates hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom.

Predictably, making piracy so profitable has sparked a huge increase in pirate assaults. What's more, the steady stream of ransom payments has been used to arm the buccaneers with increasingly sophisticated hardware - fast speedboats, rocket-launchers, heavy machine guns, night-vision equipment, satellite cell phones and ocean-going "mother ships" from which attacks can be launched over a much wider expanse of open sea.

The coast of impoverished, strife-torn Somalia, which does not have a functioning government, is now dotted with pirate lairs. These lawless enclaves serve as staging bases for attacks on merchant shipping in the vital sea lanes between the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal on the Red Sea.

Given these circumstances, this week's seizure of a Saudi Arabian supertanker was inevitable. The ship, carrying $100 million worth of oil, or one-quarter of Saudi Arabia's daily output, was captured by pirates 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, Kenya. The hijacked vessel and its crew were then taken to the port of Eyl on the Somali coast, a region where fishing villages have been transformed into lucrative pirate bases. The Saudi owners of the supertanker began immediate negotiations with the pirates over their ransom demands, which almost certainly were exorbitant.

Since the start of the year, no fewer than 90 ships have been seized by pirates off of Somalia. In most cases, the vessels and their crews have been let go after multimillion-dollar ransoms were paid. But the pace and audacity of the attacks have increased in proportion to the mounting sums of ransom paid.

Meantime, the cost of insuring shipping through the Gulf of Aden, the southern gateway to the Suez Canal, has soared dramatically. Ocean commerce will continue to pay a steep price until the piracy is eradicated.

Thus it is past time for the international community, led by the United States, to provide whatever naval forces are required to launch a cooperative campaign to patrol the waters off the east coast of Africa and eradicate the piracy threat once and for all. The United States is rightly pressing for a United Nations Security Council resolution to authorize such an operation. NATO and European Union naval ships must be made available for the task.

In this instance, President-elect Barack Obama should ask himself: What would Thomas Jefferson do?

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