Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. friend, who has a Ph.D. in history, so I would never want to joust with him on this because I would lose every time. He has extensive knowledge in this area.
Basically what his question refers to is what we are to do in the face of domestic terrorism. What do we do in regard to a despot who is willing to abuse his or her citizens in the most egregious way?
I think we could divide it into two responses, military and non-military. Both would require a multilateral, multifactoral approach. In the non-military response, I think we could use our international organizations through the IMF and World Bank. We can use economic levers as a carrot or as a stick for those leaders who want to abuse their people. That can easily be done through IMF tranches and World Bank help.
As a country we can also apply our help in international aid in a diplomatic carrot or stick approach. Also, with respect to diplomatic recognition and bilateral involvement, we could make them conditional on a country's willingness to support the basic tenets of human rights.
We also need to deal with communication. As we have seen in Pakistan and Afghanistan and indeed in certain areas of the Middle East, how we actually stimulate people to take up arms against another group is to feed them a steady diet of violent propaganda against that group. We in the international community ignore this when communication is used not as a lever of peace but as a tool to stimulate one group to fight against another group, but we can apply other tools. The UN has ways to do that through shortwave radio and other tools whereby we could institute positive propaganda, positive information, to build bridges among disparate groups and to support moderates.
Last, on the military option I firmly believe a rapid reaction force should be developed with the command and control structure that is already in place. In my view we also need an international arms registry that deals just with the bulk sales of automatic weapons. If we had an international agreement that would enable us to track the bulk sales of automatic weapons it would go a long way to making this world a safer place.