However there can be common factors among wars. In the course of the last century a common factor came to be noted, that wars were being invariably won by the more democratic side. It will not do to argue, as CW does, that Churchill won the Second World War not because of democracy but because of American loans of military hardware and so on. My point remains that Britain had a democracy while Germany had a dictatorship, and the democratic side won. To refute my argument it has to be shown that wars have also been lost by the democratic side. CW has not done so.

The explanation I proffered for what looks like an invariant law that in the modern era wars are won by the more democratic side was that dictatorship tends to go with a weakened grasp of reality. CW provides details that are not relevant to that point, or at the best are only tangential to it. In my article I gave what seem to me were convincing details of the weakened grasp of reality shown by Prabhakaran and Hitler. In my earlier article Lasantha and Democracy I pointed to the weakened grasp of reality shown by the dictatorial J. R. Jayewardena, and the disaster he brought to Sri Lanka as a consequence.

I will now point to a revealing contrast between the dictatorial Premadasa and the democratic Rajapaksa. The former would not have tolerated any dissent from any associate or subordinate who was at his mercy. Consequently he gifted weapons to the LTTE which were later used against our armed forces. He ordered the surrender to the LTTE of six hundred police officers, all of whom were butchered in cold blood by the LTTE. President Rajapaksa, on the other hand, heads a deeply flawed democracy but his style of governance has certainly been consensual and democratic. Consequently he has hardly put a foot wrong in the way he has dealt with the LTTE. Should however he turn dictatorial in the euphoria of military success, we may yet come to snatch political defeat from the jaws of military victory.