Unless we curtail the arms trade, we face another violent century

The question is why developed countries do not curb this arms trafficking, since it would appear to be in their interest to prevent these conflicts and to stop them from getting out of hand. It seems that the developed nations place their immediate commercial interests ahead of peaceful co-existence. The market rules.

As Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defence in the Reagan administration pointed out in a recent commentary on a British Medical Journal article,

Exporting arms is big business. The United States exports more military hardware than the rest of the world combined - about $20 billion a year. It not only generates profits for the defense industry but also helps the US balance of trade and reduces the cost of weapons to the Pentagon.

Added to this, he argues, is the traditional reluctance of the United States to accept limitations on its sovereignty. This is especially true of the Bush administration, which has practiced an extreme form of unilateralism and argued vehemently that it is entitled to protect its international pre-eminence by whatever action it deems necessary. It has unsigned the UN Rome statute, which established the international criminal court, and has refused to sign the protocol to enforce the treaty banning biological weapons. It refused to participate in an agreement to curtail the international flow of illegal small arms because it "infringed on the American right to own guns".

History has shown that failure to deal with the explosion of arms manufacture will cost more, in the long run, than seeking to curtail the industry now. And it's not just the United States that is culpable. Nearly all of the large, wealthy established states manufacture and sell arms, using aggressive marketing and easy financing to impoverished nations and "rogue states". This has resulted in huge inventories of weapons and a veritable global flood of arms.

Current leaders, including our Prime Minster, seem to think that sheer military might and highly visible, intrusive security measures are all that are required to keep us safe. The vast amounts of money, energy and inventiveness being poured into defence and security are profligate. Not only does it diminish resources available to deal with many of the underlying issues which cause social tensions and violence, but it reinforces the defeatist view that war and violence are inevitable, and that all we can do is minimise the risk that we will be victims.

Few would argue with the general statement that it is better to prevent deadly conflict than to deal with its consequences. But prevention requires action, and action involves costs, costs the wealthy first world is often unprepared to meet. Many Western nations are notoriously lacking in either the willingness to work toward a more equal distribution of the world's wealth or a sustained commitment to international efforts to help build modern states where they are lacking. Just ask the people of Afghanistan.

It has, in the past, been difficult to convince people and governments of the need to provide such support, because internal conflict in other nations has few obvious consequences for anyone beyond those enmeshed in the violence. With a greater awareness of the potential for these conflicts to spill over into terrorist acts, the climate for prevention may be improving, but only if the international community embraces the rule of law to deal with terrorist acts and eschews retaliatory and indiscriminate violence - unlike the response to September 11.