Hypocrisy

Listened to a very interesting interview on the World at One yesterday with a representative of India's defence ministry. Nick Clarke was asking him about his understanding of whether Britain was prepared to sell arms to India and whether he didn't think it was a bit odd for us to be trying to calm things down on one hand and selling weapons on the other. He replied 'Oh, everyone's doing that. All the western nations who are demanding we cool things down are rushing over here to sell anything they can'. It's just so annoying - I knew it would be like that but it's depressing to have it confirmed somehow. Our position on arms sales seems ridiculous to me - we have a policy where we won't sell them if we think they're going to be used for external aggression or internal repression. So what do we think they are going to be used for? Fly-pasts? We want the cash but we also want to pretend that we don't have the moral responsibility (as we did with the "training" jets we sent to Indonesia to use in East Timor) so that we can be pious and preachy when situations like this blow up.