Now it is not me but the Iraqi defense minister who is warning of Somalia redux:

Iraq's defence minister warned on Saturday that the Gulf would be infested by pirates and Iraq left at risk of attack by its neighbours if US forces leave the country too soon.

"Coalition forces are currently protecting the Gulf, and our navy will not receive its first ships until April 2009," Abdel Qader Jassem Mohammed al-Obeidi told a press conference in Baghdad.

If those forces"withdraw precipitously, our gulf will become like the Gulf of Aden, where there have been 95 acts of piracy," he said.