A picture says a thousand words doesn't it 8D

RAWR

United States government-brokered overseas arms sales are expected to total about US$34 billion in the current fiscal year, up more than 45 per cent from the year before. Personally, I think this is totally atrocious, but firstly lets look at it from the American government's point of view. Ms Jeanne Farmer of the Defence Security Cooperation Agency says that "Our programme is growing by leaps and bounds." and that her agency is playing a growing role in the US-declared global war on terrorism and national security. The US carries out government-to-government conventional arms transfers through the Defence Department's Foreign Military Sales programme, which operates on a no-profit, no-loss basis. Or so they say. I seriously doubt that a country in such heavy debt would still help a total of 207 countries for no benefit at all. It is highly possible that they can earn millions if not billions from these sales. With a total of 12,262 open cases totalling US$274.3 billion as of last month, just imagine how much the US could earn if they take just one percent for themselves. If my assumption is true, America would have lots to gain. Look at the Iraq War. A war started by America. America would have earned lots and lots of money if they profit from arms sales. And now look at which country is the biggest buyer. Among the biggest governemnt-togovernment buyers in fiscal 2008, which wraps up at the end of this month, were Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, morocco, Egypt and Iraq. Through this war, other than the numerous benefits they have gained from, they have also created a new customer for arms sales. Further on, they also improve their foreign relations with other countries and gain a good reputation.

But all this is really beside the point. Is there really a need at all to have all these sales? Aren't there better things that can be done with the billions spent on weaponary? Many US arms customers could and should be funding education, health and infrastructure programmes that would go much further in improving the long-term stability of their countries. The benefits these countries would get if they did so far outweigh the benefits of improving their armoury. By increasing their sales, America is indirectly causing these countries to lose out in the long run.

Critics say booming sales reflect a failure of US diplomacy and show a need for America to rethink how it handles foreign policy. I agree with this statement, and it is sad to say that this is not the only time America has failed in diplomacy. Back to the example of the Iraq War. The recent case in Thailand.

Democracy brings stability within a country

I guess to make myself clearer I should just define what I mean by stability and democracy. As for stability, there is social, political and economic stability. Democracy itself would have many different interpretations as there are many different types of it but in general democracy means that the power is given to the majority, that is, the people of the country.

By investing the power in the people, the chance that they will revolt or go on strikes is much lesser than when the power is invested solely in the government. However, along with democracy will also come a small minority of people who are not content with the direction the country is developing towards. It is hard to expect what they might do when facing such a problem. If the country is lucky the minority will not be violent and will merely voice out its opinion but as we can see all over the world many organizations representing minorities often resort to violent means to their own ends. One such example would be the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. The Tamils, if I am not wrong, represent approximately 8-9% of the population in Sri Lanka while the majority would be the Sinhalese (80+ %).

By saying this however I must acknowledge the fact that such a thing as consensus democracy exists, that is, a kind of democracy that requires various degrees of consensus rather than just a mere democratic majority. Basically consensus democracy aims to protect the minority rights from majority rule.

There are some examples of democracy bringing stability to countries and one major one would be the United States. Due to the fact that equality is one big pillar of democracy itself, the Blacks managed to eradicate racism and gain an equal status as the Whites. This resulted in stability but the process however definitely did not so… I’m not too sure about whether the U.S would be a good example haha. I guess I should use another example to give you guys a better overview.

Singapore is also an example of a democracy which brought about stability. Though Singapore is not a “true blue” democratic state, I guess socialist democracy wouldn’t be too far off.. For Singapore, the power is vested in the people in the sense that we vote for a certain group of people to be our leaders and therefore it is assumed that whatever they choose for us would be what we want. Sometimes it doesn’t really work out, like for the old National Library issue where it was demolished despite numerous attempts to stop it. However, if you look at Singapore from the economic, social or political point of view, she can be considered stable. Our economy is strong and still growing. The people are content with the government and events like riots have not happened for quite a while. There is no or little tension between the different races and politically we have no problems either.

I personally think that there is no form of government that can possibly fulfill the wishes of every single person in their country and therefore total stability cannot be achieved. However, democracy does, to a large extent bring countries to stability, mainly because it satisfies majority of the people in the country.