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Contributor: Vox
Date: 2003-03-10 12:40:45
kn_aeshap, since you wish to nit-pick over citations for so many things. Perhaps you can also validate some of your own key ideas:
- "It is not necessary to have weapons in order to be considered a nation state. The working construct is not dependent on armed forces." Just what exactly do you mean by these two statements? Can you identify an authoritative source to back them up? Can you offer valid examples with respect to Canada's security needs?
- "Even thought the latter is true, the former is a different point altogether..". This statement is quite open to interpretation. Can you explain further? How is this idea, whatever it is, relevant to practical Canadian security options?
As for your request for citations:
"It is possible to limit our arms industry to government institutions but that often limits ingenuity and cost-control"
This concept is really not uniquely an arms issue but an issue of how competition can often improve one's choices. A good example is Canada's fighter aircraft. IMO, Dieffenbaker essentially ended Canada's indigenous jet fighter development capability. If Canada wanted to meet national and NATO defence commitments and come up with a fighter it could conceivably have tried to cobble something together but it would have to start from "ground zero". Instead it chosed to buy from an outside commercial (non-government) contractor, McDonnell-Douglas. The CF-18 has served us well and has provided Canadian jobs as well.
"... suggestion for a truly effective international body to administer arms trading may be even more problematic than the UN situation we now have. We would require agreement on extremely intrusive monitoring capability at the level of a "Big Brother".
An excellent example is Iraq. Here we have a very clear case of arms embargo and a very hot story not only for the "main players" in the UN, the US plus Iraq but also for the many investigative journalists all over the world. Throughout the processes, the Iraqis have complained about intrusion and various businesses have also been indicted presumably to their chagrin. So now, after 12 years' of expensive and highly acrimonious effort, even with numerous reports, stories and UN resolutions the UN is still not clear on just what the status of Iraq's compliance is and we have a big war looming as a result. Remember the disputes over interviews and U-2 overflights? This is just to show possession of weapons - proving where those weapons and supplies came from would require additional work. Would you care to extrapolate this kind of process to include arms trade for all the other nations? Who would pay for it all? Why would they?
My validations are taken from every day contenporary life. If you care to keep up with current events you can easily figure it out for yourself. Providing a citation is necessary if a concept is vague but also key in a discussion but relatively simple concepts should be common knowledge to anyone who wants to debate more serious issues. If you wish to debate critical issues, you need to first take some responsibility to be aware of current events, to think about them and to do your own research. Don't be too surprised if I or other people just ask you to "look it up for yourself" next time.
Vox Canadiana
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