So, democracies don't go to war against each other, Keith. So you're using that as a demonstration that democracies are the nice guys. OK to sell them weapons, etc.

Well one or two things. First, one of our biggest arms customers is as far from being a democracy as it's possible to be. Not only that, it's a country that's bombing a neighbour back to the Stone Age, destroying in the process thousands of lives of innocent people and perpetuating an epidemic that is a shame on the modern world.

Second, some of these alleged democracies are acting just a little undemocratically, especially beyond their own borders. Indiscriminate drone attacks killing civilians. Ousting a democratically-elected president then propping up his successor, one of the worst fascist dictators of the last century. Plenty more propping ups of similarly nasty dictatorships too. The funding of right-wing terrorist rebels who undermined a democratic administration. Chemical warfare on Vietnamese civilians and their crops. The invasion of a country on entirely false pretences. The uncritical military funding and political support of a country that routinely invades its neighbours, which has carried out massacres in refugee camps, razed civilian villages, stolen land for its settlements, tries to ethnically cleanse the Negev of Bedouins, left hundreds of thousands of unexploded cluster bomblets in a neigbouring country which are still blowing off children's feet twenty years later, illuminated school playgrounds with white phosphorus flares in order to more easily attack civilians, built an apartheid wall and uses remote-controlled weaponry to kill children.

So the fact that a democracy hasn't attacked other democracies is, to say the very least, not a reliable measure of whether that country is one of the good guys. So I ask you again. When it comes to who we should sell weapons to, who is it who decides who the good guys are?