Threat as you can see around the world, as also seen by the governments around the world is more perceived than real. For those of you who know a bit about Al Queda would know that the name is just something that connects dispersly populated terrorists or mercinaries or even ‘holy warriors’ as they call themselves, who just associate themselves since they have a common enemy but in real times they seldom have an actual operational or political association.

So what we are fighting in the name of our defence budgets is perceived threat! and not threat itself! To give you a perspective, look at it this way. In many cases it could also be said that Al queda is the Microsoft of the terror world… Oops stop! I am no saying microsoft is terror! Please read on and then decide. I read an intresting statistic the other day which said for every dollar Microsoft made out of its operating system Vista its partners made 18 dollars as a consequence of supporting hardware, anti-virus. Now i guess you should be coming to grasp with what i am trying to say.

For a x threat that Alqueda posts that we perceive we spend in the form of our defense budgets that is more x multiplied by z. Which has a cascading effect within the defence budgets.

Look at it from this way as well. How many people are killed by terrorist attacks worldwide.

“Worldwide terrorist attacks rose by 25 per cent in 2006 compared to the previous year, with Iraq accounting for more than half of the 20,000 fatalities, the US State Department said Monday” as quoted by monstersandcritics.com

It actually ends up in a number close to 7000 exclusing iraq. (Iraq deaths are not terrorist deaths, it is invasion in the name of democracy)

And the population of the globe last year was 6.6 billion so the percentage death was 6000/6.6billion * 100 (I did that on my calculator had too many decimal points!)

We are talking of people dying here so though i dont want to make it a statistic and do away with the concept of security. By the way the annual defence spending globally was USD 1100 billion dollars.  That is roughly 1/18th the size of the GDP of all the countries of the world. Hooh! what an astounding and mind boggling figure that can do away with the poverty of the world many times over even in our un-friendly capitalistic economies…

Seeing these figures I am getting to more reading. Will be back soon…..

Between to the readers… I am not advocating de-militarisation or buddhism.. but a more practical solution. More on this soon.

Filed under: Politics