Beware of Greeks buying ships

[pampango]

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/100223/greece-military-spending

"In spite of outward appearances that its age-old disputes with Turkey were on the mend, Greece apparently hid €8.7 billion in military spending between 1997 and 2003. This may not sound like Armageddon. But now, in part because of this kind of accounting, the European Union is facing the gravest financial crisis in its long history.

Following the 1974 Turkish-Greek crisis over Cyprus — a dispute which remains unresolved to this day — the U.S. Congress instituted a special 7:10 ratio with regard to military aid to Greece and Turkey. At the time, both countries were ruled by military juntas, and the Soviet watched with glee as the nations which comprised NATO’s southern flank lunged at each other’s throats. Crisis after crisis repeatedly brought the two to the brink of war – over Cyprus in the 1970s, a Turkish plan to drill for oil in the Aegean in the 1980s, and over disputed Aegean islands about every four to five years. Ultimately, however, the 1991 Gulf War changed the game.

(T)he massive Turkish earthquake of 1999 appeared to mark a genuine turning point in Greek-Turkish relations as Athens sent thousands of rescue workers to help and Greeks dug into their pockets to donate money for their neighbor’s reconstruction. Certainly, many things did change for the better. Greece and Turkey have held real talks over Cyprus, though agreement remains difficult. Perhaps most surprisingly, the Greeks have become among the most vocal supporters of Turkey’s EU membership bid. But no one, it seems, told Greece’s military men. Greece for years refused to open its books to the EU’s statistical unit, Eurostat, on the topic of defense spending, insisting the numbers were confidential.

The Eurostat audit which uncovered the “underreporting” of Greece’s military spending in 2004 got very little press at the time. Certainly, the EU made little of it, something German and French taxpayers are coming to regret. So it appears Greek defense spending bucked the downward trend of the 1990s as Athens ordered up a new class of warships (Standard-class frigates from Britain), hovercraft and patrol boats (from Russia and Ukraine), and most recently, high-performance jet fighters (late model F-16s from the U.S.).

[HeresyLives]

1. Always with the weaponry.

And they may have just taken themselves out because of this stupidity.