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Israel:
#1 in the world for military expenditures per capita, by a wide margin
#2 in the world for military personnel per capita (Eritrea is #1)
#2 in the world for nuclear warheads per capita (roughly tied with the US, Russia is #1, nobody else is even close to these 3)
#1 in the world for nuclear warheads per unit of land, by a wide margin (if Canada were to have as many per square km, it would have 70,000 warheads)

Israeli military spending is down quite significantly from a decade or two back, when their very large nuclear buildup drained a lot of cash. Just the same, let's look at Israeli military spending versus Israel's 4 neighbours.

Israel: $9B/yr
Egypt: $4B/yr
Lebanon: $0.5B/yr
Jordan: $0.75B/yr
Syria: $0.85B/yr

Total nuclear warheads in Africa, the Middle East and non-Russian western Asia: about 150.
Percentage of those which are Israeli: 100%

Some people try to portray Israel as a helpless little thing, but it just isn't so. Israel has an extremely efficient and well-equipped military, legendarily effective intelligence service, and more than twice as many nuclear warheads as every Islamic country put together. More than China, quite possibly more than the UK.

Israel is anything but defenseless. It is arguably the most militarised country in the world.

   

Oh yea? And what is the UN made of? Other nations.
People seem to forget that the UN is not a political power in its own right. You can't just blame the "UN". Look at the individual nations acting within it.

   

Put them on, if this was enforced we'd be fighting about Avro's shitty job.

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/sc8181.doc.htm

   

Sorry Bart, I might get under your skin with this.

I Mostly agree with your opinion of the world opinion bit, however sometimes people in other countries can provide a sober second look without being emotionally charged and involved. So when making decisions notional leaders should atleast consider other nations opinions on things and why.

End support of Isreal? Hell no, you guys have been allies for almost 40 years now, so don't let up. However you should critisize them when they get out of hand. You don't want to have to jump in to clean up one of their messes someday when they go completely over the top with one of their "measured" responses do you?

Your "mindless meddling" over the last 60 years has on many occasions been dishonerable to highly illegal, and has been like fighting fire with fire to prevent WW3. Your meathods effectively prevented war, but at the same time came so close to starting WW3 that I still ceing when I hear the names of certain crisis. Cuban missile crisis comes to mind. You guys did the right thing there to defend yourselves, but had the soviet ships kept on sailing WW3 would have started.

As for the world wars that happened you guys were a keystone in the leauge of nations, than backed out with the newly elected presedent. Without your muscle there was no way to stop germany. So in reality WW2 was everyones mess, including the United states, that everyone had to clean up.

In Iraq, you guys did the right thing, but for the wrong reason. If you said you were going in to oust saddam, the UN would have given you grace and the world would have marched beside you into Iraq, and we would all still be in there. However, you guys wanted to go in over nearly non existant WMD's based on faulty intelligence, which the most of the rest of us knewwas faulty, hance why we didn't join you. You also said at one point that Saddam had connections to Al Queda. If he did we would have gone in. But at the time our intelligence aswell as your intelligence just one month later said that fact wasn't true. He did have connections to terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the guys that recently attacked India, but not Al Queda.

Also, as a note, I feel Canada should now go into Iraq to help you guys clean up the mess, as all you seem to want to do is pull out just as a civil war is beggining.

As for Rwanda, Millions of people died because of the idiot beaurocracy that is the UN. If you guys wanted to show that you'd do the best for the world by bypassing that beaurocracy, that would have been the time to do it, not Iraq a few years later.

Darfur... I'm afraid I am not knowledgeable enough on the subject to comment.

Also, I just want to get this out about peacekeeping; Peacekeeping should be about keeping to warring sides apart civily, and if the sides start attacking each other over your head, shoot the agressor if its one, or simply get the hell out of there if it is both. This is what was needed in Isreal. A large force to keep the isreali planes out of Lebaniese and palestinian airspace aswell as isreali troops inside Isreali borders. If Isrealis weren't across the borders than none of the kidnapped troops would have been kidnapped and we wouldn't have this mess. If this mess happened anyways 9troops kidnapped) the peacekeeping force would be the ones hunting down hezbollah and hamas terrorists while keeping isreali troops inside their borders.

   

Yeah sure it all depends where you put the decimal point.

People in India make 10 figures.

   

The CIA world Fact book disagrees. I don't know how good of a source it is though.
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/fa ... 4rank.html

   

That's by percentage of GDP, expenditure per capita you can see here:
[web]http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mil_exp_dol_fig_percap-expenditures-dollar-figure-per-capita[/web]

   

Oops, sorry, I read it wrong

   

Nuclear weapons are impressive and a deterrent to conventional attacks, but they do nothing in the face of asymmetrical attacks as are extant in the current conflict.

Also, were Canada surrounded on three sides by not just mildly unfriendly people like the Quebecers (just kidding!) but by folks who kneel down and pray five times a day fo your deaths then your military budget would be pretty freaking big, too.

That or you'd be dead.

As the Israelis have less to defend against they will spend less on defense.

Your little chart, by the way, fails to account for the estimated twelve to twenty nuclear warheads developed by South Africa.

The 1984 Indian Ocean test that some people attribute to Israel actually predates the Israeli capability to carry out such a test as was revealed by Mordecai Vanunu. Common thought is that it was Israel that got up to speed on a nuclear program with South African help and not the other way around.

Whether or not South Africa is still a nuclear power is unclear.

My guess is that even if South Africa is not a nuclear power, DeBeers is.

   

It's probably so good a source that many world leaders trust the CIA's facts and figures about their own countries ahead of that which their own people report to them. Not that I'd know this for a fact.

   

3 way tie between Israel, Hezbollah and US of A.

   

I do believe the South African government dismantled its nuclear program a long time ago. Ironically the only country to do so.

   

Surprisingly I don't think the U.S. is responsible for any of this but Israel and Hezbolla are both to blame. I don't see how a single party is to blame.

   

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